Pennsylvania Coaches

Are textbook publishers scared yet? Wolfram Education Portal goes live:

Microsoft offers free tools to help engage students in a variety of subject areas-from movie-making to collaboration to science and beyond. Teachers can download these tools for free, the majority of which require no special training.

Fabulous library of instructional videos on Google Apps

We have a YouTube channel! See how to embed videos, add widgets, copy pages, and more.

" Tiers of Technology Integration into the Classroom Indicators - with Examples"

"MixedInk's collaborative writing platform allows groups of any size to weave their best ideas and language into a single text. "

"The "Moodle 2 Activity Tool Guide for Instructors" tackles the Moodle 2.0 specific activities and highlights them using the same green, yellow, red approach to show how useful they are across various criteria (co-creation, information transfer, blooms, etc.)."

As part of Search Education, Google has shared a bunch of lesson plans that are organized by degree of difficulty. So, if you consider yourself and / or your students Google experts, you should try out the more advanced plans. If you don't know what 'boolean' means, then you probably should start with the more basic stuff. The following are just some of the many lesson plans brought to you by Google.

A nice lightweight version of a visual thesaurus. Clears out all of the clutter for your interactive whiteboard

An online collaboration tool that requires only the admin to register and has a calendar, file storage and collaboration space, conferencing, chatting, and much more

A great periodic table of the elements

"Since 2001, the Northern Nevada Writing Project has proudly sponsored this free-to-use website, which aims to "fix" those teachers who don't believe that the teaching of writing can be both fun and rewarding. If you explore our website's pages, you will find prompts, lessons, and resources that were created and shared--and then posted here--during workshops and in-service classes sponsored by the NNWP. The Nevada teachers who participate in these professional development opportunities discover ways to be passionate about teaching writing, and here we share the very best, hoping that our passion is contagious to the teachers across the globe who have discovered what we've proudly posted here."

ABCya!!! is a leader in free & exciting computer activities for elementary students to learn on the web. All educational computer games and activities were created or approved by certified teachers! Activities are modeled from primary grade lessons and enhanced to provide an interactive way to learn. The activities incorporate content areas such as math and reading while introducing basic computer skills. Many of the kindergarten and first grade games are equipped with sound to enhance understanding. You can also find great elementary holiday activities here! Holiday activities available in grade level sections!

"Showing videos and the occasional Hollywood film in the classroom is an innovative way to demonstrate concepts and expose common misconceptions while providing a thought provoking change of pace for students. These worksheets are NOT meant to supplement good interactive, thought provoking activities in the classroom, rather they are meant to provide an OCCASSIONAL change of pace in the classroom. It is recommend to show the film, then stop the footage, do some teaching, and start it up again."

Maybe information on these worksheets could be used to create backchannel discussions during viewing, using tools like edmodo or Moodle forums...

This site provides thousands (currently 11,000) of videos to be used for learning. The videos are organized in categories.

"The American Museum of Natural History gives you the whole enchilada in six minutes. The film, moving from Planet Earth to the Big Bang, is part of an exhibition, Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe." Scientific, mystical, awe-inspiring.

Easily and quickly create a backchannel room. You can set it to be deleted at a certain time, too. Pull in twitter hashtagged tweets, too.

Here are ten items I thought you should know about SAS and the Institute.