For teachers, there’s a constant challenge of connecting learning to the real world in a relevant way. Times have changed and traditional instructional methods are no longer always effective, leading some students to look for more active learning experiences and ways to tie their learning to their own lives. Any educator with interest in something like this should check out the service known as NextLesson. On this platform, there's relevant, rigorous, and real-world lessons that children can quickly complete while supplementing key knowledge and skills.
Essentially, NextLesson offers all teachers ways of connecting the content they have to teach with the real world. It helps them leverage the authentic situations that students are likely to encounter in the future and makes them relevant to them now by providing them with problem-solving activities that challenge them to use their creativity in order to achieve success. There are three types of accounts you can sign up for: a teacher account, student account, or a parent account. You can also use a Google account (NextLesson is compatible with Google Classroom), Edmodo account, or personal or school emails.
As you can see on the NextLesson homepage, you can browse valuable lessons by type. The five types include performance tasks, projects, activities, rank and reason, and skill builders. Variety in these options helps educators find something that’s compatible with the content they’re teaching as well as the skill sets of individual students. The performance tasks, for example, include math, science, social studies, and ELA lessons on some interesting and important topics. Students can also develop their critical thinking skills all throughout these real-world scenarios while using real data.
Some of the lessons within each category are free and others have a cost associated with them. Teachers can sort the library of lessons by the subjects they cover and the grade level the lesson aligns with. Users can sort these lessons by the most popular, lowest price, alphabetically, and more, making it easier to find something that’s age-, cost-, and content-appropriate. They can also click one of the buttons at the top to select grade levels (K-12), subject areas, or both.
The lessons in the projects category help educators extend units and get students using their curiosity to drive deeper learning. They also give students the opportunity for choice and help them start to dabble in reflection, revision, and collaboration. As for the activities section, these lessons all feature a collection of ready-to-use lessons that are either printable or interactive. They also include the resources that teachers would need, such as links, videos, and notes.
The rank and reason category includes activities that get students to rank items in a list and answer various questions that often don’t have correct answers. These experiences challenge them to think critically about how they're ranking their responses and justify their answers with sound reasoning. Finally, that skill builder section includes shorter exercises that get students to focus on academic skills through repetition. The skill builders include topics with relevance in the real world and those that students have the most interest in.
The rank and reason lessons and the skill builder lessons are the quickest lessons on NextLesson. In fact, students can generally complete them in less than an hour. The performance tasks, however, are designed to last a bit longer and could take children anywhere from 2-5 days to complete, the activities generally will take 1-3 days, and the projects could take up to a week or longer, giving students valuable experience with managing a project from start to finish!
To learn more about NextLesson and see why it’s such a valuable resource in the classroom, we encourage you to head to their website. Then, visit the Eduporium store to check out all the EdTech tools we offer and create an Educator Discount, too. Make sure to follow us on Twitter and Instagram as well and to check out the rest of our blog!