Most teachers have heard some version of the question “When am I ever going to use this?” from a student. KET’s free resource Skills on Demand, aimed primarily at students in grades 6-12, is designed to help answer it by combining interactive instructional content with career pathway-informed context.
Skills on Demand is a collection of math and language arts resources perfect for hybrid or virtual learning or for any-time extra practice for students who need targeted review. The more than thirty resources in the collection cover math topics in geometry, averages, fractions and formulas and language arts topics in rhetorical devices, understanding main ideas and evidence, author viewpoint and proofreading for errors. The scaffolded lessons and review Tune-ups can even be easily embedded in Google Classroom, where teachers can see students’ activity and results.
What really sets Skills on Demand apart is that it uses videos and context from the Workplace Essential Skills courses, adding real-world examples and problems throughout each lesson. In some lessons and Tune-ups, workers from a variety of career pathways explain in short videos how they use the relevant skills in their everyday jobs. A realtor explains how she calculates the square footage of a home in order to price it. A chef details how he works with fractions to make recipes larger. EMTs, information technology workers and manufacturing employees stress the importance of using reading strategies to understand key information at work.
The approach is proving popular with teachers and students, with over twenty thousand views since the fall. You can see the resources on PBS LearningMedia at and create free student accounts to launch the interactive lessons and reviews right from the site.