[Feature Focus] Study Island Guided Practice Videos

My niece was recently describing the elaborate cake she wanted me to make for her upcoming birthday. When I asked where she got the idea for a cake like that, she immediately responded, “YouTube!” (The “duh” was silent.)

Our Curriculum team has received overwhelming feedback from educators that younger learners simply do not engage with the traditional print-only lessons available in Study Island. We heard from many educators that there is a gap in the resources available in Study Island and that they need something that students will want to interact with voluntarily.

In a true reflection of our #EducatorFirst mindset and commitment to innovation, we took that feedback to heart and began having conversations about ways to better support educators by improving student engagement with instructional content.

At this point, we had our own silent “duh” moment. We realized that we could fill this gap with videos that tightly align to the topics that learners practice and educators build tests for.

Regardless of how you teach and how your students learn, our new video lessons will fit into your arsenal of teaching tools. They follow the guidelines of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), support multiple learning modalities, and reflect best instructional practices. Take a peek below at one of the videos we created for the 3rd grade math topic “Multiplying by Tens.” You can find another example here.

There are 72 new math and ELA video lessons attached to topics across grades 3, 4, and 5 in our Common Core content, as well as in our content built specifically for Texas, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and California and many other states. Each lesson includes two videos: one that focuses on instruction and one that provides guided practice. The videos themselves are also available in the Teacher Toolkit for all users, regardless of the state you teach in.

Give them a try in your classroom. You might want to project the instructional lesson on your board or screen when introducing a new concept. You could revisit the guided practice lesson as a class before a group session, solving the problem together first before watching the video solution walkthrough. Or, you could have students review them before attempting an independent practice session. Or, you could leverage them during a small-group reteach. They can even be a resource for families to better understand the concepts and skills that your students are working on.

Study Island’s new video lessons are created by educators for educators. We believe they will delight you as much as, if not more than, your students. Are we right? We’d love to hear your thoughts. Please answer this super-short survey to help us figure out which direction to go next, and be on the lookout for more video lessons tailored to your insight!