Make Digital Content Your District’s Superpower

10 Ways the Learning Explorer lesson-building and student engagement platform benefits students, educators, administrators, and districts:

1. Maximize Your Content Investment: Learning Explorer can help your district maximize its investment in content. Most single-sign-on portals and LMSes still leave your content confusingly scattered around on multiple sites on the internet. Learning Explorer unifies your district content in one searchable place and makes it easy for you to mix and match all of your resources to meet the individual needs of your students. Usage reports (filterable by subject, grade, date, and standards) let you easily keep track of which instructional resources are available to and are being used by your teachers and assigned to your students.
   
2. Teacher Time-Saver: According to a study published by K-12 Market Advisors (2016) educators spend 7 hours a week searching for instructional resources¹, and that time undoubtedly increased during the height of the pandemic. Educators can reclaim hours of instructional time with students by instead using the Learning Explorer intuitive, all-in-one learning resource search solution with built-in, drag-and-drop lesson building, managing, and sharing capabilities that provide them with a comprehensive single point-of-access to all of their instructional content.
   
3. Student-Centered: Engage students with a variety of diverse instructional styles and content to meet the needs and interests of any student. Resources and activities, whether they address a Lexile range, a specific accessibility issue, or a high-interest topic that captures a student’s attention, can all be easily incorporated into a personalized lesson collection using Learning Explorer.
   
4. Continuous Instructional Improvement: By organizing student lessons around multiple content providers, educators and specialists can build, customize, and refine their lessons to create a cycle of continuous improvement. Teachers can easily add & modify lessons to take advantage of relevant feedback, current events, new ideas, and supplemental offerings for enhancing student learning.
   
5. Diversity of Learning Materials: Curriculum & instructional designers can provide a wide variety of instructional materials to help educators employ compelling pedagogical methods by mixing diverse learning objects into collections that can be shared and remixed to meet specific student needs and learning styles.
   
6. Teacher Efficacy: Teachers who believe in their own ability to guide their students’ success will improve student outcomes. By combining a teacher-tested, intuitive interface with an extensive repository of high-quality, vetted educational resources, Learning Explorer provides teachers with the tools and resources to boost their abilities as educators. Increased teacher efficacy can spread through an entire organization as teachers share and collaborate on lessons as high-quality collective work products.
   
7. Equity & Access: Studies in 2016 (Rand Corporation) and 2018 (TNTP) showed that teachers working in schools with a high proportion of students who receive free and reduced lunch are searching the internet for materials at higher rates.² Further, assignments that teachers select from the internet or create themselves tend to be of lower quality than resources that the district or state provide.³ Using Learning Explorer, students (regardless of socio-economic background) have access to the latest, most up-to-date content through a unified repository of district-vetted, educator-curated, high-quality resources.
   
8. Standards: Guide instruction and ensure that specific learning goals are met via instructional resources aligned to―and searchable by―state learning standards.
   
9. Professional Learning & District Success: Learning Explorer is a teacher-centered and teacher-led company, so we understand the importance of education for teachers as well as students. Our district success team provides highly effective on-site workshops, online webinars, and “how-to” help center resources to ensure a successful district-wide roll-out and adoption of the Learning Explorer platform.
   
10. Partner Integrations: Learning Explorer seamlessly integrates with Google Classroom, Canvas, Schoology, and other LMSes so that educators and administrators can easily provide their students with diverse, high-quality curriculum resources and collections via the LMS.
    
    LuAnne Abercrombie is Learning Explorer’s chief product officer. Before joining Learning Explorer in 2012, LuAnne was a middle and high school math teacher at Laguna Blanca School in Santa Barbara, California. LuAnne began her career as an engineer and product manager at Digital Equipment Corporation.

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¹Goldberg, M. (2016). Classroom Trends: Teachers as Buyers of Instructional Materials and Users of Technology. K-12 Market Advisors.

²Opfer, V., Kaufman, J., Thompson, L. (2016). Implementation of K-12 State Standards for Mathematics and English Language Arts and Literacy. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation.

³TNTP. (2018). The Opportunity Myth. Retrieved from: https://opportunitymyth.tntp.org/