CPALMS (www.cpalms.org) is a unique platform developed by LSI to support K-12 education in Florida and used by millions from all around the globe. More than 260,000 K-12 Florida educators and approximately three million Florida students actively use CPALMS to access educational resources, information to help them teach and learn, and software applications to support them throughout. CPALMS is the State of Florida’s official source for standards information and course descriptions. It provides access to thousands of standards-aligned, high-quality instructional and educational resources designed specifically to support standards-based instruction. Over the years, CPALMS has become a platform of tools and continues to grow the level of support it provides to the entire state and the world. During the year, the CPALMS team worked on multiple projects and grants.

CPALMS Impact
CPALMS now offers more than 12,000 high-quality educational resources developed by FSU faculty and K-12 educators. Our team has created over 1,300 original student tutorials for students to use anytime and from anywhere. These are interactive online lessons on the topics from the curriculum standards the students need to learn in math, science, English Language Arts, and social studies. During the pandemic, LSI made all the CPALMS resources accessible to students, parents, and educators around the globe to support them in teaching and learning from home. More than 20 million students depended on CPALMS during that period. Since CPALMS started offering educational resources, more than 800 million resource views/downloads have been delivered. During the last year, CPALMS had more than 70 million resources delivered to Florida’s educators and students.​​​​​​​

Original Student Tutorials
The CPALMS team created more than 150 new original student tutorials and maintained 1,300 tutorials throughout the year. The development of these tutorials is a collaboration between K-12 educators, subject specialists, instructional designers, graphic designers, narrators, and others who collectively spend 200-400 labor hours to create each tutorial. During the last year, several tutorials crossed a million views.

CPALMS Professional Development
Throughout the year, the CPALMS staff hosted professional development (PD) workshops in Tallahassee and around the state. The PDs covered financial literacy, civics integration, career and technical education, and coding with Scratch. Almost 700 Florida educators participated in over 20 workshops this year.

The most ambitious PDs were held in Tallahassee in June, as nearly 300 Florida teachers came to the capital city for over 35 hours of PD rooted in research-based pedagogy and integration methods. An essential part of these PDs in Tallahassee was offering unique immersive experiences that increased teacher content knowledge while inspiring engaging lesson ideas for teaching units the participants created. Attendees visited the Florida Supreme Court, the historic Capitol building, the Florida House of Representatives, and the Senate. The teachers also took a tour from Cascades Park to Wakulla Springs to learn about water management and civic duty.​​​​​​​

CPALMS Civics Platform and Educational Resources
The CPALMS team is working on multiple projects to develop educational resources for civics, including integrated resources that can be used in math, science, English Language Arts (ELA), computer science/coding, social studies, and fine and performing arts. Over 1,200 instructional resources, such as lesson plans, student tutorials, and videos, are being created and will be distributed on CPALMS for over 260,000 Florida teachers and 2.8M Florida K-12 students.

CPALMS will be debuting a new type of K-2 student resource, Interactive Research Pages, that will allow students to independently research and learn about civics while using ELA skills and concepts. Civics family guides were created to help families better understand the civics initiative and civics topics covered in each grade, along with ideas on how families can continue learning at home.

CPALMS was chosen to be the platform for the new Florida civics portal. Our team created the platform to deliver civics education instructional resources to all K-12 educators across the state. The portal features thousands of educational resources the CPALMS team guided during the development process to support teachers as they implement civics education, provide innovative ways to teach civics, and integrate civics into other content areas. The portal provides students and parents with resources that will enhance home-based support of civics education. While building this vast support system for the entire state, LSI vetted submissions from over 500 K-12 teachers and worked with collaborators from other Florida universities
and organizations.

CPALMS Initiative for Career Technical Education
CPALMS has expanded its support to include Career and Technical Education (CTE). In partnership with and funding support from the Florida Department of Education, the CPALMS team is designing and migrating a complex process and a massive data set to modern, efficient, and usable tools and resources for all educators. By the end of the project, CPALMS will have a CTE application to help the state manage all the programs, courses, and standards data, along with software tools and educational resources for teachers across the state. This project will lay the foundation to build support for students to explore CTE programs, careers, college degrees, and much more. At the same time, it will create a one-stop-shop for CTE teachers across the state to access resources for teaching and learning.

During the past year, CPALMS staff trained 100 educators to create more than 250 educational resources that will be the first of many CTE resources featured on the new CPALMS CTE application. The resources are grounded in research-based integration and engaging pedagogy to support Florida CTE teachers who reach over 460,000 students preparing for future work.

Professional Learning Platform

CPALMS supported the Department of Education’s Civics Excellence Initiative by building an interactive online learning system featuring a 55-hour teacher professional development course. The system was created from the ground up in the CPALMS platform and was launched in just months. It includes the development of advanced and AI tools for grading and detecting plagiarism, as well as a built-in support system. More than 13,000 Florida teachers completed this online course since January, and more than 18,500 are expected to complete the course by the end of September.

"Last summer there was an Integrated Civics and MEA workshop sponsored by CPALMS and I decided to use what I learned and wrote in that workshop as my observation. Our administrator was very excited about what we were doing in the classroom with the MEAs (model eliciting activities). She said it was one of the best lessons she has seen. She was thrilled to see the students talk and discuss how they can use math in a real-life context, which is the goal with what we are teaching our students."

Josue Nunez Manatee School District  

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