With Crio™, teachers become rock-star lesson builders

"Crio opens up hundreds of resources to educators, and challenges them to feed their students' curiosity by creating amazing lessons," said Scott McQuiggan, Director of Curriculum Pathways at SAS. "We're eager to see our large community of educators expand their reach beyond the classroom, department and district. Their best ideas can now reach students around the world."

Curriculum Pathways developers have spent years creating engaging elements based on proven pedagogy. No programming or development experience is required to use Crio, as its drag-and-drop editor makes it easy to transform static, paper-based lesson plans into interactive, online resources. Features include:

• A library of elements including audio, text, images, video and several question types.
• Customizable feedback with options for explanations, suggestions and encouragement to promote deeper engagement beyond simple right or wrong responses.
• A variety of question types, not simply multiple choice.
• Robust lesson guide area provides notes, strategies and additional resources for the creator, or other educators using the lesson.
• A portfolio for students to save, manage and send their work.
• Options for embedding and sharing lessons.
• Integration in learning management systems including a variety of single sign on options.
• Ability to share lessons publicly with millions of Curriculum Pathways users around the world.
• Outlets for providing suggestions to Curriculum Pathways regarding new features for future releases.

Faced with reduced budgets, districts across the country are allocating funds historically reserved for textbooks to other priorities. With fewer books, maintaining high-quality curricular content becomes a top priority. Provided at no cost, Crio is easily integrated into digital learning plans and can help districts as they transition away from textbooks and go beyond digital documents.

"In an era of open educational resources, Crio will create a network of great teachers who empower students through the design of interactive learning," said Marlo Gaddis, Interim Chief Technology Officer for Wake County (NC) Public School System. "Crio will allow our teachers to create, curate and reimagine learning for their students. We are excited to leverage Curriculum Pathways and Crio to support student learning in our schools."

Curriculum Pathways is provided by analytics company SAS, and is used by nearly 4 million teachers and students. Learn more about Crio and Curriculum Pathways.

Imagine the possibilities with Crio

Consider a first-grade teacher with a small group of young readers who are struggling with comprehension questions. The teacher knows her students well, and the things that ignite their curiosity. She scours the library and online resources for content to capture their interest and foster engaged, focused learning, but comes up empty.

With Crio, the teacher constructs passages about the school building, the playground, the local park, and the high school basketball team. She creates a video of herself reading text aloud to model fluent reading. The software's powerful answer-checking capabilities allow the teacher to craft customized feedback to any question type. Students respond to a series of multiple choice questions, with audio files to listen to for each answer. With customized videos for correct and incorrect responses, the teacher validates or directs students to information that helps them achieve new levels of mastery.

The teacher then assigns the new Crio lesson through the school's learning management system (e.g., Google Classroom), enabling students to access the materials from anywhere, anytime.

Catch Crio and Curriculum Pathways at ISTE 2018

Crio is on display at Booth 874 at the International Society for Technology in Education Conference (ISTE 2018), along with CodeSnaps and other Curriculum Pathways resources.

CodeSnaps is a no-cost app that teaches coding basics by enticing students to actively work together, hands-on, to control Sphero, an app-enabled robotic ball that students command using code and an iPad^®. CodeSnaps can be used in any learning environment, including traditional and blended classrooms, 1-to-1 or at home. The collaborative coding activity requires only one Sphero robot and one tablet.

Students prepare programs together using printed paper blocks. The blocks represent pieces of code, which students "snap" together in a certain order to create programs to control the Sphero. They then scan the assembled blocks using the app and run the program, which the Sphero executes.

CodeSnaps is available for iPad through the App Store^®. Interested users can also download the app from the CodeSnaps website, where they can view tutorials, print code blocks and find ready-to-go lesson plans.

Crio and CodeSnaps are two of the more than 1,700 free tools, resources and apps from Curriculum Pathways covering English language arts, mathematics, sci­ence, social studies and Spanish. Used by nearly 4 million teachers and students in traditional, virtual and home schools, Curriculum Pathways increases student learning and teacher effectiveness by targeting higher-order thinking skills. Mapping resources to both individual state and Common Core standards helps educators across the country and around the world for free.

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