Week 5

This week, we viewed the resource Focused Ed. This resource looks amazing for teachers and has a bunch of quicklinks to some educational resources. We checked out the different levels of World Book. Something that jumped out to me was the fact that students can change the language of the articles. This offers equity in learning, as each student is able to access the learning in their own language. It was also cool to see the World Book Early Learning resource for emergent readers. The graphics and the text-to-voice feature provide a way for students to be independent in their learning.

We also looked at 4Canoes, an Indigenous resource on Focused Ed. There were a lot of books and resources for intermediate and middle school students to learn about different Indigenous peoples and their culture and history. The read-aloud book of the Eagle Feather Story had lots of audio additions, such as what a mouse sounded like, which was a really great way to integrate different forms of media into learning, something students wouldn’t get when reading the paper copy of the book.

All the resources and links to educational websites on Focused Ed were great. I remember using World Book in elementary school to do research for an animal project. There’s a lot of great information that students can access safely, rather than just searching around on the Internet.