This past year has reinforced the nation’s belief that, even with limited resources, teachers are incredibly resilient and able to meet a broad array of challenges such as school closures, distance teaching, and more.

School is wrapping up and most of us are thinking of ways to help our students maintain their progress over the summer in fun and engaging ways. The following resources are terrific for learning from home with or without parent and caregiver help. For the most part, the websites collated here offer free activities and content. So, take a few minutes, click through some of these resources and share them with your families for engaging summer enrichment.

Hickory Creek Elementary School (Warren County Schools, McMinnville, TN) has a vision of motivating their students to “strive for academic excellence” so that they are empowered to “become productive members of society.” Principal Mike Mansfield and Katrina Haley, Director of Technology at Warren County Schools, understand that this generation’s children are digital natives so to best serve their needs, as well as prepare them for the future, they look for education technology solutions that will engage both students and teachers.

It is nothing new that teachers juggle multiple resources, tools, and programs with the aim of providing their students with high-quality instruction that is engaging and improves their learning progress. With the move to remote and hybrid learning for many schools, teachers also had to juggle multiple platforms, software, and applications to facilitate synchronous learning sessions that would help students overcome education-related challenges. But does it have to be this way?

Quite a few of teachers and students are in their last couple of weeks of school. Now is the best time to try activities that couldn’t be done because of challenges to time, planning, and navigating the learning environment whether remote or hybrid. So, as you wind down the year, try having class book groups and enjoy the richness of stories.

Ensuring that every student in a class has access to high-quality instruction is an ongoing need for many schools, especially when considering how students with disabilities have varying educational objectives. In recent years, teachers have explored different technologies to support student learning including but not limited to interactive hardware, software, and apps. Teachers have found quite a few of these technology solutions to positively engage students and support active learning.

Barry Sunder, Central Regional Manager with Boxlight, spoke with Larry Jacobs from Equity and Access Pre K-12 (ace-ed.org) on how large interactive displays (interactive flat panel displays, interactive boards, interactive panels) can improve engagement for students with disabilities. Sunder who has experience working with students with disabilities and special needs, as well as having a wife and a sister who are both Special Education teachers, shares that in these classrooms, the use of technology has “gone up another level.” Referencing an experience his sister had with a student, he says, “His attention span was about 15-20 seconds. He has seizures. When he got in front of that board, (his) time with seizures was reduced. He was up there focused on that activity.”

Shamrock Independent School District (Shamrock, TX, U.S.) has long strived to provide its teachers and students with innovative technology to engage and boost active participation in all grades, whatever the situation. A case in point, they were able to respond quickly to school closures due to the pandemic because they are a 1:1 school and students could connect to remote learning without extensive issues.

Pre-pandemic, the thought of incorporating flipped or blended learning, self-paced learning, video conferencing, and creating videos to teach key concepts or skills was seen as reserved mostly for virtual schools that catered to families that wanted an alternative to traditional brick-and-mortar schooling or for especially ‘high-tech savvy’ educators who could deftly handle quickly changing technology. Of course, the pandemic and consequent school closures changed all that, and educators, students, and parents had to learn to navigate online learning fairly quickly. For teachers who were comfortable with the tried and true, front-of-class style of instruction, switching to tech tools for creating, assigning, grading, and facilitating lessons was a steep learning curve. But here we are, over a year later, and many teachers have found that they have become incredibly adept at using these same tools if not more so.

Districts and schools across the country are making decisions about how to best utilize federal funding. Regardless of the programs, software, and technology professional development and training plays a critical part in acclimating educators and students to what’s “new” for best integration for teaching and learning.