Britannica Learning Strategies Builds Student Literacy Skills

CHICAGO, June 20, 2019 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Enhancement to LaunchPacks platform makes it easier for teachers to help students:

•     Develop inquiry, close reading and summarization skills
•     Meet Common Core mandates

Britannica® Digital Learning today announced Learning Strategies, a host of new tools that give teachers more ways to guide students in the acquisition of key skills for understanding and working with nonfiction material.

The new tools are part of LaunchPacks™, Britannica's popular K-12 classroom solutions for science and social studies.

Learning Strategies addresses a key aspect of today's U.S. educational mandates. The Common Core State Standards require students to have a broad, deep experience with literary nonfiction and informational text in a variety of subjects.

Learning Strategies helps students with several important competencies in working with expository texts, such as:

•     identifying the main idea;
•     summarizing the text;
•     identifying the main idea and summarizing the text together, as part of the same exercise;
•     journaling, using an assigned article or primary source as inspiration for the student's own reflections on a topic. Journaling is understood to have a range of benefits: stimulating curiosity, honing verbal skills, and helping students build expressive confidence to write freely, without pressure.

Designed for classroom use and to make lesson planning more efficient for teachers, LaunchPacks are a rich trove of curriculum-aligned (NGSS and NCSS) content. The science and social studies versions include approximately 4,000 current, trustworthy and highly relevant content sets, from magnets to medical imaging, American folk heroes to World War II and many more, offering a full range of articles, images, videos and primary sources presented in an engaging interface. Teachers will spend less time searching for relevant resources by having a rich library of curated, up-to-date, curriculum-mapped content in multiple formats to support differentiated learning in one place.

Learning Strategies allows teachers to assign, monitor and assess activities across topics seamlessly and to customize assignments with features such as excerpting or "chunking" text when it's appropriate for some students to be assigned only portions of a text.

LaunchPacks are aligned with the curriculums of all fifty states. The online solutions have drawn customer praise for their relevance and trustworthiness and won numerous adoptions around the country. Earlier this spring the integration of Kahoot! quizzes was launched to drive student collaboration and engagement. The platform continues to rapidly evolve to meet the growing needs of students, teachers and the curriculum standards. The new Learning Strategies tools will enhance the user experience even more by putting all of LaunchPacks' assets at the service of today's literacy goals.

"Today's literacy standards are higher, and students have to understand and work with textual material in many different ways across the curriculum," said Karthik Krishnan, global CEO of the Britannica Group. "These new tools in LaunchPacks will help teachers teach these vital literacy skills in a personalized way using social studies, science and history content. Britannica is committed to developing the best possible solutions to achieve the trifecta: curriculum standards, student learning and engagement, and teacher efficiency."

About Britannica Digital Learning
Our mission is simple: to inspire curiosity and the joy of learning. Future dreamers, leaders, and builders depend on educators every day to help them learn to examine their world more deeply. We partner with educators, school districts, ministries and media companies all around the world. Trusted in over 83 countries, translated into over 15 languages and used by more than 150 million students, we provide educators and learners with effective, enriching, and innovative tools, resources, and ideas to meet evolving teaching and learning needs. Britannica Digital Learning is a division of the Britannica Group, which is headquartered in Chicago. Information about North American products and services is at https://britannicalearn.com/.

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SOURCE Britannica Group