Digital Education Search Engine Gooru Launched

Gooru, a search engine dedicated to revolutionize digitally enhanced education, has officially launched after more than two years in development, one of the latest and most comprehensive products designed to help K-14 teachers better navigate the plethora of digitally enhanced education curriculum resources being offered.

“This is an innovative and valuable tool for teachers,” said Angela Phillips Diaz, CCST Washington Liaison for Education, Science, and Technology. “The collaborative nature of Gooru helps to ensure that the resources it includes are vetted by teachers and other education professionals.”

Gooru includes libraries of digital content developed by a variety of school district and other content partners, including CCST’s California Teacher Advisory Council (Cal TAC). Teachers from California schools and the rest of the country worked to produce, sort, and review digital resources, ensuring that all collections of web resources are age-appropriate and aligned to standards.

The Cal TAC library includes classroom resources created and used by Cal TAC teachers Art Lopez and Jeff Foote in K-College computer science and middle school science and engineering.

“Cal TAC has been involved with the creation of Gooru from an early stage, and is pleased to engage in the building of a partner library,” said Diaz. “The core mission at Gooru aligns well with Cal TAC’s work to provide a solid qualitative approach to finding and using digital resources in the classroom.”

Cal TAC recently completed a resource guide to digitally enhanced education, the culmination of more than two years of investigating the efficacy of digital learning and teaching and assessing what works well. It also developed a one-page “QUICK Assessment” checklist, a tool designed for use by classroom teachers wishing to determine the quality and appropriate use of digital resources.

“Development of the Resource Guide has led to numerous ongoing collaborations between Cal TAC and others including the National Academies of Science, the Gates-funded educational technology clearinghouse Graphite, the California State University system, the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning at WestEd, as well as Gooru,” said Diaz. “Gooru founder Prasad Ram, a CCST Council member and Chair of the CCST Education Committee, values the wisdom of practice that Cal TAC teachers bring to others locally, regionally, and nationally through the development, dissemination, and use of these products.”