Britannica LaunchPacks: Social Studies, Britannica Digital Learning’s newest digital classroom resource, has rolled out some major updates as teachers jump into the second half of the school year. Along with giving teachers the ability to customize content and differentiate instruction, LaunchPacks can now be annotated by teachers and students, and teachers are able to schedule Packs into their own personalized calendar.
ANNOTATION
New annotation tools ensure that teachers are able to develop students’ close reading skills and support student reading AND comprehension.
Annotations allow students to actively work with content, supporting literacy across the content areas. Students are able to improve reading comprehension and vocabulary, identify important ideas in the text, see connections between multiple resources, formulate questions, make visual relationships between texts, show evidence to support their arguments, prioritize information and reorganize ideas, show how they work with informational text, and improve critical reading and thinking skills.
• Both teachers and students can highlight text using six color-coded annotation categories. For example, teachers can create an instruction, note, or question on a text. Students can identify evidence, connections, new vocabulary, and summarize what they’ve learned.
• In read mode, students can choose between three reading levels, which allows teachers to differentiate instruction all within the same article and the same classroom tool.
• Users can save annotations, print, share with a read-only view, and export.
SCHEDULING
A new customizable LaunchPacks calendar allows teachers to schedule Packs to fit their students’ needs.
• Teachers can personalize, control, and manage reminder notifications to automatically receive selected Packs on specific dates.
• Scheduling content simplifies organization and saves teachers’ time. With this programmable feature, content can be “scheduled” according to their pacing or student needs. Scheduling can take the place of bookmarks, e-mails, links, additional searching, and clutter.
• Teachers can easily drag and drop Packs into their calendar and view or edit their entire calendar of scheduled content.
• Notifications are delivered to teachers through the product site header. Teachers can also opt-in to e-mail or for pop-up notifications.
PERSONALIZATION
LaunchPacks offers many ways to customize the user experience.
• Teachers are able to opt-in to receive targeted Britannica-created Packs based on their teaching, student, and content needs.
• Teachers can submit Pack topic requests if a certain topic needs deeper coverage. Britannica is committed to ensuring that subjects required for specific state or regional standards receive full attention.
• New support features, such as quick-tutorial videos, allow users to easily learn helpful skills.
• As always, users can create custom Packs, add their own notes, remove irrelevant resources within a Pack, add external resources or links, include a classroom activity, append instructions, and share with other teachers or students.
With these new enhancements, this is a perfect time to set up a free trial of LaunchPacks or schedule a demo with our curriculum specialist team at contact.eb.com. Teachers and districts are loving what they see, and we think you will too!
