Appendix C: Section Resources - California Digital Learning Integration and Standards Guidance

Section A

Be Internet Awesome

Google provides free digital citizenship resources and lesson plans to help educators reinforce students’ digital citizenship skills. Google additionally provides helpful resources for parents/caregivers to reinforce digital citizenship from home.

California Department of Education Distance Learning Webinar Series

Webinars include guidance for EL student instruction, English language development, and dual-language programs.

CASEL’s SEL Framework

The CASEL framework addresses five broad, interrelated areas of competence and examples for each: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making.

Center for Equity for English Learners: Equitable Distance Learning for English Learners: Design Principles

Loyola Marymount University, as part of their Center for Equity for English Learners, released this resource that provides five design principles for supporting EL students in distance learning environments. Included in these design principles are creating explicit goals, outcomes, and digital modes; forming meaningful connections and engagement; maximizing comprehensibility; varying participation structures; and differentiating reflections and assessments.

Creating and Sustaining Family Partnerships in Distance Learning

Californians Together, along with EL RISE! (English Learner Roadmap Implementation for Systemic Excellence) and LMU’s Center for Equity for English Learners, hosted a webinar focused on connecting to and engaging with families to support EL students in online and blended learning. Strategies shared include engaging in meaningful dialoguing with families, goal setting with EL students, streamlining communications, providing flexible instruction options, ensuring culturally responsive and supportive communities, and more.

Critical Conditions for English Learners in Distance Learning

EL RISE! published a resource that highlights areas where educators, schools, and districts can better support EL students. These include centralizing and building language in all lessons, harnessing formative assessment, leveraging flexible grouping, providing scaffolds and supports, affirming identity, investing in relationships, ensuring access, disrupting inequity, supporting home language, prioritizing oral language, implementing designated English language development, and making learning relevant.

DigCitCommit

The DigCitCommit competencies take digital citizenship a step further than safe and healthy communication and comprehensively define the topic as being composed of five distinct competencies (Inclusive, Informed, Balanced, Engaged, and Alert) that educators can help students build.

Digital Citizenship Resources and Curricula

Common Sense Education provides free digital citizenship resources and lesson plans sorted by grade level to help educators reinforce students’ digital citizenship skills, ranging from digital identity and footprint to news and media literacy.

Educator Resources for Citing Sources

BrainPOP provides sample lesson plans and resources to help students in younger grades properly give attribution to online sources of information.

Equity & Social and Emotional Learning: A Cultural Analysis

This brief examines how the CASEL SEL framework reflects issues of equity, including programs and practices that support the competencies to promote educational equity.

Evaluating Online Sources

Learning for Justice provides lesson plans and resources to help students in grades 9-12 evaluate online sources of information for credibility, accuracy, and reliability.

Families in Schools

Families in Schools has curated a library of free resources, ranging from subject-specific digital tools, as well as tips for parents/caregivers to build positive technology habits and skills with young students.

ISTE Standards for Educators

A collection of research-based standards based on best practices in digital learning to guide teachers in creating learning environments that empower and engage students by leveraging technology. Teachers can also watch videos of the ISTE Standards in classroom practice through the ISTE YouTube playlist.

Khan Academy

Khan Academy provides free math lessons that are organized by grade level from Pre-K through eighth grade as well as by concept. For high school, specific courses are organized by subject area (e.g., Algebra 1, Geometry, Algebra 2) and by concept. This website also offers “Get Ready Courses” that prepare students for upcoming grade-level and course-based math concepts.

Library of Congress Education Resources

The Library of Congress provides a collection of vetted educational resources and professional development for use in online and blended learning settings.

Math Learning Center

This website provides free access to digital manipulatives that students can use to visualize mathematics concepts.

National Archives Education Resources

The National Archives provide a collection of vetted educational resources, including primary historical documents, for use in online and blended learning settings.

National Standards for Quality Online Teaching

A collection of research-based standards developed via collaboration between the Virtual School Leadership Alliance and Quality Matters. These standards provide indicators for best practices in online learning to guide teachers in designing and facilitating online learning environments that cultivate meaningful learning.

News Literacy Must Include Social Emotional Learning

This article from the School Library Journal discusses how social-emotional learning competencies can be reinforced via news literacy instruction.

PBS Videos

PBS provides free access to a wide array of video content ranging from historical documentaries to news and public affairs.

Smithsonian Open Access Resources

The Smithsonian provides millions of open access images that educators can download, share, and reuse for their classroom activities.

U.S. Department of Education: Educator and Developer Toolkits on Using Digital Learning Resources to Support English Learners

This toolkit offers guidance on designing educational technology with EL students in mind. It also includes vignettes and matrices of distance learning resources and digital support features relevant for EL students.

U.S. Department of Education: Supporting English Learners through Technology: What Districts and Teachers Say about Digital Learning Resources for English Learners

This report focuses on how districts and teachers identified digital learning resources (DLRs); how teachers have used DLRs; supports for and barriers to DLR use; and suggestions for improving the usefulness of DLRs in EL student instruction.

