This is a recording of our Getting Started with Exploros Webinar (video below). This teacher training covers a variety of topics using examples from Exploros Social Studies.

If you are new to Exploros, we recommend watching the entire video, but you can scrub to a particular timestamp for the following topics:

WEBINAR VIDEO CONTENTS

00:00 Introduction and Join Us on Facebook

01:12 Overview of Exploros Social Studies

05:18 Teaching Tips (High Level)

08:33 Setting up Classes and Assignments

13:47 Guiding a Learning Experience

15:40 The 5E Model Lesson Structure

30:28 Ending a Learning Experience

31:45 Curriculum Planning

33:39 Signing Up for a Teacher Account

36:27 Curriculum Mapper (Learning Standards Mapping)

37:51 Reports and Analytics

41:13 Conclusion

Alternative Video Link: This video is hosted on Vimeo. If you cannot access it, here is an alternative version of the video hosted by Exploros.

Transcript

  Hello and welcome to this training, Exploros Social Social Studies — Give Every Student a Voice. Today, we will do a quick introduction of Exploros. We will discuss instructional improvement strategies and how to teach with Exploros. And finally, we will do some curriculum planning where we'll talk about what to teach with Exploros.

I would also like to invite you to join us on Facebook, where we have a group called Social Social Studies. We just try to keep everyone up to date on everything going on with Exploros. We share ideas, we get teacher feedback and input, and we're really trying to build a community around teachers who are using Exploros in their classrooms as a way for us all to share ideas and get advice from each other.

My name is Sabrina Valverde. I'm the Professional Learning Partner for Exploros, and if you have any questions or you'd like to learn more about Exploros after this training, please feel free to email me.

Social Social Studies Introduction to Exploros: Exploros is teacher-guided student-centered, and device-enabled.

Exploros is an educational platform that supports the social learning environment of the traditional classroom. Teachers guide the learning, and students actively engage with the content. By providing both the platform and the content, Exploros goes beyond interactive slideshows and self-paced modules to provide device-enabled, social, 5E model learning experiences based on the best instructional approaches.

The Exploros Social Studies program presents courses designed to save you, the teacher, time by helping you achieve high student engagement and improve students' academic performance. We have just about one lesson, we call them experiences, for every instructional day. You choose, assign, and guide a TEK (or standards) based learning experience.

Each experience follows the 5E model of instruction: Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate, and Evaluate, which scaffolds the learning experience and becomes the baseline from which student engagement and achievement can be monitored.

Student centered. During the typical classroom lesson, most students are passive, which decreases engagement and inhibits learning. One way to get students more engaged is to give them a voice in the lesson, and a stake in their own learning outcomes. This is where the use of technology comes in. Students regularly use mobile devices as their main means of communication with friends and family.

By bringing this technology into the classroom, your students use their social media skills as a voice that engages them in their learning through inquiry and discourse. Exploros promotes student agency and engagement that fosters active learning and allows you to quickly identify areas for personalization or intervention.

Exploros drives student participation, giving you real-time insight into student thinking, and helping you tailor your instruction. During the experience, Exploros displays all student interactions, brainstorming, submitting drawings, including analyzing primary sources, engaging in discussions like historians and scholars, and contributing their unique perspectives.

In one case study, students posted 17 responses per student, per class. And finally, Exploros is device-enabled. Students contribute to the classroom learning experience via social media style posting using devices like Chromebooks and iPads. Exploros turns posts, student posts, into data, providing real-time insights into student activity and understanding across the lesson, unit, and course, giving you a clearer window into student comprehension.

The user-friendly system does all this for teachers, freeing you up to teach. This is made possible because students are using devices to engage, and that engagement, plus technology, turns into valuable information the teacher can use. to drive instruction.

Instructional Improvement. How to Teach with Exploros. Understanding both how to teach and what to teach is critical for success. Each social studies experience provides the actual implementation of a lesson plan ready for teaching to the class. The Exploros curriculum is designed to be delivered in a teacher-guided, student-centered, device-enabled classroom with opportunities for discussion.

