New to Boardworks or trying to get the most out of it for your school’s teachers? Our team works tirelessly to take the burden off of teachers, providing a massive, ready-to-use library of interactive instructional presentations in an easy-to-use interface. With more than 30,000 slides of K-12 Math, Science, ELA, and History content, designed by teachers for teachers, Boardworks is a powerful curriculum supplement that helps educators throughout the district build lesson plans faster and supports the individual needs of their students. 

Whether you’re evaluating if Boardworks is the right fit for your school district or are just getting started and want to get the most out of the platform, the below tips will help you get the most from the platform. 

Quickly Add New Teacher Accounts

Boardworks makes it easy to quickly add new accounts, individually or in bulk, streamlining the process of providing turnkey access to your teachers. 

Watch the full video illustrating how to add new accounts and get everyone in your district connected and engaged with the full video here

 

Easily Find the Right Content for Lessons

One of the most important things the Boardworks team focuses on is ensuring it is as easy and accessible as possible for teachers. The goal is to streamline lesson plan development, not add another bulky, time-consuming technology platform to their plates. 

That’s why the Boardworks library is organized alphabetically by subject and mapped to state standards, providing tools to quickly filter to teacher and student needs. Teachers have access to the entire Boardworks library, allowing them to draw on materials from other grade levels and subjects to support individual students, and giving them the resources needed to fill out lessons at all levels. 

The Boardworks library is available from all account levels. 

Build Personalized Libraries of Frequently Used Presentations

The library is a great starting point, providing a robust collection of 30,000+ slides for teachers to use in their lessons. To make it as flexible as possible, each presentation can be edited and customized to match the needs of those classes. 

For any presentation, simply click the “Save” icon and choose a library and name for the presentation to find it easily in the future. 

Once a copy of a presentation is saved to your library, it can be quickly edited to hide slides, rearrange their order, or add new materials.

Customize Slides In Your Library

Once a personal library is built and contains specific presentations, teachers can customize them using a suite of different tools. For example, teachers can add links to assessment tools in custom slides in a presentation, seamlessly integrating Boardworks with existing tools:

Videos can also be embedded. Boardworks offers the ability to embed YouTube videos into a custom slide using the “Insert/Embed Media” icon on the menu bar.

Add YouTube videos to synchronous lessons or student sessions and reduce the time it takes to transition between materials. 

And custom notes can be added to any Boardworks presentation, allowing teachers to record and add audio clips to their slides for students who struggle with reading or who learn better through listening. 

To do so, click the audio recorder button (microphone icon) to record audio on your slides:

Teachers can add separate audio to existing slides by clicking the “Custom Notes” option below a slide on the Edit screen. They can then record audio or use the “Insert/Edit Media” button to add a custom clip. 

Teachers can even add specific notes for individual students when they access and review Boardworks materials. 

Another valuable feature for teachers who are customizing their content is the ability to embed cross-curricular slides, pulling specific slides from presentations across subject-matter and grade levels to support individual lessons. 

When editing your presentation, click “Add Slide” and choose “Select a slide from Boardworks presentation.”

You can choose any presentation in the Boardworks library to extract one or more slides. 

 

Providing Synchronous vs. Asynchronous Materials 

Boardworks is designed to provide a flexible solution for delivering lesson materials, whether at an individual level with students who need additional support or for the entire class. 

For students who need more individualized instruction, Boardworks allows teachers to create student sessions that can be accessed independently, both in and out of school. Teachers tell us they love student sessions for self-guided exploration for review, study plans, and making up missed classes. 

These student sessions can be accessed with a link created in Boardworks, meaning no login is required for the student, and they can be accessed for up to 30 days after creating the link. Students can access and control the pacing of their Boardworks materials individually this way. These session codes can be embedded directly into your LMS for quick access. 

Live lessons can also be created and broadcast to student devices in the classroom. Using the live lesson code, teachers can create a presentation and send the code to students to access and follow along on their devices. 

Teachers then control the slides everyone sees, but students can work with the interactive components on their own devices, getting the best of both worlds in an individually interactive, teacher-led presentation. 

To make it easy for teachers and students alike, Live Lesson codes can also be embedded directly into Google Classroom or any LMS. 

 

Getting the Most from Boardworks

Boardworks is designed to support teachers where they need it most. Whether it’s a new teacher struggling to build out lesson plans from scratch, special education teachers working with a large population of students across grade levels, or long-time teachers who want to provide a more robust, individualized lesson plan to their classes, Boardworks can help. 

Learn more about how Boardworks supports educators across K-12 and learn if the platform is the right fit for your district here, or schedule a demo to see more of Boardworks in action.