| By Gale Staff |
The summer season flies by too fast, and the first day of school approaches before you know it. Teachers and students feel a bittersweet excitement for the upcoming year; we look forward to reconnecting with our friends and colleagues, yet there is an undeniable anxiety about what the year could bring. Gale is ready to help educators start the school year off on the right foot, providing extensive, teacher-focused content and student-friendly resources.
Even the best teachers can feel overwhelmed at times. Your job is undeniably rewarding, but the daily responsibilities are time-consuming and often challenging. Today’s teachers support all kinds of student needs, including literacy coaching, technical assistance, and mental health interventions. Gale In Context: For Educators is an invaluable solution that can help teachers create lesson plans, integrate individual student accommodations, collaborate with other educators, and pursue professional growth. We’ve compiled a few key strategies to help you create healthy learning habits in your classroom and prepare for back-to-school success.
Find & Create Engaging Lesson Plans
With Gale In Context: For Educators, you can get a head start on your lesson planning for the fall semester. Find pre-built lesson plans across subjects and grade levels or develop your own while browsing content in For Educators. With a simple click, you can organize articles, videos, podcasts, and other helpful materials into customized folders. Plus, you can trust that Gale’s education experts have reviewed all information, ensuring that resources are reliable and aligned with state-specific curriculum standards. Kickstart your lesson planning with Gale’s collections of Content-Specific Training Materials, including readymade activities and lesson plans. Or check out the 2023 Back to School With Gale In Context collection for back-to-school training to spark classroom ideas.
Here is an example of just one of many scavenger hunts:
Provide Students with Tools for Success
Teachers who feel confident and prepared for the school year will have more energy and time to support the individual needs of their students. By leveraging Gale’s lesson-planning tools, accessibility features, and how-to guides, you can create a supportive and engaging learning environment for your students. Educators can embed notes into materials to help guide students and inspire critical thinking. They can leverage assessment tools to ensure students are successfully comprehending the material. Everything you need is on one dedicated platform. Explore helpful tools designed to instill back-to-school habits.
- Scavenger Hunts: Gale has dozens of different databases housing hundreds of thousands of materials, including videos, audio files, news pieces, books, literary criticisms, and so much more. Give students time to practice their research skills and familiarize themselves with search tools with a scavenger hunt activity. We have ten ready-made themes (such as fairy tales and fake news), but we’ve also created a customizable template so you can adapt the activity as needed for your classroom goals.
- Customization Tools: Encourage students to access tutorials for Gale customization features, including citations and accessibility tools. Gale’s Support site includes helpful videos that model the many customization options for users with visual, audio, language, and other needs. Introduce these lessons early so students can quickly take ownership of their own learning journeys.
- Annotate & Organize Assignments: Teachers can annotate assignments in Gale resources and build out lesson plans that limit what materials students can see. Annotate materials with your instructions or highlight the relevant passages to help guide students toward specific learning outcomes. Instructors can easily organize daily content, including readings, activities, quizzes, and other homework, and monitor student progress. You can discover early on who is falling behind or struggling, helping you intervene sooner and get students back on track.
Collaborate with Colleagues
Don’t reinvent the wheel—with Gale’s built-in integration tools, it’s never been easier for teachers to share their expertise and classroom tools. Simply click the “Send To” icon in the right-hand corner of your Gale resources. This function allows educators to effortlessly transfer materials via email or cloud-based software, even between institutions. Users can download and share materials beyond the classroom, examining and organizing resources comfortably from home devices. Department heads can even develop lesson plan folders so all department teachers can access the same approved materials. Gale strives to create a learning environment where teachers can rely on one another and strengthen the overall learning experience for students.
Grow Professionally
For Educators features webinars and tutorials for teachers seeking strategies to improve their skills. After all, even the most tenured educators can find new ways to adapt to the ever-changing needs of their students. For example, you can discover tips for enhancing the accessibility of classroom content and ways to support differentiated learning. Gale products integrate translation services (including dozens of languages), visual and hearing aids, and other helpful adjustments. Students can even toggle between options for an article’s reading level, tailoring the information to their reading comprehension skills. Teachers can also rely on how-to instructions to support student research, leveraging Gale’s user-friendly search tools and filtering functionality to identify relevant, up-to-date content and save time.
Leverage Technical Integration
Gale resources integrate easily with your classroom learning management systems, allowing teachers to quickly construct their digital syllabi and leverage online learning platforms. Discover set-up guides and product overviews to help you master Gale’s integration potential and streamline instructional planning. If you need more assistance, contact our technical support experts, browse technical FAQs, or peruse our collection of technical how-to documents.
For Educators is an effective tool for all teachers, whether they are new to the field or possess several years of experience. The resource’s collaborative approach and standards-aligned content help educators save time and reduce their workload. As summer ends, let Gale ease those back-to-school nerves and help you prepare for a successful school year.
Watch this short video to see For Educators in action!
Not a For Educators subscriber? Contact your education consultant or fill out this form for a demo.