While we’ve been curating resources for community-based COVID-19 relief efforts, for our Consolidated for COVID page, we’ve also been filing away learning-at-home resources we’ve encountered along the way. We’ve had an educational Resource Page on the AMRoC Fab Lab website since before we opened the Fab Lab last year. But with COVID-19 forcing school closures worldwide and over 1.5 billion children now restricted to home bound learning, online resources are blossoming like never before.
While families who were previously homeschooling are usually aware of the wealth of online content available to them, newcomers to home learning may not be. So we’ve enhanced our Resource page with what we believe are some of the most useful and most comprehensive learning sites out there, and identified many new additions that have come online in recent weeks. We’ve also created a section of COVID-19 related resource for children on the Consolidated for COVID page, including Live Science’s Ultimate Kids Guide to the New Coronovirus.
Some favorites we’d like to highlight, in no particular order:
- MITs new Innovating Learning and Education in the Era of AI which covers everything from K-12 Artificial Intelligence literacy to AI for technical and adult vocational education.
- Instructables – hands down one of our favorite hands-on sites!
- AccelerationNation – STEM ed through motorsports
- NOVA resources for At-Home Learning is a great compilation of science education resources related to NOVA science programming.
- The Physics Classroom , an online, free to use physics website developed primarily for beginning physics students and their teachers.
- Skype a Scientist for Families, which matches scientists with people all around the world, and now includes a family chat option for home bound families.
- The ever awesome eGFI ,comprehensive K-12 STEM and engineering education website hosted by the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE)
Live Science’s Activities and online resources for homebound kids: A coronavirus guide has a variety of other links to museums, theaters and more.
Before you get too carried away though, be sure to read Edutopia’s How to Teach at Home – Why Learning at Home Should Be More Self-Directed—and Less Structured.
The sudden shift to work-from-home might provide a good kind of disruption, opening up a golden opportunity for students to engage in authentic, deep learning that is more self-directed, more playful, more aligned with young students’ development—and much easier for parents to manage than stacks of worksheets. – Edutopia
No matter how much educational content you find online, on top of whatever schools have sent kids home with, the fact is that you’re not going to be able to recreate “school at home” and you probably shouldn’t try. These are unprecedented time, but they also offer an unprecedented opportunity to be together with your children in a new way. It’s a good and important read and we hope you’re reassured by the article and inspired by it.
So take this time together, to learn together in ways you all enjoy!