4 tools to help students develop post-COVID research skills
As an educator with 21 years of teaching and learning experience, I have had the opportunity to work with students of varying abilities and learning backgrounds. In a typical school year, meeting the varied needs of my students is extremely rewarding, yet challenging work. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has increased the needs of students tenfold, maximizing both the rewards and the challenges of my role as an educator.
As the world begins to change in the evolving post-pandemic environment, it’s clear that a lot has changed. In my opinion, K-12 education has seen tremendous changes whose impacts we will assess and address in the years to come.
However, as educators begin to think about how to evolve education to meet the needs of our students today and tomorrow, we have before us the enormous task of strengthening the academic skills of students who may have been eroded during the era of “emergency education”.
As a language arts teacher, I have found that one of the skills my students need to improve is their basic research skills. Student media literacy, citing their sources, and communicating their findings are all essential research skills that my students need to develop.
The good news is that there are loads of edtech resources out there to support this. Here are some of the resources that my colleagues and I use to help students improve their research skills in a changing educational landscape:
Educational puzzleis a great resource that helps students learn the basics of almost any subject. I find this program useful because I can assign a group of students via Google Classroom videos to watch and take notes. If I want, I can even include an assessment to see if the students are absorbing the information in the lessons. One of the great features of this resource is that I can take videos and adapt them by incorporating my own questions or audio. Then, once I’ve assigned the content, I can see who watched the video. Plus, students can rewatch the video as many times as they need at their own pace, allowing them to learn information they might have missed.