This social interaction engages students and facilitates learning. You shouldn't just turn the students loose. Teachers are expected to monitor student work, facilitate discussions, and check for understanding to ensure that all students are engaged and on the right track.

Here are a few tips for teaching with Exploros.

The 5E model is your daily lesson plan.

An Exploros experience is a full lesson from bell ringer to exit ticket. The Engage scene starts with a short classified warm-up like contributing a word or phrase to a word cloud, or finding an image that represents their existing knowledge of the topic.

The goal is to ensure every student feels at ease participating. This initial phase encourages student-led inquiry. where students ask questions and reflect on their prior knowledge, fostering the development of crucial social studies skills, such as critical thinking, speaking, listening, and interaction.

The experience moves on to Explore, Explain, and Elaborate, where students do more and more challenging work. They're often reading differentiated reading passages, watching videos, and building graphic organizers. The example on the screen, students are analyzing a primary source, which is an engraving by Paul Revere, and posting aspects of their analysis.

Students work through this active learning, digging deeper into the learning objectives. And finally, the E scene is Evaluate, where students take a short exit quiz, which allows teachers to see if the class struggled with a particular question or if a student struggled with the lesson in real time, allowing them to reteach and provide immediate feedback and intervention.

Now we're going to look at a teacher account to explain the different ways of teaching with Exploros.

First, you'll need to set up your classes. To do that, click on the three stacked lines, click the plus button, and follow the prompts for each of the methods. If you're importing from Google Classroom, click the button and follow the prompts, Canvas, or Schoology.

You may also create your class manually, and students can log in with the class code. For more explanation on those steps, visit Exploros.com. You may go to the help section and search for creating a class with your particular rostering method, or reach out to us in the live chat. Once your classes are created, they will be listed here.

To assign a lesson to your class, choose the class. You may assign the same experience to multiple classes, but for our purposes today, we're going to assign it to one class. Click the plus button. When you click the plus button, it will open up the courses in your library. You do have access to all of the courses in our social studies bundle.

Find your course and open it. When you open the course, you will see a list of units. You could begin at the beginning, or you might have a pacing guide that tells you what it's time to teach. Select the unit you want to teach out of. When you open up the unit, you will see a playlist of learning experiences.

Read through the summaries of the experiences, and toggle out the standards. to decide what you want to teach. You may also preview the learning experience in order to see exactly what the students will see. I'm not going to do that right now because we're about to walk through all of the pieces that a student will see once it's assigned.

Once you know what you want to assign, Click the assign button. In the first step, set your time. Set the start time for when you want students to be able to access the experience. Set the end time for when you want the experience to disappear for students and to be ended. Most teachers will bump this out a little further than you think necessary because we all know all of the different things that can happen or come up and there's a way to manually force the experience to end.

I'll show you that in a little bit later on in this video. In step two, choose your students. Most of the time you will assign it to the entire class. You could remove students from this particular assignment and create smaller sets of students. For our purposes, I'm going to assign it to the entire class.

If there are reading groups or small groups tagged, this is your opportunity to choose your reading groups and your small groups. I'm not going to talk about all of the things involved with reading groups and small groups in this training, but I will show you how to learn more about those in just a little bit.

Reading groups are really straightforward. A is A for article summary. This means they're going to get a brief article designed to be at a lower lexile level, easy to print, and Easy to annotate, easy to take that information and use it to answer questions within Exploros. If you'd like students to receive only the full article, you can move them to B.

It defaults to A because that is most teachers' preference. Also, at the bottom of the article summary, students are able to click out to the full article. If you don't remember everything I'm saying, just remember to click, click the question mark and it will explain to you all of the things I just mentioned about reading groups.

