Retrofitting Existing Lessons with Applicable Standards in the ASN

In my last column, I gave a brief overview of our Achievement Standards Network, or the ASN. The ASN is a vast (and ever-growing) repository of educational and professional standards that are described using rich metadata. The ASN uses concept terms with controlled vocabularies in order to maintain accuracy and consistency, and brings a host of other advantages for researchers and developers. That’s all fine and dandy (and it really is – believe me!) but let’s cut to the chase: How does using the ASN benefit educators and librarians who just really want to locate relevant academic standards quickly and efficiently?

The use of controlled vocabularies in the ASN greatly aids in searches for particular standards, so that teachers can, for example, search for lesson plans and activities that address a specific educational standard by searching by that standard. But many educators also have a stable of tried-and-true lessons that don’t currently include educational standards. Rather than warehouse these lessons, teachers can search the ASN by keyword, and thus locate standards that specifically apply to their existing lesson(s). Even better, standards from a variety of jurisdictions, including both state and State Common Core standards, are returned in the search results. For example, a teacher may have an existing lesson plan on the Pythagorean theorem, but hasn’t aligned the lesson to any standards. Using “Pythagorean theorem” as a search term, the teacher can use the ASN to return a list of state and common core math standards for grades 5-12 that specifically address the Pythagorean theorem. An example of a search is shown below:

The ASN search function is currently a demo version, but give it a whirl. It’s just one feature of many goodies that will be incorporated into the ASN in the coming months. I’ll also be exploring the ASN search feature in greater depth in future columns. And be sure to take a look at our Twitter and Facebook pages, where we highlight lots of K-12 lesson plans, activities, and other resources daily.