Calling all educators! Help shape the future of SkillBlox!
SkillBlox is Expanding...
We are in the process of adding new subject areas to SkillBlox! The subjects we are adding are the five "topics" of Teaching the Skills that Matter:
🌐 Civics Education
💻 Digital Literacy
💲 Financial Literacy
🩺 Health Literacy
👷🏽♀️ Workforce Preparation
In order to ensure that we are living up to our tagline "Learning. Organized.", we want to make sure the new frameworks we've developed to organize content in these subjects makes it as easy as possible for you to find great content for the topics + skills you teach.
...and we need your help!
Between now and Thursday, May 26, we are asking educators to provide feedback on these subject-level frameworks.
We've created a survey with a series of questions asking you to identify where you would expect to find concepts you teach within the frameworks. You can review just one subject area or review all four. Each contains anywhere from 15 - 30 questions and will take about 20 minutes to complete.
What is SkillBlox?
Finally....Learning. Organized!
SkillBlox is a free, first-of-its-kind learning plan generation tool that pulls together learning materials both from publisher resources and free and open education resources (OER) and organizes them by skill to provide an increased range of learning options for students. Check out some samples!
TABE Level M Geometry: Angles & Lines
TABE Level D Expressions + Equations: Multi-step Equations
NOTE: SkillBlox BETA only includes Math resources. New subjects will be added after our testing phase to see how educators and learners wish to use SkillBlox.
Video Tutorial Playlist
Want to learn more about how to use SkillBlox? Visit our SkillBlox YouTube playlist to watch a video tutorial walkthrough, along with past webinars. Subscribe to the CrowdED Learning channel to be notified when we upload new content.
Mobile-friendly for Anytime, Anywhere Learning
All of the free and open online resources in the SkillBlox library come from high-quality, engaging, trusted sites recommended by adult educators. This makes it easier then ever to find lessons, games, simulations, videos, and activities aligned to the skills your learners need.
And, given these resources are mobile-friendly, more learners can access engaging, standards-aligned content, even if they don't have a home computer.
Thousands of Activities, Standards-aligned, in One Place
We've compiled standards alignments for a range of great, free resources within core academic areas, totaling thousands of engaging, media-rich activities. Click on a subject area to explore high-quality free and open education resources, many of which are included within the SkillBlox library.
Built for Adult Education
We Strive to Be Useful
We knew that if we were going to create something radically different for educators, we needed to test out our ideas first. As part of our "Learning. Everyone" mantra, we worked with design undergraduate students at Brigham Young University to help us make sure our first release met the needs of educators and learners. Check out the report.
CrowdED Learning Report.pdfWhat Educators Think
SkillBlox was released in mid-March 2020, right when COVID-19 school closures began. Read this testimonial where one adult educator shares how SkillBlox made it easy to continue to support her learners from a distance:
"I work as a GED Instructor for Wallace Community College Dothan, AL. Since I had to learn technology from scratch during Distance Learning, your organization was and still is a life saver. No exaggeration intended.
Skillblox gave me the hope that even I could learn enough to help my students from afar. In the beginning, I sent direct links to my students through Remind. Since GED classes bring people from all different learning levels and styles together, you cannot fathom HOW HELPFUL Skillblox was to establish a lesson plan for every Math need out there. I took a subject (fractions, for example) and within minutes I had a lesson plan including videos from Khan Academy and fun activities from Math is Fun ready for some of my students.
Later in June, I went back into the Skillblox assignment I had already established and added the publishers. Now that we are back in class, the students can reach for the books, page numbers already given, and study a little more if they feel it necessary.
I could write a book about the time saver this program is AND last but not least the ease with which my students became familiar with it."
Why SkillBlox?
Truly Personalized.
In a world where there is no one-size-fits-all solution to providing all of the resources needed to help learners develop the skills they need for their career, educational, and life pursuits, we are building SkillBlox to take the guesswork out of finding the right resources for learners. Create personalized learning plans that help learners know what resources they can use to develop the skills they need.
Truly Blended.
SkillBlox will aggregate both publisher and freely available quality resources through standards and framework alignments. Instructors can indicate what publisher resources they wish to use as "anchor" resources while integrating a growing library of free resources to augment those resources, allowing for true, blended learning opportunities that provide variety and accommodate multiple learning modalities.
Truly Free.
Best of all—SkillBlox will be free! As a 501(c)(3) charity, CrowdED Learning is committed to finding innovative ways to help adult learners achieve self-sufficiency and career mobility through education. We believe access to quality learning is a human right, and free and open resources hold incredible promise for supporting lifelong learning. We strive to find inventive ways to make OER more widely available and readily accessible to adult learners and instructors.
Participating Publishers
Each of these publishers is committed to expanding the reach of adult education by providing CrowdED Learning with alignments of their content to the College & Career Readiness Standards and TABE 11/12 to be included within SkillBlox. See a publisher that's not listed but you would like to see included? Drop us a note!
