Actively Learn, part of McGraw Hill, is a digital learning platform that features a huge catalogue of reading materials. This is all designed specifically for education with both teachers and students in mind.
The company says that through its award-winning offerings it is able to offer a “richer, more meaningful educational experience” for students across a range of subjects.
Founded by Dr. Deep Sran and Jay Goyal in 2012, specifically from doctoral work in educational psychology, it features the creation of an electronic reading environment that they say allows students to construct knowledge that would be impossible with traditional texts.
This guide aims to lay out all you need to know about Actively Learn so you can decide if it could work for your class.
What is Actively Learn?
Actively Learn is an online reading and comprehension system designed specifically for use in education with teacher- and student-specific tools.
The platform works to offer students a vast array of reading options along with customization tools. Everything is standards-aligned, and there is the option to collaborate, too — ideal both for students and teachers.
While this is primarily a text-based site, it does also offer some videos. All that media covers several subject areas, including ELA, science, and social studies.
Thanks to the ability to view student progress, and offer feedback, this is far more than just a digital library.
How does Actively Learn work?
Actively Learn is primarily a huge catalogue of reading and video materials. Once teachers grant access, students can begin reading and interacting right away.
Usefully, this platform integrates with both Google Classroom and Canvas, so sharing specific reading tasks is easy for most schools.
Teachers and students are able to find reading specific to their needs with helpful filters. You can adjust by age, Lexile level, subject, genres, and more.
Students are also able to engage with questions that go with the text, which can mean Common Core-aligned assessments baked right in for teacher ease.
Since teachers are able to monitor student digital note taking, live, this can be a great way to track progress both in the class and beyond.
What are the best Actively Learn features?
Actively Learn offers a huge library of materials with well over 10,000 ebooks at time of publishing. But should teachers want to use this platform for a specific text that isn’t there, the option to upload is also available.
Thanks to the interactive nature of the platform, it allows students to make notes with annotations and use that to interact on a particular text with other students as well as the teacher.
Useful features such as language translation as well as text-to-speech help to make this very widely accessible for a range of students.
Polls embedded in the platform are also helpful as these can be a great way to get a read of the class opinions and spark discussion points for the group.
While student progress can be viewed and monitored by teachers, it is also available to the students themselves. They are able to see their reading proficiency and vocabulary reports to better assess how they’re progressing.
How much does Actively Learn cost?
Actively Learn offers both a free version as well as more comprehensively tooled paid version.
The Free version gets you access to hundreds of assignments with pre-built instruction, student reading aids including built-in dictionary, translation, and text to speech, real-time written feedback, automatic grade book, and rental of more than 10,000 ebooks.
The paid plan, Prime, is charged on a bespoke basis and gives you the above plus thousands of additional ELA articles, short stories, poetry, drama, explainers, skill practice, speeches, biographies, personal narratives, essays, and videos with expertly crafted, pre-built instruction. Plus, you get state-specific standards alignments, customization of any assignment and ability to bring in your own, pre-built Extra Help notes, summaries, and scaffolds, automated, personalized feedback on student writing. It also offers real-time data, student and educator collaboration, LMS integrations, priority customer support, and unlimited ebook add-ons available for purchase.
Actively Learn best tips and tricks
Use a poll
Place poll points in reading to have the class comment and then use that to expand in discussions during class.
Monitor live
Have students work on reading and answering the questions during class so you can monitor and intervene where needed, live.
Use you own
Upload your own media, including links, to have students read and comment as part of further educational expansion.