Here’s a digital curriculum and toolkit for Grades 4-12, which provides wonderful resources for students at all reading levels, from those who need extra help to gifted learners. Scholastic’s Expert Space lets you select from different levels of text, introduces content with anchor videos, and offers a read-aloud tool in addition to Spanish translations. With these options, all students in your classes will be able to become content experts. Scholastic calls it a way to transform learning.

Students, after creating their own accounts in Expert Space, are ready to dive into the more than 100 science and social studies content collections, better known in the program as xSpaces. These xSpaces feature content traditionally covered in social studies and science curricula, meaning that most topics assigned or selected for reports, papers or projects are available for student research. If a topic isn’t there in the xSpaces, students will find links to search for the content they need.  After looking over what’s available within xSpaces, however, your students will want to use the unbelievable content resources that are within a mouse click.

To help students better understand a topic, 90-second videos are available for introduction to the material they’ll be using. It’s a great way to give your students, as Scholastic says, “a mental model” to launch the topic in their minds. After watching the video, students read the main (feature or overview) article on the topic. Each of the 150,000 or more articles is available on three reading levels: 600-800 Lexile level, 800 to 1000 Lexile level, and 1000-1200 Lexile level. If students cannot read the articles, the read-aloud feature is available.  For students who need to look up words, five different dictionaries and thesauri options are included.

For those students who are anxious to delve deeper into a topic, links are provided to resources such as articles, videos, images, slideshows, timelines, and Web links. The links are arranged to help students find the most appropriate material for their research.

Besides providing excellent content, Expert Space has the resources to help students use the content collected to create papers, home assignments, podcasts, essays and other types of reports and projects.  All the material students collect is placed in what’s called a digital locker where it’s ready to be put to use depending upon the assignment. The program helps students manage the content collected by encouraging them to fill in dates when assignments or tasks are due and consider their goals for the assignment.

When you take a tour of Expert Space, everywhere you look you’ll see support for your students. There are tutorial videos on topics like setting goals, evaluating sources, citing sources, note taking, outlining and researching. —And there’s a note-taking tool. Scholastic says that “students can copy and paste for a direct quote and they are also prompted to write a synopsis in their own words ….”  Each time students save a note, the program asks them to put in a source—using MLA, APA, or the Chicago Manual of Style. All the citations students enter automatically go onto a bibliography page.

Sound good? There’s more. Expert Space encourages students to edit and evaluate their work, organize it into folders, and create an outline of the content collected.  Then it gives them ideas for putting it together in the format required for their assignment. For you, there are lesson plans, ways to search by Lexile level, and project tools.

All this is on the Internet, so there’s no loading of software. Looks like a winner.

If you are interested in browsing Expert Space, try it free by signing up on the Scholastic site.

Additional Information:

Scholastic Expert Space

http://teacher.scholastic.com/products/digital_curriculum/expertspace/index.htm

Watch Some of the Videos

http://teacher.scholastic.com/products/digital_curriculum/expertspace/socialstudies_science.htm

You can request price quotes on the site when you sign up for a free trial.