Free Lesson Plans
Literacy Design Collaborative (multiple subject areas) – The LDC is a national community of educators providing a framework, online tools, and resources for creating literacy-rich assignments and courses across multiple subject areas (social studies, science, language arts, etc.). It gives teachers access to hundreds of teacher-created lesson plans which they can then copy and modify as needed. These can be sorted by specific standards or by grade level. The LDC even allows teachers to create their own structured lesson plans for sharing with other teachers across the country. For a more detailed description and links, click here.
Mathematics Design Collaborative – While the LDC does contain math lessons, the MDC is a math-only site with additional emphasis on higher-level math. For a more detailed description and links, click here.
Common Sense Education – The nonprofit Common Sense Education was created to help K-12 educators discover, use, and share the best apps, games, websites, and digital curricula for their students by providing unbiased, rigorous ratings and practical insights from an active community of teachers. Their website also includes access to over 1,000 tech-rich lesson plans.
LinkedIn Learning – LinkedIn Learning (formerly Lynda.com) can help anyone learn the software, technology, and creative skills they need in order to reach their full potential. They offer hundreds of engaging, top-quality courses taught by the industry’s leading experts. With advance approval, many courses can count toward a teacher’s required PD credits. LinkedIn Learning is free to Arkansas teachers through ArkansasIDEAS. Just enter your ArkansasIDEAS username and password; then follow the directions for signing up.
Lesson Presentations
Presentation Tips – We’ve all seen them … horrible PowerPoints that are so poorly produced that the message gets lost in the clutter. So what makes the difference between a weak presentation and a great one? Check out these 11 Tips for creating effective digital slide presentations! Note: this is a great link to share with your students so they can improve their presentations, too. (It might keep you from suffering through yet another “50 special effects in 50 seconds” visual assault!)
Presentation Tools – If your school has a strong technology base, your teachers may want to occasionally use a “game based” learning platform. Three of the most popular are Quizizz, Quizlet, and Kahoots.
Quizizz offers self-paced quizzes to help teachers review, assess, and engage students. Quizlet lets teachers and students access thousands of study sets on hundreds of different topics. Kahoots lets students answer questions on their own devices while answers are displayed on a shared screen. Each has strengths and weaknesses, and many teachers use all three depending on their goals. If you’d like to explore the possibility of incorporating this technology into instruction, the links above will take you directly to their websites.