Next, once your reading groups are set, If there were small groups, you would set them also. And in step three, you're going to assign. Exploros is designed to be teacher-guided. There are some instances when self-paced might be necessary. We don't recommend using self-paced, especially when you're first teaching with Exploros and your students are getting to know the program, but it does have its purpose. Maybe when there's a substitute teacher or a need for students to move through each scene at their own pace. They do have to answer the questions before they can keep moving. But Exploros is designed to just assign to your class, and this means that you're guiding the lesson, unlocking the scenes for each student.

After you assign an experience, it will appear here in the Assigned Experiences area of your dashboard. It will also appear for the students in their assigned experiences. Click open the assigned experience in dashboard view. This is what we consider the GPS of the lesson. So from here you can see who has logged in because their name will be in blue.

At the top, these five bubbles represent the five scenes in the learning experience, starting with the Engage scene, all the way to evaluate. These bubbles stand for the questions that have to be answered in the experience, and this line is the teacher gate. It's red because it is locked. The teacher has to unlock the gate so that students can move on.

Even if there is an indication that students have answered the question, but if the scene is locked, students cannot move on until the teacher unlocks the scene. When a scene is unlocked, the line will turn green. Next, there is the activity view. Most teachers will project the activity view on their screen.

You can hide the teacher notes so that now your, your view, what you're projecting out to the students matches what the students see on their device. I'm going to flip over to a social preview mode and walk through what it would look like if actual students were engaging and interacting with this experience, starting with scene one.

Scene one, Engage. The Engage scene usually presents a short class wide warmup that helps students make connections to the topic. For example, students might be prompted to post a single word or phrase in a word cloud, or to find an image to illustrate what they know about a topic. The Engage scenes are designed so that every student is comfortable posting.

Before you begin, review the teacher notes displayed in the bright red bubbles. Scene 1 often begins with an overview of the experience along with lesson objectives. Read through the scene and summarize how you plan to guide it ahead of time. Here are a few tips for guiding the Engage scene. Engage is almost always a very social scene.

Think through how you will use the opportunity to engage your quiet or reluctant students. On the flip side, anticipate how you will guide the conversation if it becomes lively. What expectations will you discuss before the conversation begins? In this example, students are asked to post a word or phrase.

If a student were to say something inappropriate or silly, I as the teacher can immediately hover over the caret and edit or delete the response. I can also ask students to edit or delete their own response. in the same location from the student view. Many teachers choose to project their screen to effectively guide the experience, frequently referencing it during the session.

You may hide your teacher notes and the correct answers While you're projecting. Often, there is a video component. Plan in advance whether you will project the video for the class to watch together, or if each student will view it individually with earphones. Another tip is for your time management. The Engage scene works as a do now, bell ringer, or a warm up activity.

Direct students to begin the scene as they enter the classroom, while you're taking care of housekeeping items, such as taking attendance. If students have devices at home, they can watch the Engage video as they enter the classroom. Or, work through the entire first scene ahead of class to prepare for discussion.

1. Scene 1, Engage. The Engage scene usually presents a short class wide warm up that helps students make connections to the topic. For example, students might be prompted to post a single word or phrase in a word cloud, or to find an image to illustrate what they know about a topic. The Engage scenes are designed so that every student is comfortable posting.

Before you begin, review the teacher notes displayed in the bright red bubbles. Scene 1 often begins with an overview of the experience along with lesson objectives. Read through the scene and summarize how you plan to guide it ahead of time. Here are a few tips for guiding the Engage scene. Engage is almost always a very social scene.

Think through how you will use the opportunity to engage your quiet or reluctant students. On the flip side, anticipate how you will guide the conversation if it becomes lively. What expectations will you discuss before the conversation begins? In this example, students are asked to post a word or phrase.

into the word cloud. If a student were to say something inappropriate or silly, I as the teacher can immediately hover over the caret and edit or delete the response. I can also ask students to edit or delete their own response in the same location from the student view. Many teachers choose to project their screen to effectively guide the experience, frequently referencing it during the session.

