Key factors:
In my classroom, college students more and more ask for related content material. College students need to know the way what they’re studying in class pertains to the world past the classroom. They need to be engaged of their studying.
In truth, the 2025-2026 Schooling Insights Report vividly proves that college students want and need participating studying experiences. And it’s not simply college students who see engagement as essential. Engagement is broadly acknowledged as a key driver of studying and success, with 93 % of educators agreeing that scholar engagement is a essential metric for understanding general achievement. What’s extra, 99 % of superintendents imagine scholar engagement is without doubt one of the high predictors of success in school.
Creating extremely participating lesson plans that can immerse as we speak’s tech-savvy college students in studying could be a problem, however listed here are two easy-to-find sources that I can flip to turbo-charge the engagement quotient of my classes:
Digital discipline journeys
Digital discipline journeys empower educators to introduce college students to superb locations, new individuals and concepts, and noteworthy experiences–with out ever leaving the classroom. There are such a lot of digital discipline journeys on the market, however I at all times love those that Discovery Schooling creates with companions.
This fall, I plan to take my Okay-5 college students to see the world’s largest photo voltaic telescope, positioned in Hawaii, for a behind-the-scenes tour with the Nationwide Science Basis and Sesame. For these with older grades, I like to recommend diving into engineering and structure with the brand new Forging Innovation: A Mission Doable Digital Area Journey.
I additionally love the digital excursions of the Smithsonian Nationwide Museum of Pure Historical past. Collectively as a category or individually, college students can dive into self-guided, room-by-room excursions of a number of reveals and areas throughout the museum from a desktop or sensible system. This digital discipline journey does embody particular collections and analysis areas, like historical Egypt or the deep ocean. This makes it enjoyable and simple for lecturers like me to select and select which tour is most related to a lesson.
Immersive studying sources
Immersive studying content material provides one other approach to take college students to new locations and join the broader world, and universe, to the classroom. Immersive studying will be simply woven into the curriculum to boost and supply context.
One immersive studying answer I actually like is TimePod Adventures from Verizon. It options free time-traveling episodes designed to interact college students in locations like Mars and prehistoric Earth. Now accessible instantly by means of an online browser on a laptop computer, Chromebook, or cellular system, college students want solely web entry and audio output to start the journey. Guided by an AI-powered assistant and that includes grade-band particular lesson plans, these missions throughout time and house encourage college students to take management, discover unbelievable environments, and resolve complicated challenges.
Immersive studying content material will be overwhelming at first, however skilled growth sources can be found to assist educators construct confidence whereas incomes microcredentials. These sources let educators shortly dive into new and modern methods and educating methods that assist enhance scholar engagement.
Taken collectively, participating studying alternatives are ones that present college students how lecture rooms learnings instantly hook up with their actual lives. With sources like digital discipline journeys and immersive studying content material, college students can dive into faculty matters in methods which can be enjoyable, recent, and typically otherworldly.
