Collaboration, Connections and Digital Library Resources, Oh My!
NOTE: The Smarter Balanced Digital Library was decommissioned. Please visit Tools for Teachers, the new home for instructional resources and professional learning.
Educators from around the nation collaborate to connect resources in the Digital Library to interim assessments
Teachers are crazy productive. So what happens when you bring 70 educators together over a three-day period and give them an ambitious goal? They exceed it, of course. Educators from nine Smarter Balanced member states and the U.S. Virgin Islands recently convened in Sacramento, Calif., to tackle the twice-yearly task of building new resources for the Digital Library, a teacher-created, teacher-approved collection of (free) lesson plans and professional development resources.
This was no easy feat. All resources in the Digital Library are vetted by no less than three educators to ensure they are aligned with state learning standards and will help teachers implement the formative assessment process.
How did they do? At the 2018 State Network of Educators Winter Workshop, teachers not only created new resources, but focused on further increasing the already high quality of library resources by turning a critical eye toward what makes a resource truly successful in the classroom. Additionally, the team leveraged formative assessment practices, such as gathering and acting on student data, to help teachers hone instruction even more precisely.
“Enjoyed collaborating with educators and educational leaders on formative assessments for students linked to #CommonCore.”
@ccpowellruns via Twitter
The work isn’t finished yet. These dedicated educators are still at it (even though they’ve all returned to their home states) and by the end of the month, the total number of teacher-created (and reviewed) resources in the Smarter Balanced Digital Library will, for the first time, surpass 3,000, representing an enormous body of high-quality, time-saving instructional tools for educators.
The impressive quantity and quality of content in the Digital Library is the result of teachers working together to build it from the ground up.
One of the most exciting recent additions to the Digital Library is the newest batch of Connections Playlists, which link interim assessment results with instructional resources, providing teachers with actionable information to enhance their teaching in real-time. By February 16, we’ll have more than 100 Connections Playlists for teachers to use in the classroom. We’ll be posting more about this soon, so stay tuned.
Educators from the member states are scheduled to meet again in July of this year for the next round of Digital Library resource creation and review. And the work continues…