You may hide your teacher notes and the correct answers while you're projecting. Often, there is a video component. Plan in advance whether you will project the video for the class to watch together, or if each student will view it individually with earphones. Another tip is for your time management. The Engage scene works as a do now.

Once students are engaged and you've checked for understanding, You may now guide students to Scene 2 by unlocking the teacher gate at the bottom of Scene 1. Students have to answer the question before they'll be able to open up Scene 2.

2. The Explore scene generally uses curated primary sources, secondary sources, articles, article summaries, and videos to present the topics.

The Exploros program offers different ways of accessing the information to accommodate various types of learners. Students may be required to take notes as they read or answer reading comprehension-style questions. Here are a few tips about the Explore scene. Students will access open educational resources.

It's recommended that you open the links and preview them ahead of time. Also, pay attention to any notes within the scene that let you know what you should be focusing on or paying attention to when you and your students click on the OERs. Exploros integrates with dynamic translation and text-to-speech.

Utilize these browser features to ensure all students can access the reading materials and have an opportunity to use their voice to participate in class discussions.

And finally, plan ahead to manage the reading and viewing times needed to complete the scene. Because we include a variety of articles and videos on similar topics to offer options that suit your students, If time is limited, decide in advance which choices are best for your class. In this example, students are being asked to write into a discussion wall what they learned from the timeline that was interesting.

Other students are able to reply to their responses, and you as the teacher may also add your thoughts. After students have completed the activities in scene 3, you may now unlock the teacher gate and allow students to go to scene 3.

3. Scene 3 is the Explain scene. The Explain may introduce related material, or have students dive deeper into the material from the Explore scene.

These activities use graphic organizers, charts, drawings, discussion walls, and more to engage the students. In this particular Explain scene, students are asked to read two articles, or article summaries, and as they read, fill out the chart below. Notice that this activity has one person on the icon. This is only shared to the teacher.

In scene one, the icon is three people. That means it's shared out to the whole class. Once students answer, their peers can see their response, and they can see what their peers said. In this activity, only the teacher sees what the students say. If you remember, when we went to assign this experience, you were asked to choose reading group A or reading group B.

It will default to reading group A. Reading group A will give all students or whichever students you assign it to, the article summary. The article summary is written at a lower lexile level and designed to be easy to digest and comprehend. Allowing students to take the information and apply it to the chart or the graphic organizer or the drawing that they are working on.

We also have embedded auto-graded activities. This particular auto-graded activity will be shared out to the class and is a multiple choice question. We also have drag and drop, hot text, and many other types of activities that will be auto-graded. The teacher has lots of visibility into who answered the question, allowing you to see student understanding in real-time and adjust your instruction to make sure all students are understanding the objective.

Once students are able to explain their understanding of the learning objective, you may then unlock the teacher gate and allow students to move into the Elaborate scene.

4. The Elaborate scene, in some instances, may function as an extension. And they may not be essential for learning facts, provided that all other scenes have been thoroughly completed.

You could instruct students to skip the scene by typing in the word skip or typing in something, one fact that they remember that they've learned in previous scenes, something to tie in their learning without having to take the time to complete the full Elaborate scene. However, Often teachers like to use this scene as an opportunity for students to practice short constructed response.

They are also given opportunities. to do drawings, research, create posters, videos. Every Elaborate scene is unique, but it truly is what it says it is. It's an opportunity for students to elaborate on their learning. Some teachers will even just pull the Elaborate scene as a project for students to do.

Often the teacher notes will suggest that you have a whole class discussion around this Elaborate work that students have completed. In this particular scene, students are simply asked to elaborate by imagining that they are a member of British Parliament. So putting themselves in someone else's shoes, using the facts that they've learned from the previous scenes, and writing a response, giving reasons why they voted a certain way or to impose the stamp act in this particular question. Once students have completed this Elaborate activity, you may click the unlock button and now students will go into scene five.

