We’re excited to share that Easel Activities has been awarded the Research-Based Design Product Certification from Digital Promise. Using Easel Activities, a part of Easel by TpT™’s suite of digital tools, educators can pair ready-to-use digital activities with interactive tools, such as answer boxes and movable images, to engage students on any device. With this certification, teachers and administrators can have confidence that Easel’s tools are rooted in research and built to support powerful instructional practices, such as differentiation and timely feedback.
Keep reading to find out how Easel supports research-based instructional practices and to learn more about Digital Promise’s Research-Based Design Product Certification.
The Research-Backed Instructional Practices Easel Supports
Digital Promise’s Research-Based Design Product Certification serves as a signal to educators that Easel Activities was built to support instructional practices rooted in research about learning — but what are those practices and how does Easel support them? Here are a few highlights from our full report, Learning Science and Supporting Instructional Best Practices with Easel by TpT™.
Supporting Differentiation with Easel Activities
Learning science demonstrates that differentiation leads to benefits like enhanced learning opportunities and improved student achievement. With Easel Activities, educators can support more differentiation by easily adapting their materials and instruction to their students’ individual needs. For example, educators can:
- Customize pages within an activity to add or remove content based on different students’ needs.
- Create movable shapes, text, and images to support visual or kinesthetic learners with virtual manipulatives or to provide students with multiple ways to demonstrate their learning.
- Use the text, pen, or highlighting tools to point out key information to students, encourage students to use annotations to show their thinking, and more.
- Assign different versions of one activity to meet students where they are.
Providing Timely Feedback with Easel Activities
Timely feedback is delivered either immediately or close to the moment of learning, and gives explanatory or corrective coaching so a student can learn and grow. With Easel Activities, educators can support timely feedback in a number of ways:
- Use the text and pen tools to insert comments on students’ submitted assignments.
- Preview assignments using the student view to work with students on an activity and provide feedback in real time.
- Return student work with grades and comments immediately or shortly after receiving it.
- Have students resubmit work that has been reviewed so they have multiple opportunities to receive feedback and improve their work.
About Digital Promise and the Research-Based Design Product Certification
Digital Promise is a non-profit organization focused on driving innovation in education to improve opportunities to learn. They vet and certify edtech products in order to provide an unbiased, third-party verification on the quality of the products to meet a learner’s needs.
To receive the Research-Based Design Product Certification, Easel Activities underwent a thorough assessment process to certify that it was designed for learning according to research. For example, to be considered for this certification, edtech product teams must provide evidence that they consulted rigorous research about the science of learning and developed a theoretical framework grounded in research about learning to inform product decisions.
Among the artifacts submitted was our recent report, Learning Science and Supporting Instructional Best Practices with Easel by TpT™. This report outlines the research grounding Easel’s tools and the instructional practices Easel was built to support, such as differentiation and timely feedback. To learn more about the research behind Easel’s tools, check out the full report here.
To support more instructional practices backed by learning science in your classroom, browse Easel Activities on TpT.
Are you a school administrator? Easel by TpT is also available with premium features in a TpT School Access subscription. Learn more and schedule a demo here.