A Vision for California’s Schools this Fall: Equity for Dual Language and English Learners in an Unprecedented Moment

This resource was developed by a collaboration between Californians Together, The Education Trust-West, Early Edge California, Loyola Marymount University’s Center for Equity for English Learners, Sobrato Early Academic Language (SEAL), Advancement Project California, and California Association for Bilingual Education (CABE). This brief report focuses on providing state education leaders, local education leaders, and educators focus points for better supporting EL students. The expectations for California educators include maximizing live instructional time for EL students, prioritizing relationship building, differentiating assessments, committing to strategic and consistent family communication and engagement, adding time to educator schedules for additional support of EL students, as well as grouping in non-segregationary ways and in small groups to personalize language needs.

WestEd Webinar Series: Supporting Multilingual and English Learner Students During Distance Learning

Sponsored by the Region 15 Comprehensive Center at WestEd in collaboration with the California Teachers Association (CTA) and CDE, the webinar series includes topics, such as How to Support Young English Learners at Home with Language and Literacy Development, Lesson Planning for English Learners in Distance Learning Environments for Elementary and Secondary Educators, Communicating with Families of Newcomer English Learners During Distance Learning for Elementary and Secondary Educators, The Development of Oral Language in a Distance Learning Environment, Supporting Secondary English Learners in the Social Studies Classroom in a Distance Learning Environment, and Supporting Secondary English Learners in the Science Classroom.

Section B

CODAP

CODAP, or Common Online Data Analysis Platform, includes many data sets and distributions that students can examine and analyze as they consider measures of center and variability.

Desmos

This free suite of math software tools includes graphic and scientific calculators and digital classroom activities.

District-Curated Number Talks Resources

San Francisco Unified School District compiles a comprehensive page of resources for using number talks strategies in instruction.

Esri GeoInquiries

Esri provides a number of free modules highlighting geometric applications in geospatial data analysis.

How Does Project-Based Learning Work?

This Edutopia resource provides a step-by-step framework by which educators may approach the incorporation of project-based learning opportunities.

Learning Variability Navigator

Digital Promise’s free online tool translates the science of learner variability into easily accessible learner factor maps and strategies to improve classroom practice. The navigator suggests a number of research-based, technology-empowered practices for both mathematics and reading.

Math Visuals

This page allows students to use and reference visuals that allow them to make direct links to materials and spaces they have immediate access to.

NASA JPL

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) provides a number of modules, lesson plans, and data activities premised on the geometry of detecting wildfires from space with remote sensing and satellite imagery.

NRICH

The NRICH Project from the University of Cambridge provides free access to a number of digital resources educators can use to facilitate mathematical reasoning and develop problem-solving skills.

Number Paths

This page provides an overview of the number paths strategy to help younger students develop foundational mathematics concepts.

Number Talks Video Resources

Inside Mathematics includes video examples of number talks from classrooms in grade one through grade seven.

Project-Based Learning for Remote Learning

PBLWorks provides strategies, sample projects, and digital tool suggestions for adapting project-based learning opportunities in online learning settings.

Real World Math

This website provides a series of lesson plans and activities using Google Earth and Geometer’s Sketchpad for teaching many mathematical concepts.

Scratch

Developed by the Scratch Foundation, this online tool allows students of varying grade levels to program their own interactive stories, games, and animations.

Slow Reveal Graphs

Educators can use various visualizations featured on this website to facilitate discourse about data and their implications.

Spurious Correlations

Educators can use various visualizations featured on this website to show how seemingly correlating sets of data do not necessarily imply causal relationships.

Strategies for Using Digital Choice Boards in the Classroom

This article provides several strategies for using choice boards in online and blended learning spaces to offer students multiple ways of demonstrating their learning.

Teach InCtrl

Educators may use the strategies on this page to help students build media literacy skills through mathematics instruction.

Toy Theater

Educators have many virtual manipulatives to choose from on Toy Theater to help students actively understand math concepts.

What’s Going on in This Graph?

The New York Times provides various visualizations of real data, from vaccination rates to food preferences, that educators and students can discuss to foster a mathematics discourse.

Wolfram Alpha

Among other features, Wolfram Alpha offers tools for students to create visual mathematical representations.

YouCubed

YouCubed is a platform for teachers and parents to find information on how to approach math from a very different angle by focusing on addressing the myths of the “math brain” and how to transform the latest research on math into accessible and practical forms to promote high levels of student engagement and achievement. The website includes: Ideas, Tasks, Data Science, Films, Courses, Evidence, Books, and News. YouCubed also provides activities, videos, and research findings for number talks and data talks.

Section C

Apps and Websites for Special Education Programs

Common Sense Education has curated digital tools and resources for use with students with specific disabilities.

AVID One-Pager

AVID suggests a strategy that students may use to process their reading through multiple modalities. This may be conducted in digital or analog environments.

Embedded Supports to Differentiate Instruction for Struggling Students

LD OnLine, a national education service organization working in partnership with the National Joint Committee on Learning Disabilities (NJCLD), shares a number of key technology-empowered approaches grounded in the Universal Design for Learning framework.

Fostering Collaboration in a Remote Learning Environment

This article from the International Literacy Association provides recommendations for encouraging authentic collaboration in online learning environments.

Resources For Virtual Instruction and Online Learning

The National Council of Teachers of English provides several focused resources—including books, articles, and journals—to build ELA/literacy and ELD teachers’ knowledge of new digital tools and strategies they can use in online or blended learning settings.