5. Scene five is the Evaluate quiz. At the end of each experience, this quiz helps teachers identify any key concepts or skills that need to be retaught. Teachers see student results in real time. The Evaluate scene is a short exit ticket. Students are asked three to eight questions that include multiple choice, multi part, multi select, inline choice, hot text, hot spot, and drag and drop.

I recommend going through each question before you teach the experience and clicking through each scene to locate where the students will find the answers to each of the questions. This will really help guide your teaching. If you know that students are asked to answer a question, or all of the questions maybe, and you can find the answers in scene one, two, and three, then maybe you don't need to have them complete a full Elaborate activity.

Or if they need to really dive into each scene in order to answer the quiz questions, You will know that ahead of time and you can make sure that students are focused on the right tasks in order to do well on the quiz. Here are a few tips about the Evaluate scene. Before starting the quiz, hide the correct answers and display your screen.

Go through each question together and help students think through their answers before they begin. Monitor the heat map as students work, showing correct, green, blue partially correct, and incorrect, red answers. If a student has mostly incorrect answers, check in with them. Should a student's quiz results be unsatisfactory, consider allowing a retake by selecting Retake Quiz. The option will be located here.

Once all students finish the Evaluate Quiz, conclude the experience. It will then appear in the Ended section, allowing students to review their quizzes, including correct and incorrect answers. After students have completed the quiz and it's time to end the experience, click the Back button. Then select End Now. Once you hit End Now, The Ended Experience will be stored under the Ended section.

The students will also see the assignment in their Ended section. This is where many teachers will have students use this information to review for unit reviews or any type of project that students might need to work on. All of their work is saved, really eliminating the need for students to keep up with notebooks or past quizzes and tests with grades on them.

Now, they can just simply go into their Exploros experience, review the quiz, review the graphic organizers, and study for their test. You have learned how to teach with Exploros.

Now, let's discuss curriculum planning, what to teach with Exploros. The Exploros Social Study Curriculum provides full coverage for each course.

The courses are divided into units, and each unit contains a set of learning experiences. Exploros. A learning experience is a ready-to-teach lesson that is meant to take about one class period to teach. Your scope and sequence and pacing guide likely determine what general topics and student expectations you should be teaching.

The Exploros courses are designed to help you pace your teaching across that scope and sequence. We recommend teaching with Exploros at least two or three times a week. This consistency will help you implement student-centered learning that engages your students and guides them to achieve depth of learning.

In addition, it will build a reliable data set for your reports. Here are a few tips. You may choose experiences for topics that are generally difficult to cover in class or that require significant differentiation. You may choose experiences that integrate a wide variety of standards in a single experience or that cover specific standards that are prescribed for a given week by the pacing guide.

Work with your teaching team to decide which experiences you will all teach. You can discuss and share pedagogical strategies knowing that you are delivering the same content using the same 5E learning model. This will help provide a focal point for PLCs. Now, let's log in to your teacher account to learn how and where you can start choosing your experiences.

To access your Exploros curriculum, we're going to follow a few steps. Do know that if your district has already set you up using ClassLink, Schoology, or Canvas, that should be available through those apps. If you're using Google Classroom or just signing up to review the curriculum, these are the steps that you will follow.

Click, I'm a teacher. After you have gone to Exploros.com, click, I'm a Teacher > Social Studies bundle. Enter the zip code for your campus and then find your campus in the drop-down. Hit select. Follow the prompts to sign up with your district-based email address. Be sure to click that you've read the terms and conditions.

Once you have followed the prompts and you have access to your teacher account, there are a few important things to know about choosing your curriculum and your experiences. So again, your classes will be over here. Follow the prompts. If you've logged in for the first time, you're probably getting a tour that's showing you how to add your classes.

We also discussed it some earlier in this video. This is where you will add your classes. And they will populate for you here. Once you do that, and you're ready to plan your curriculum, you will click open the library of all learning experiences by clicking there. Here, you can search. If you're looking for a particular lesson, you can search it here.

