Yuba City High School

“The animations are really helpful in making difficult concepts accessible to students. I just used the glucoregulation animation, and I think students understood blood sugar regulation better, and in less time, than in any previous year."

Cynthia Sargent is the Science Department Content Leader at Yuba City High School in California. Since the school purchased Boardworks resources for High School Biology, Chemistry, Physics and Earth Science and AP Biology, Chemistry, Physics and Environmental Science at the start of 2011, Cynthia has been extremely impressed with the impact that the resources have had on teaching and learning in her classroom.

Firstly, Cynthia can be confident that the resources align well with the California state standards. “For almost every topic I’ve taught so far this year, I’ve found a Boardworks presentation that helps me teach it,” she told us.

Boardworks really helps Cynthia with her lesson preparation. “Boardworks has definitely helped me save time!” she says. “I used to spend tons of time trying to jazz up my presentations with pictures, find links to online animations etc, to make my notes and presentations to students more engaging and interesting. Boardworks does this in a way I could never do on my own!” She also loves the interactive menu system, which makes it easy to find and select material she wants to teach with. “It’s very intuitive and easy to use. I use it to explore the options of presentations available when I’m doing my longer term planning.”

Cynthia finds the format of her Boardworks resources extremely easy to use because PowerPoint is a program that she’s already very familiar with. She also loves the versatility that the format offers. “I love the option of being able to edit the presentations! I often insert one or more of my own slides into a presentation, or take one or a few slides from a Boardworks presentation and insert into one of my own.”

Cynthia finds that the interactive Flash activities in her Boardworks resources really engage the class and make teaching easier. “The animations are really helpful in making difficult concepts accessible to students. I just used the glucoregulation animation, and I think students understood blood sugar regulation better, and in less time, than in any previous year. No matter what pictures I get from online and/or draw on the board, there is no substitution for an animated representation. I like the option in the animations to rewind one step and replay, and just the general format that they are progressive. A little bit is shown at a time and leads to natural points for teacher input and class discussion.”

She also finds that the games and quizzes in the resources help to maintain student engagement. “The quizzes are great for getting students to take some responsibility for their learning. They start to anticipate that they’re going to be asked to do something with the information that has just been presented.”