Community reviews for Gooru

Overall it took a little bit of time to create the module in the multitude of ways needed, but in the end my students each were able to master the content at their level and at their own pace (with check-in's and due dates along the way). As a tool to allow personalized learning, free up my time to work with small groups or individual students this tool is great.

I love the filters. One of the filters allows you to be able to access open educational resources (OER). Teachers will then be able to share, use, and reuse knowledge or content. There are resources for teachers to get started. You can also check out Professional Development opportunities. Gooru provides webinars and tips and tricks for blended learning. There are many resources from great sites like BBC or the Metropolitan Museum of Art. However, the first site that usually appears is Wikipedia.

For teachers, Gooru can be used simply as a great search engine for curated learning resources or collections. The filters available to find resources is especially impressive. You can drill down your search by the typical filters (grade level band, content area, standard), but Gooru also lets you search for specific types of resources (websites, videos, quizzes, etc.), it identifies if resources are friendly for mobile devices, it lets you specify access needs (like color dependent, text on image, tactile, auditory, visual, or textual), and if you know a publisher or aggregator (like NSDL), you can enter that as well. For teachers who want to actually build lessons, Gooru is also a good solution. You can pace learning, add your own questions, and track progress. That does require setting up classes and having students logging into the site, but it's fairly intuitive and easy to figure out. Students can get immedate feedback, work at their own pace, and even create their own collections. There two major drawbacks to Gooru: a) video content is almost exclusively from YouTube, which could be a stumbling block for schools or districts who block access to YouTube and b) the websites included aren't always "live" (I came across several that had been taken down or were no longer available). While difficult to control, the websites are displayed as is. Any distracting content or confusing layouts can make it seem very visually cluttered. For those folks who share collections, it is up to them to make sure the content is still available and relevant, and that may be a challenge in terms of keeping resources up-to-date.