You could also click open your course and take your district's pacing guide and begin reviewing the units. You could start at the top and go teach all the way to the bottom. You can pick and choose the units based on your pacing guide. When you open up the units, this is where you will see each of the experiences.

You could toggle open the teaks and choose one that covers the most teaks that are important to you. Or you could also look for teaks that you know your students have traditionally struggled with. And you want to teach it, or you could click open preview mode and just find an experience that you know would be really interesting and engaging for your class and put that on your list of what you're going to teach with Exploros.

We also have a curriculum mapper that's available over here in the help section. The help section contains lots of really great articles from teaching ideas to technical things like setting up your class. So be sure and check out the help section if you have any questions at any time. When you come in here, if you search curriculum mapper, you will find our curriculum mapper guide.

If you click it open, be sure and read the information explaining how it works, and then you can scroll through and pick the course that you teach and open it up. This is a way that you can do some backwards planning. So, again, if you traditionally struggle with a certain objective, but it's time to be teaching exploration and colonization, You can choose that unit and then drill down on the standard that you want to make sure to cover or you could choose multiple standards.

Then our curriculum mapper will let you know which Exploros experiences cover that standard. So this is a way you could narrow your focus and choose experiences to teach that are really focusing on the goals that you have for your class.

Finally, you may also utilize our reports to help you see student learning.

So under the reports tab, we have three key reports. The student progress report is the gradebook report. So you can toggle between your classes and every time they take a quiz, their quiz score is listed here. You can also export that data. And you can also change the metric. So you might look through here and notice what experiences your students have struggled with and decide to reteach that experience.

You could also choose experiences by clicking open experience summary. Now this is not at the beginning. This is after you've been teaching with Exploros. You could utilize the reports to use that data to drive your instruction later on. This isn't what you would do obviously at the beginning because you won't have any reports available.

This is also why we talk about teaching with Exploros two to three times a week because this data set will become more full The more you're using Exploros. So, the experience summary is going to offer you an at advance look at how many students are participating, percent complete, average response per student, average quiz score per student, and time on task.

So, again, if you have a particular experience that you chose to teach in the beginning, But you scroll through reports and can see that their quiz average was low, then you could reassign that quiz. You could also, or I'm sorry, that experience and go back through it again. You could also open up the experience and it will take you right into that experience and you could review.

What your students did when they did that original experience and the third report That's very popular is the TEKS learning report So again, you need to be teaching with Exploros two to three days a week Maybe one day a week might get you there But really we want to be at that two times a week mark So that these reports are really filling up.

So, the student learning report is going to provide you. Here, you can scroll through and notice the standard. Every time that standard is quizzed, we're providing an average quiz score. 65 percent or above is what we want to see on these quiz scores. Our quiz scores are a little, our quizzes are a little more difficult, and we have found that 65 percent or above is a good STAAR proxy.

So for curriculum planning purposes, again, not something you can look at. At the beginning of the year, but once you start consistently using Exploros two or three times a week, this report is really going to fill up, giving you lots of data to help you drive your instruction for listening and following along.

During this training session, we reviewed social social studies. an introduction to Exploros, instructional improvement, how to teach with Exploros, and curriculum planning, what to teach with Exploros. Teaching social studies is complex. Teachers need to cover a lot of standards-based content, engage students in important social studies skills such as speaking, writing, reading, interacting, listening, and inquiry, support all students, personalize instruction, and more.

Exploros Social Studies simplifies this and boosts teacher confidence by integrating essential elements into our user-friendly platform. Our program is standards-aligned, ensuring all content meets state requirements. It creates an inclusive environment that supports all learners, making it easier to engage every student.

Data-driven instruction helps you monitor progress and tailor your teaching to meet individual needs. Exploros also enhances social studies skills and practices, including inquiry, critical thinking, analysis, discourse, and understanding of primary sources.

As we conclude, be sure to stay connected by joining our Social Social Studies Group on Facebook to stay up to date on Exploros features, exchange ideas, contribute feedback, and learn more about upcoming professional learning opportunities.