Welcome back to the 2023-2024 school year!
It's that time of year. Educators have an amazing opportunity every day to meet students where they are and respond to students' individual needs in a way that fosters optimal growth. Let INFOhio help support you in placing each individual learner in your classroom at the center of the learning process. At INFOhio, we strive to support educators with curated high-quality instructional materials and resources that reinforce and supplement instruction for all learners.
Are you an educator looking for specific instructional materials to bridge a knowledge gap? Are you introducing a new topic? Do you need a variety of material types to support all learners? INFOhio connects Ohio students, educators, and families to licensed and purchased digital resources and tools that can be integrated into classrooms and libraries at no cost. Dig into Educator Tools and Open Space, INFOhio's instructional materials repositories, to find timely resources for your classroom.
Educator Tools offers quality instructional materials and professional support materials for teaching and learning aligned with Ohio's Learning Standards. Materials in Educator Tools include INFOhio's licensed and purchased content such as BookFlix, Gale, ScienceFlix, World Book, and EBSCO. Educators will find videos, lesson plans, eBooks, and other materials to use in the classroom at no cost. In addition, Educator Tools has training and support materials for INFOhio's resources such as flyers, training videos, and bookmarks.
To find instructional materials in Educator Tools, use the keyword "career" and limit it to Item Type: Video. There are 456 videos on a variety of careers that appear in the list of search results.
Filters have been updated and added to Educator Tools to make it easier to find what you need. Educators can limit their searches by Grade Level, Content Area, Source, Item Type, Training & Promotion, Instructional Practices, and Dimensions of Inquiry.
Use the drop-down arrow to expand each category and choose the filter that describes the content you need.
Many student-facing materials can be found in Educator Tools. For example, a 4th-grade elementary math teacher wants to help students who need to further understand the concept of multiplying fractions. Some of the videos to support this concept found in Educator Tools are:
A 7th-grade science teacher has students who need support to understand abiotic and biotic factors in relation to biomes. Here are just a few of the student-facing instructional materials found in Educator Tools:
Finding Instructional Materials in Open Space
Open Space is INFOhio’s premier instructional material curation and collaboration space. Open Space enables educators to discover freely accessible instructional materials from the web such as lesson plans, textbooks, activities, and other learning resources from organizations like ReadWriteThink, COSI, Fishtank Learning, and Quill. Instructional materials can be searched from the homepage initially with a keyword, Subject, Education Level, and Standard.
In this example, a keyword search was completed for "career" and then limited to the Educational Level of middle school. The search results provide a list of 283 instructional materials about careers for middle school.
When looking at this search more closely, the material types that appear include teacher-facing and student-facing content like Lesson Plans for educator use and Activity/Lab or Homework Assignments that can be used directly with students. If an educator needs student-facing materials, they can limit their search by the Material Type of Activity/Lab. Limiting the search by Activity/Lab narrows the search to 88 results.
Open Space Collections
INFOhio has also curated special collections in Open Space containing high-need content, topic-specific items, and instructional materials from Ohio-based organizations. To find these, click Discover and select Collections from the drop-down menu.
Curated collections have been created to make it easier for educators to find a specific type of instructional material or to find materials from a specific provider. Some examples of the collections available include Career Exploration Resources, Standards-Aligned instructional materials by content area, Textbooks, and Full Courses. If an educator was looking for a complete course in science, they will find the CK-12 Science curriculum is available for elementary, middle, and high school levels.
Open Space Hubs
To find open-access content from the web that has been reviewed and vetted, click Hub in the main menu and choose the Ohio Reviewed Instructional Materials hub. This hub includes content reviewed for quality and earned an endorsement by a team of trained education professionals.
A variety of instructional materials can be found in Open Space. From the previous example above, a 4th-grade elementary math teacher wants to help students who need to further understand the concept of multiplying fractions. Some of the instructional materials found to support this concept in Open Space are:
The same 7th-grade science teacher from the example above has students who need support to understand abiotic and biotic factors in relation to biomes. Here are some of the student-facing instructional materials found in Open Space:
A high school English language arts teacher needs to support students in learning more about the proper command of the conventions of standard English such as grammar, capitalization, and punctuation. Here are some of the instructional materials found in Open Space:
Share these repositories of instructional materials with other educators in your district to help them support the diverse learners in their classrooms. To continue to spread the word about INFOhio's licensed and purchased digital tools and resources at no cost, share the updated Teach & Learn With INFOhio: Digital Resources for a Digital Age flyer with your colleagues that showcases select resources for each grade band. Also, make sure to Stay Connected by joining the INFOhio Community group on Open Space.
We are here to help! If you have questions visit support.infohio.org.
Sarah Mowery is a Professional Instructional Specialist with INFOhio. She has worked in education for 16 years as a school librarian and technology coach in elementary and middle school settings. While in these roles, she's been an integral part of the building leadership teams working as a curriculum connector and integrating web-based tools. She earned a BA in Sociology from Bowling Green State University and an MLS with a specialization in PK-12 schools from East Carolina University. Sarah was one of the original INFOhio ICoaches when the program first began in 2013 and has a passion for sharing how INFOhio resources can transform teaching and impact learning for students and educators across the state of Ohio.
Fetch is avaiable to INFOhio automated schools. If you are an INFOhio school, please log in with your school username/password using the button at the top-left corner of this page.
For more information about Fetch, please visit the Fetch information page or contact INFOhio support at https://support.infohio.org.
