Welcome to an exploration of Gooru, a powerful tool designed to help educators access and assign a wide array of free educational resources. This platform is particularly beneficial for teachers looking to enhance their lesson plans with diverse and interactive content. Let’s delve into what makes Gooru a valuable asset for educators.
Gooru is a free online platform that serves as a vast repository of educational resources. It is especially recommended for educators teaching students from grades five through twelve. The platform aggregates open educational resources (OER) from across the internet, providing teachers with a plethora of materials to differentiate and assign to their classes. These resources include games, assessments, interactive activities, and more, all curated to support various learning objectives.
One of the standout features of Gooru is its “GPS for Learning,” which personalizes the learning experience by recommending activities and lessons based on student progress. This feature helps tailor educational content to meet individual student needs, enhancing the learning journey.
Gooru’s Navigator is a specialized tool designed for math education. It offers comprehensive math courses from grade 2 through high school, allowing students to learn at their own pace. The resources available in Navigator include simulations, texts, websites, and videos, providing a dynamic and interactive learning experience. However, it’s important to note that Navigator is currently limited to math subjects.
The Learning Object Repository is another component of Gooru, offering curated activities that align with educational standards. This repository includes a Learning Activities Catalog, featuring resources in multiple languages, making it accessible to a diverse range of students.
Creating a free teacher account on Gooru is straightforward. Once registered, educators can explore extensive content catalogs, create their own collections, and integrate existing materials. The platform also allows teachers to share class codes with students, facilitating easy access without the need for individual logins. Additionally, teachers can track student progress and engagement through the teacher dashboard.
While Gooru offers a wealth of resources, it is advisable to use the platform selectively. Due to the vast amount of content sourced from the internet, some links may be broken, and not all resources will be of high quality. Therefore, educators should carefully curate materials that are engaging and beneficial for their students. By doing so, teachers can avoid burnout and make the most of the interactive and video-based resources available.
Gooru is an excellent tool for educators seeking to organize and utilize open educational resources effectively. It excels in providing math and science content, thanks to significant early funding and contributions from reputable providers. By leveraging Gooru, teachers can create enriching learning experiences without the need to develop all content from scratch.
For more insights and reviews, visit Common Sense Education. Stay informed and join the conversation by liking, subscribing, and sharing your thoughts. Happy teaching!
Navigate through the Gooru platform to familiarize yourself with its features. Spend time exploring the “GPS for Learning” and the Learning Object Repository. Take note of how these tools can be integrated into your lesson plans to personalize and enhance student learning experiences.
Using Gooru, create a custom collection of resources tailored to a specific lesson or unit you are planning. Include a mix of interactive activities, videos, and assessments. Share your collection with peers for feedback and discuss how it could be implemented in a classroom setting.
Utilize the Navigator tool to design a math-focused lesson plan. Choose resources that align with your curriculum standards and consider how the pacing and content can be adjusted to meet the diverse needs of your students. Reflect on the potential impact of these resources on student engagement and understanding.
Conduct a critical evaluation of several resources found on Gooru. Assess their quality, relevance, and alignment with educational standards. Discuss with your peers the criteria you used for evaluation and how you can ensure the resources you select are beneficial for your students.
Organize a session with fellow educators to share your experiences using Gooru. Discuss best practices for curating and integrating resources into your teaching. Reflect on the challenges you faced and the strategies you employed to overcome them, fostering a collaborative learning environment.
Here’s a sanitized version of the YouTube transcript:
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We’re back! I haven’t shaved and I have a cold, so you’re really getting me at my best right now. I’m Tanner, and I also haven’t shaved. I’m one of the editors at Common Sense Education, and that’s Chrissy. We come at you every Tuesday to give you reviews that we’ve been doing over on commonsense.org/education. It’s a free site where you can find reviews about tech.
Chrissy, you’ve got something for us today that you want to talk about. What is it? Dazzle us!
Well, Tanner, it is Guru. Am I going to ask you to join a cult today? Nobody knows; it’s a mystery we’re going to find out. But let’s get into it!
Alright, here’s our review of Guru. It’s free, so let’s just go ahead and lead with that for individual teachers. Guru is free, and I just clicked off the review. Here we go. You can see it got four stars, and we recommend it for grades five through twelve, give or take.
The top-line information is that it is a lesson resource activity hub of gargantuan proportions that is sourced from all over the web. You can find what you need to differentiate and assign to a whole class, and there is a dashboard through which you can assign lessons and activities to students. These are highly touted open educational resources. Is that what they do? I hear people talk about these things.
Yes, it is yet another acronym that teachers have to know and deal with—OER. I would say it is an open educational resource in that it’s entirely free, and you can get tons of resources from it.
