Students may struggle to find credible sources of information, and they may not learn deeply about a topic through text alone. A Resource Bank is an easy way to curate and share a variety of sources, including webpages, videos, and other sources of credible and appropriately-leveled information to increase student engagement and deeper learning and to support the development of research skills.

Resource banks can be used to provide multiple media and multiple sources of information as well as multiple perspectives on a topic to allow students to engage with information that they can best comprehend and that they find most relevant and interesting. Resource banks can also be a great tool for research projects in which the teacher carefully curates relevant and varied sources at accessible difficulty levels and then the students can select from those. Padlet is a great application to curate a resource bank for students; however, this can also be done simply with Google Docs, Google Slides, Jamboard, and many other free resources. 

When asked to look up information on a topic, students may be overwhelmed by the number of resources there are to choose from. In addition, students may not know exactly how to identify credible sources of information. To help students narrow down resources they can refer to as they learn a topic, you can create a Resource Bank using apps like Padlet, Jamboard, or Google Docs. Teacher-curated resources that are shared in a Resource Bank can also be a great way to support students to learn to synthesize information from multiple and multimedia sources for research projects and other learning goals. Students can select resources they find relevant and engaging and learn about the topics they are exploring  without getting lost in a search for information. By having students use a resource bank you have created, you can ensure that the information is accurate and relevant. Of course, helping students develop the skill to identify reliable and accurate sources is also important and can be taught and scaffolded in additional lessons by having students analyze and evaluate selected resources and share their thoughts using the comment or other similar feature on the resource bank.

Another type of Resource Bank is called a “HyperDoc”. This is typically a Google Doc, in which all of the resources needed for a particular lesson or unit are linked with an explanation of the expectations for each part of the assignment. These could be used with an embedded checklist to help support students’ self-regulation and self-assessment and to help students ensure that they are not missing parts of a multi-step assignment or unit while also integrating multimedia sources into instruction.