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.
Larry – their writing reviser is definitely worth a look!
Thanks for the post. We are definitely here to help out here to help out the teaching community. Check out our Product Demo for more information about all the core subjects. You can also see all our resources by subject here: http://www.sascurriculumpathways.com/portal/#/pdataglance
To learn more about our team and SAS, visit us here: http://www.sascurriculumpathways.com/portal/#/about
You’ve looked at the site in more depth than I, but it was a lifesaver for me in finding a way to make the early kingdoms of Africa more interesting to my ELLs. I learned about the site in a professional development session in my school district, the District of Columbia Public Schools. But I only caught the last half of the session so I don’t know much about the creators.
Mary Ann,
Thanks again for the great tip!
Larry
I’ve used SAS Pathways in my U.S. History course for the last 5 years. Their interactive segments provide nice content background in short segments and practice activities. The practice quizzes and quizzes offer reinforcement. Some of their interactives have an “Apply” segment that supports the higher order thinking you may be looking for to challenge students to make connections. The quick launch codes, ease of login, and teacher support guides make this a nice resource for both individual or whole class participation.