Here’s a little added bonus: it also offers what it calls the GPS for learning, which gets a little more personalized in terms of student progress and the activities and lessons that it will recommend to you, then assign based on what a student is encountering and doing on the platform.
First, there’s something called Navigator. You can see there are a lot of layers, so this can get a little confusing, which is one of the reasons it didn’t get five stars—there’s a lot to sort through here. Let me break it down. Navigator is just for math, so it has a personalized learning solution for math courses that students can work through at their own pace. Again, it’s only for math in this one area on the platform.
You can see when you click through that it offers comprehensive math courses from grade 2 through high school, with lots of different resources that you can use and assign to students—games, assessments, interactives. And you can see where these things are sourced from. This is not original content; these are things that they have collected—simulations, text, websites, and videos. It’s not all static content, which is great. There are things that kids can interact with, and it’s varied, which is really helpful. But again, the Navigator is just for math.
If you then click into the Learning Object Repository, which is another acronym, it also sounds mysterious. You have to take a tunnel or something to get there.
They have curated activities for personalization, and that is all part of the lore. They have the Learning Activities Catalog, which is also part of this. There are lots of resources available in multiple languages, which is really helpful and aligned with standards, etc.
So let’s say you want to create a free teacher account and get to using it. You can see my class is named “Nipsey Russell Studies,” which is very important. I don’t have any activities scheduled for the day, but if I wanted to look around, you can browse extensive content catalogs.
These are user-created catalogs, and you can click into a whole bunch. You can also create your own, curate and bring in things that you’ve already created, etc. You can take your students on a learning journey unlike any they have encountered before.
If you go to the teacher dashboard, you can share a class code so that they can join without needing a login, which is really helpful. You can track their progress and what they’re doing.
I think the main thing I want to highlight is that this isn’t a resource you necessarily want to use abundantly because, unlike some of these curative resources, you may encounter some broken links and some real duds. These are curated from the internet at large, so try to pick through and find the things that are useful and engaging that will help your students.
Using it extensively could lead to burnout, so it’s really recommended for targeted use. The great thing is that you don’t have to create everything from scratch, and there are interactive, video-based resources that are more engaging than just worksheets.
For all of those reasons, I think you should consider using Guru. It’s a site that is attempting to wrangle these OER resources. This has been a concern; people keep talking about how much OER is out there and how to find it. I think Guru is one of the go-to places to try and organize these resources and assign them.
From what we’ve seen, it does math and science really well. There was a lot of funding early on to develop that content, and many of the providers you see on Guru are ones we’ve reviewed highly. You can probably put together some good learning journeys that you can recycle and make use of all this free content out there.
Make sure to read that review over on commonsense.org/education, and of course, join us every Tuesday. To do that, it’s best to like, subscribe, throw a comment, and tell your friends. We’ll see you next week!
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This version removes informal language, personal anecdotes, and any potentially inappropriate content while maintaining the core information and structure of the original transcript.
Math – The abstract science of number, quantity, and space, either as abstract concepts (pure mathematics), or as applied to other disciplines such as physics and engineering (applied mathematics). – The math department is developing a new curriculum that integrates real-world applications to enhance students’ understanding of complex theories.
Science – The systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment. – Advances in science have led to groundbreaking discoveries in renewable energy technologies.
Resources – Materials, tools, or other assets that are used to support and enhance learning and research in various fields. – The university library offers a vast array of digital resources to assist students in their scientific research projects.
Learning – The acquisition of knowledge or skills through study, experience, or teaching. – Online platforms have revolutionized learning by providing access to interactive courses and lectures from experts worldwide.
Activities – Tasks or exercises designed to engage students in learning and applying new concepts, often involving hands-on or practical experiences. – Laboratory activities are essential for students to gain practical experience in scientific methods and experimentation.
Education – The process of facilitating learning, or the acquisition of knowledge, skills, values, beliefs, and habits, often within an institutional setting. – Education in STEM fields is crucial for preparing the next generation of innovators and problem-solvers.
Content – The information or material contained within educational resources, including text, images, and multimedia, used for teaching and learning. – The course content was updated to include the latest research findings and technological advancements.
Students – Individuals who are engaged in learning, typically within an educational institution, and who are pursuing knowledge in various subjects. – Graduate students are encouraged to participate in research projects to deepen their understanding of scientific principles.
Tools – Instruments or software used to facilitate learning, research, or problem-solving in scientific and mathematical contexts. – Advanced statistical tools are essential for analyzing complex data sets in scientific research.
Progress – The advancement or development towards a goal, particularly in the context of learning or scientific discovery. – The research team made significant progress in developing a new algorithm for data encryption.
