According to SAS, more than 50,000 teachers and 12,000 schools use SAS Curriculum Pathways. At no cost, educators at traditional, virtual, and home schools can access highly interactive content for grades 6-12 in English/language arts, math, science, social studies, and Spanish.
“I think it’s important to remember that just because we put classes online does not make [them] interactive, does not make [them] engaging,” said Bruce Friend, director of SAS Curriculum Pathways. “We can bore kids as quickly online as if we just put them in a traditional classroom with a textbook.”
The curriculum resource includes a wide range of interactive formats, such as “read, research, and respond” guided questions, web lessons, and audio tutorials.
“I really like the new interactive tools because they look like a video game—which gets the students engaged—but they’re geared towards higher-order thinking,” said Katie Higgins, an English teacher and 2011 Mooresville, N.C., High School Teacher of the Year. ”Unlike the drill-and-kill videos that are more rote memorization, these get kids to think critically.”
Higgins praised tools such as Curriculum Pathways’ Writing Reviser and Punctuation Rules for being “incredibly interactive—students can actually click and drag a comma into where it’s supposed to be.”
Joy Elliott, a math teacher at Northern Middle School in North Carolina, said she particularly appreciates that the lessons can be differentiated according to students’ abilities.
Elliott explained how she would teach the math topic of slope: The whole class would begin with an “Audio Inquiry,” a basic activity that shows the definition and applications of slope and is followed by a quiz. By studying the results of the quiz, Elliott would decide how to review with struggling students, and she would know which students to send on to the next activity, a more challenging “Web Inquiry” that might have students measuring the slope of handicap ramps around the school or watching videos online.
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