Earlier this evening, Mary Ann Zehr, formerly a reporter with Education Week and now a high school ESL teacher in Washington, D.C., sent a tweet recommending something called SAS Curriculum Pathways for history resources.

Since I have always respected Mary Ann’s judgement, I immediately checked it out.

And I’m impressed.

It has a huge amount of interactives in all subjects. In many of them, students complete the activity online, and then send their work electronically to their teacher (it can also be printed out).

Before I continue, I should also mention that it’s free…

I really don’t know who SAS is (I didn’t have time to investigate), but they have set this system up so it’s free to educators and their students. The teacher signs-up and is give a log-in name for all the students in a school. It doesn’t appear that students need their own individual log-in because they have to type in their name before beginning any activity. Let me tell you, that will make using this site immeasurably easy — students won’t have to remember — or forget — individual passwords!

Since I’m teaching US History this year, I mainly focused on those sites, and they looked pretty good and accessible to ELL’s with audio support for the text. The site, though, has resources for all subjects.

In my quick review of the US History sites, they all appeared engaging, though primarily geared to lower-levels of thinking, primarily comprehension and recall. But since I use the Web generally as a reinforcement tool, that works fine for me.

Let me know if you’re familiar with SAS or, if you are just starting out with it, what you think of their other activities.

I’m adding it to The Best Websites For Teaching & Learning About U.S. History.