Navigating the IRIS Website

Transcript: Navigating the IRIS Website

Welcome to the IRIS Center, a federally funded, national center dedicated to improving the educational outcomes of all children, especially struggling learners and those with disabilities. We provide free online resources for college and university faculty, professional development providers, and practicing educators or independent learners. These resources translate research into easy-to-understand information that is user-friendly and engaging.

On our home page, you will notice a carousel that showcases new or updated resources and upcoming events. To access any of these resources, simply click on the image. Beneath the carousel is a light purple navigation bar displaying links to IRIS Stories, Featured Resources, and News & Events. If you select any of these links, they will jump to that specific section. We will discuss these in more detail in just a moment. As I scroll down our home page, you can see information about our center and links to the most popular areas of the site: our IRIS Resource Locator and the Professional Development section. Below that are IRIS Stories—brief articles that share the many ways in which professionals use IRIS resources to increase their knowledge and skills in order to improve student outcomes. Further down are links to some of our Featured Resources, such as newly posted products. By scrolling further, you can see recent announcements and find out more about upcoming events. Finally, we encourage you to connect with us through your favorite social media as well as our newsletter.

Let’s go to the top of our home page and take a little tour. As we move around, keep in mind that clicking on this IRIS logo will bring you back to the home page. Moving to the right, you’ll notice tabs to the four main areas of the IRIS website as well as a Google translation tool, which allows you to translate website content into approximately 100 different languages. Now, let’s move back to the tabs and explore the Resources section. In this section, you’ll find the IRIS Resource Locator that I mentioned earlier, which is the search engine that helps you find the resources you need. You’ll also find tools to help you identify evidence-based practices, IRIS resources about high-leverage practices, listings of films and books that feature characters with disabilities, and a glossary of education and disability-related terms.

On the left side of the page is a navigation bar that contains the same links as the top Resources tab. Using this additional navigation option, I am going to select the For PD Providers tab, which displays the resources we have that support the work of state-, district-, and school-level professional development providers. You can access these resources by using either the colored squares in the center of the page or the colored tabs in the left-hand navigation bar. Here you will find information on using IRIS resources in professional development activities and trainings, as well as Learning Pathways that have been designed to help states and districts develop a structured plan for professional development and personalized learning activities. Within the For PD Providers tab, you can also access module and case study wraparound resources, a PD Facilitation Toolkit, information about our free PD Certificates for Educators, and more.

Moving down the left-hand navigation bar, we have additional products to support the work of college and university faculty members. Here you can find tips for using IRIS resources in college courses. You can also access resources like coursework planning forms; wraparound resources that highlight supplementary resources for modules and case studies, which allow you to go broader or deeper on the topic; answer keys for IRIS Modules, Case Studies, and Activities; and more. 

There are more videos like this one to help you navigate the different areas of our website, information on new resources as well as those that will be posted soon, and archived resources (those that are dated but still might contain relevant and useful information).

The next area of our site is the PD Options section. We currently have two professional development options. In the first, learners can earn a certificate verifying completion of one of our online modules. These certificates are appropriate for professional development requirements in circumstances where clock hours are accepted. This is one of the few places on the IRIS site where you will be required to set up an account with a username and password.

Our second PD option, the IRIS+ School & District Platform, allows groups of educators to earn certificates of completion while providing school leaders with an Administrative Dashboard. The dashboard has options for monitoring educator progress, sorting and viewing results, sending reminder emails, and exporting the data for accountability purposes.

Returning to the tabs in the top right, the next section of our site is the Articles and Reports section. Within the Articles tab, you can find titles and annotations for over 50 peer-reviewed articles in which IRIS is mentioned. There are also conference proceedings, articles in magazines and newsletters, and more. Additionally, this section contains internal and external IRIS reports and access to all IRIS Stories and archived News and Events postings from the home page.

Finally, the Help tab takes you to the Help & Support section, which contains information on contacting us if you need technical support for both the open access website and for the PD options. We also provide information on the many accessibility features throughout the site.

Under the Help tab, you can also access our website navigation videos, which explain how to use our IRIS Resource Locator and demonstrate how to navigate an IRIS Module, earn a PD Certificate, and use our HLP alignment tool. We encourage you to watch those videos and then spend some time exploring our site and the many resources we have to offer.

At this point, I’ll click on the IRIS icon to return to the home page. This ends our website navigation tour. Thank you for watching this video. We hope you find the IRIS Center helpful in your current and future work.