Categories
Lesson planning
26 May 2023Rethink how you can use Oak this year
Ffion Rees Hughes
Head of School Support
You may have directed your pupils to lessons in our online classroom during the pandemic or during periods of disruption since, but that’s not all there is to Oak.
Did you know that you can download editable versions of our slide decks and worksheets?
40% of teachers who use our teaching resources to kick-start their lesson planning save on average four hours per week1. That’s all your PPA time and more! It’s time to rethink how you can use Oak this academic year.
(bright upbeat music)
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- [Announcer] We're not just a bank of online lessons to use during periods of disruption. We're here to make your everyday lesson and curriculum planning easier. It's time to rethink how you can use Oak. Did you know we have thousands of slide decks, worksheets, and quizzes you can download for free? Rather than creating your resources from scratch, they give you a head start on planning, and a foundation to build your own lessons. We know you'll need to adapt them for your pupils, so grab a handful of slides, or the whole deck, they're totally editable. Add or remove scaffolding. Introduce local context. They're yours to use in whatever way you want. And our videos, they aren't designed just for cover on independent learning, they're your gateway into the classrooms of hundreds of experienced teachers. Watch others teach topics you're not so familiar with to help with your own planning. All of these resources are available for you to use now. But have you heard? From autumn, and throughout the next few years, we're adding brand new teaching resources. We're designing them with our new curriculum partners, a diverse sets of schools, universities, subject associations, and more. Each one will be made with brilliant teachers from across the country who understand what you need to plan great lessons. And just like the thousands of teaching resources we already have, our new resources will be adaptable, totally optional, and free. So get planning with Oak now.
Ready to get started? Search by topic, subject or key stage for free, sequenced teaching resources.
Still not sure how we could help you? Hear from teachers themselves about their hacks for speeding up and improving their lesson planning using Oak.
Use Oak as a starting point
We can never know or understand the needs of your pupils, your individual delivery nor the local context of your school. Only you have this expertise. So we’ve made our resources editable and adaptable. 78% of teachers who use Oak adapt our slides2.
Alisha and Helen are both teachers who use Oak as a starting point for their lesson. They find that the adaptability of our teaching resources means they can easily pick and choose what they need and make changes to suit their pupils.
- For me, it's about having a bank of high quality resources available to me that reduces my planning time and gives me a really strong starting point for the planning of any lesson, so I can either teach it directly or I can adapt them to our school module.
“Sometimes I might change the task, or I might add something to the independent task or make the independent task longer. You have the freedom to do so much with it.”
Alisha
secondary teacher
Learn more about how you can adapt our resources to suit the different needs of your pupils and our thinking on why Oak is not a finished curriculum, nor a complete set of resources.
Use Oak to gain subject knowledge
Plenty of teachers delivering a new subject or topic are using our slide decks and videos to quickly get up to speed. Whenever you need to, you can watch experienced teachers teach topics you’re new to or haven’t taught in some time.
Helen, a teacher and mentor for trainees, uses the videos herself and recommends them to her mentees as a reliable source of modelled examples of explanations.
- Sometimes I'll watch the videos to help me model an explanation if I want some clarity on how I'm gonna explain something in a better way to students. I've even used them to direct trainee staff to look at videos when they're planning their lessons in terms of learning the content and how they're going to model their explanation and lessons.
Use Oak to plan for lesson cover
Finding and setting last-minute cover for absent staff remains a consistent challenge for schools. Teachers use our resources to manage lesson cover and keep their pupils’ learning on track, without adding to their workload. You can select single lessons for one-off cover or full units for long-term cover.
“Nothing ever fits perfectly what you want. So we pick and choose what we want, take what's relevant and then work from there.”
Kathryn Nicol
teacher
New teaching resources this year
Have you heard? We're adding even more teaching resources to help you in the classroom. Explore our new curriculum plans using the links below or search by topic, keyword or key stage to find and download teaching resources.
- Primary English teaching resources and secondary English teaching resources
- Primary history teaching resources and secondary history teaching resources
- Primary maths teaching resources and secondary maths teaching resources
- Primary science teaching resources and secondary science teaching resources
- Primary geography teaching resources
- Secondary music teaching resources
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