Learning Assets

The Buck Institute for Education (BIE) is the "go to" site for anyone interested in project-based learning. BIE hosts a rich array of resources, including a searchable, curated database of projects suitable for use or adaptation across content areas and grade levels.

This tool enables teachers to customize learning assets by annotating directly on a wide range of text-based resources. Teachers can add notes, questions, and multimedia resources directly to texts.

Pricing and other criteria are included in this curated list of 36 curriculum platforms.

This nonprofit provides a free blended project-based learning curriculum aligned to the Common Core State Standards. The Educurious materials are high quality and online. Their disadvantage is that they are not designed for self-paced or flexibly-paced classrooms. 

inspire Literacy, or iLit, is blended-learning literacy program by Pearson that emphasizes strong literacy practices such as think-alouds, vocabulary development, and independent and self-paced reading.

This model performance-based course, emphasizes is organized around a set of formative and performance assessments that support students in undertaking a deep exploration of the genre of memoir. The course was designed as student-facing, so that students can move at their own pace. This link takes you to a Course Overview, the 3 Module Overviews, a Sample Lesson and a Performance Task on "Photo Writing."

Project Foundry is a rich database of free resources on project-based learning, but beyond that, it provides a learning management platform specifically designed for project-based learning. The tools available on the platform are robust and can provide a foundation for designer's looking for a starting place in the design of performance tasks and projects.

This tool for personalizing literacy instruction is built around a strategy to help students think critically, write, and read (emphasizing "close" reading) across all subjects in grades 4-12.

WISE, which stands for Web-based Inquiry Science Environment, is a research-focused, open-source inquiry-based learning management system that includes a student learning environment, project authoring environment, grading tool, and user/course/content management tools. 

A free tool that helps educators create topic, skills, and theme-based playlists to support students skill and content knowledge development, as well as to explore their passions and interests. Gooru Learning includes playlists and resources for each grade level and content area. Gooru Learning has merged with Activate Instruction.

Identifying or developing high-quality learning assets to support mastery learning remains challenging, particularly at the secondary level. This design guide is organized as a set of check-lists that can be used to evaluate the quality and appropriateness of online learning assets. Using the checklists will help you reflect on issues such as the appropriateness for your students' knowledge and skills, alignment with your school's competencies and standards, the existence of embedded formative and summative assessments, and the asset's progress tracking capabilities.

This report documents findings and recommendations from a 2014 summit on technology-enabled personalized learning. The challenges explored include: data; content and curriculum; technology architecture; human capacity; and research and development.