Educational Technology at IU13

The Sora Big Library Read is occurring this year from November 2 - 16!!!

• A Snake Falls to Earth is now available to all IMS Sora Readers at no cost to your school library. Readers have unlimited access to the ebook and audiobook until November 16 – with no waitlists or holds. It’s a great way to bring your school community together through reading and discussion. The Content Access Level for this title is set at "Young Adult (YA)."

Get readers talking

• Check out the discussion guide designed to encourage conversation and help students and teachers get the most from A Snake Falls to Earth.
  
  

Get even more from A Snake Falls to Earth

• Be sure to visit Teaching Books for additional resources including activities, lessons, interviews and more.

Book Trailer

This video book trailer is provided by RJ Julia Booksellers. 

Here are some "Timely & Relevant" resources from Discovery Education for the month of November 2022. Be sure to log into your instance of Discovery Education before clicking on the links below.

This Month at DE

• Already thinking ahead to November? Give teachers the DE November Newsletter for resources that support timely events like Native American Heritage Month, Election Day, Veteran’s Day, Thanksgiving, and much more!

November 2022 Activity Calendar

• Explore ready-to-use activities for November that provide students with opportunities to explore their curiosity around a variety of topics. Looking for more? Explore the Instructional Activities Channel. There you’ll find the recent Activity Calendars for Grades K-2 and Grades 3-5. Use them as they are or make your own copy to edit and share.

Supporting Families

• Have you checked out the Family Resources landing page yet? Families can find a video as well as flyers to support learning at home with DE. Also, be sure to check out and share the new Sesame Learning flyer, highlighting the PK-2 content that DE has recently added in collaboration with Sesame Workshop.

Tundra Connections Virtual Field Trip

• Travel to Churchill, Manitoba with DE to learn about the polar bear’s environment and the people who share it. On this live Virtual Field Trip, we’ll discover what enables this unique species to survive in the arctic tundra, explore different ways you can work with polar bears, and identify how you can protect polar bears and our planet. Learn more and register today!

Feature of the Month: Share Quizzes

• Did you create a video or standard quiz and want to share it with others in your grade or subject area? You can share it via a link to anyone for them to use with their students. Check out DE's Quick Start Guide to Quizzes!

Sora has seen quite a few changes over the past few months and with all the emails that land in your inbox, it can be easy to miss an announcement or two. To help you get caught up on all things Sora, below is a list of seven new features and tools you may have missed. Check them out below:

• Google Classroom Add-On –  The new Sora Add-On allows you to browse your school’s catalog and attach specific titles to posts within Google Classroom.
• Only available for schools using Google Workspace for Education Plus or the Teaching and Learning Upgrade.
• See here for details.
• On-Demand Class Sets – Feedback from schools helped us develop a more flexible curriculum-centered lending model option.
• Content Bundles – Reserve titles and offer exclusive access to select users. Great for curriculum titles, classroom libraries, professional development for staff and more.
• Sora Extras – Add learning resources like DOGO News and Method Learning to Sora.
• Comics & Magazines – All access comics and magazines packages are now available for Sora! Contact your Account Manager for pricing.
• Sora Showcase – Give your digital collection a physical presence with our free interactive discovery kiosk software! Contact Zach Delin at OverDrive to get started.
• Student Dashboard – Admins can now see more detailed individual and aggregated reading data to help make data-driven decisions about literacy and reading initiatives.

Here are some "Timely & Relevant" resources from Discovery Education for the month of October. Be sure to log into your instance of Discovery Education before clicking on the links below.

This Month at DE

• Explore and share the Discovery Education October 2022 Newsletter to learn about all the timely, relevant and featured resources happening this month!

Monthly Activity Calendars Continue to be Published! 

• Explore ready-to-use activities for October that provide students with opportunities to explore their curiosity around a variety of topics. Looking for more?
• Explore the Instructional Activities Channel. There you’ll find the recent Activity Calendars for Grades K-2 and Grades 3-5. Use them as they are or make your own copy to edit and share.

World Space Week is October 4th-10th!

• DE has created four out of this world PowerPoint decks for each day of World Space Week from October 4th-10th. There’s a lot of really cool things happening in space right now, and many of these resources have been added just THIS week so they’re hyper relevant!

• Broken out by grade bands K-2, 3-5, 6-8, and 9-12, these decks contain an entire week’s worth of resources. Each deck has slides for next Tuesday-Monday with a different video activity each day + extensions linked to many videos. The best thing about them – they are all ready to go with minimal planning needed! Quick activities that you could fit into a Morning Meeting, end of day activity, brain break, etc. - whenever works throughout the day. Each slide also contains a link to DE's Explore Space channel for even more resources.
  • Pk-2 Space Week Deck
  • 3-5 Space Week Deck
  • 6-8 Space Week Deck
  • 9-12 Space Week Deck

Here are some "Timely & Relevant" resources from Discovery Education for the month of September. Be sure to log into your instance of Discovery Education before clicking on the links below.

This Month at DE

• Explore and share the Discovery Education September 2022 Newsletter to learn about all the timely, relevant and featured resources happening this month!

Activity Calendars are Back!

• Explore ready-to-use activities for August and September that provide students with opportunities to explore their curiosity around a variety of topics. Looking for more? Explore the Instructional Activities Channel. There you’ll find the recent Activity Calendars for Grades K-2 and Grades 3-5. Use them as they are or make your own copy to edit and share.

There have been some exciting updates to the Discovery Education platform: 

• A new Explore page: Looking for inspiration? DE's new Explore page lets you browse by subject, then offers personalized suggestions based on your activity in DE, grade levels, and more.
• New content partners: DE has partnered with Sesame Workshop for PK-2, Minecraft: Education Edition, and Marzano Academies!
• Studio updates: From new fonts to animated buttons, Studio offers a quicker workflow and a few other fun tweaks that will make lesson building easy, creative, and engaging.   
• A brand-new Student Experience: Your students will see a new interface designed to build agency and promote time on task. No more excuses for incomplete assignments!   
• A redesigned My Classrooms: DE has completely overhauled the My Classrooms section, giving teachers a much more intuitive interface to easily navigate classes, assignments, and students. 
• Quiz Library: Have you tried the Quiz Library yet? Each month DE continues to add more pre-built quizzes aligned to DE content to save teachers time and effort in assessing student progress.