Trends | Making Searches Easier

inBloom imageAs educators across the U.S. move toward implementing the Common Core State Standards, the Association of Educational Publishers (AEP) and Creative Commons have been working on a project that will make it easier for teachers to zero in on content that addresses their specific needs. The Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI) has developed a common standard for tagging educational content with rich and useful metadata such as age range of the intended audience, subject area, and the learning objectives—such as the Common Core—the resource addresses.  Delivery platforms like inBloom and the Learning Registry can make use of this new metadata to return more precise search results, allowing teachers and students to find the right resources at the right moment. And, with the recent adoption of the LRMI by Schema.org, search engines such as Microsoft Bing, Google, and Yahoo! will begin to incorporate the metadata into their filtering options. What this means, for instance, is that if a first grade teacher is trying to find a worksheet on subtraction skills for her students, a search that might have yielded thousands if not millions of results could now be narrowed down in a matter of seconds to a handful that meet the teacher’s specific needs. As more and more educational publishers implement LRMI metadata, the project will play a key role in connecting educators and students with the right Common Core content.

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