Award recognizes teacher-friendly tools for curating and managing OER and more in personalized curriculum collections
Santa Barbara, California (PRWEB) March 24, 2016
Lesson Planet earned finalist honors in the EdTech Digest 2016 Cool Tool Awards for Lesson Planet Collections, a new way for K-12 teachers to curate and organize open educational resources (OER) and more.
The new tools allow educators to find, gather and manage teacher-reviewed OER (including uploaded resources) and then share them as personalized Collections with other teachers in the Lesson Planet community.
“We’re honored that judges recognize the need for teachers to be able to create their own curriculum ‘playlists’ to meet students’ real learning needs,” notes Founder and CEO Jim Hurley. “It’s not enough anymore to use OER just to supplement adopted curriculum. Teachers need easy-to-use tools that help them find and curate comprehensive curriculum from a wide array of sources.”
Project Tomorrow’s Speak Up survey, which polls thousands of educators nationwide, shows
64% of principals want new teachers to know how to source, evaluate and use digital content within instruction, and
65% of school librarians said access to vetted, grade-level, content-specific resources would be most effective in helping teachers better use digital content in their classes.
Lesson Planet Collections, available to both individual teachers and to schools and districts, support educators with access to vetted OER (through credentialed teacher reviews and targeted search), and with drag-and-drop tools to organize and manage them easily.
"This year's program had some very stiff competition, and we're proud to honor these cool tools in education technology," says Victor Rivero, editor-in-chief of EdTech Digest. “The edtech sector has experienced tremendous growth in the past several years; these honorees are among edtech's best and brightest."
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About Lesson Planet
Lesson Planet provides award-winning Open Educational Resource (OER) review, search and curation tools to K-12 educators, librarians, curriculum and technology specialists and homeschooling parents. Experienced, credentialed teachers curate, evaluate, rate and review high quality OER according to a rigorous research-based rubric. Lesson Planet connects educators with the OER they need most, in the least amount of time, via intuitive search technology that enables teachers to find expert ratings, reviews and links to lesson resources targeted by grade, subject, Common Core State Standards, Next Generation Science Standards and more. With Collections, Members can now gather and manage OER, along with their own uploaded curriculum materials and video/website URLs, and then share their personalized Collections with others in the Lesson Planet community. Founded by educators in 1999, Lesson Planet is entirely Membership-sustained.
For the original version on PRWeb visit: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2016/03/prweb13265002.htm
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