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SuccessMaker is an excellent program that provides help and instruction in English, language arts, math, science, and social studies. According to the Pearson website, over 16,000 schools nationally use the 3,300 hours of supplemental instruction available. It is also used as part of SCORE! Educational Centers' after-school tutorial program. Each seperate program allows online interactivity to sync progress at home and school, as well.

Scratch is a Web 2.0 programming environment for beginners, where kids can use a simple programming syntax to create their own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art, and share their creations on the web. Students use built-in sprites or they can draw their own. Once the student finishes the game or animation, they can publish it online.

SuperKids is a great educational software review site. The site provides rating scales for educational value, kid appeal, age ranges, and ease of use. They also delve into system requirements, price comparisons, and product support. This particular review is on a program called Words Rock! This is a strong drill and test vocabulary/spelling/grammar program, hidden in a search game. The educational component would be attractive to parents and teachers, as well as to students looking to challenge themselves.

Visit this site for lots of ideas about how to use these programs with your students. Inspiration is a program that makes it possible for students to plan their pre-writing as well as monitor their progress in Writer's Workshop. This is a great site for creating flow charts, as well.

brainstorm, visualization, graphic organizer(s), multiple intelligences, organize, engage students, software, program(s), social studies, science, language arts, visual learning, visual software, visual writing

Students from New York City Public Schools, DC Public Schools, and many other urban areas throughout the country have created multiplication songs that go with some of the newest hip hop songs. Students are encouraged to create their own lyrics, record songs, and create dances. Originally created by an Ohio teacher, Spark the Mind has been featured on Good Morning America, CBS News, and other reputable programs. Smart Shorties is a proven program changing low math test scores and improving student achievement.

downloadable programs for graphing calculators.

This is an excellent website that goes along with the Rebecca Sitton Spelling Program. Users can click on the different grade levels to find the words and corresponding activities for a particular unit. The site would make it easier for parents to stay involved in weekly spelling lists.

For those Early Childhood and/or preschool teachers, Baby Smash is a free "keyboard banger" game for very young kids (ages 1-3 years). It disables all system keys such as ctrl-esc, alt-tab and the Windows key, so that the kids do not exit the program accidentally or harm the computer. When the child hits the keys, colored shapes and letters will appear on the screen. The names of the shapes and colors will be read out loud, as well as the names of the letters. Babysmash for Windows (created by Scott Hanselman) is a copy of the Alpha Baby software for Macintosh. It requires the .NET framework version 3.5 to be installed.

Cherokee County, GA's program for getting technology tools to teachers who are motivated to use them. I listened to a podcast of their presentation at GAETC 2007. Sounds like a great way to use limited money to put technology into classrooms where it will be used. Teachers have to commit a lot of time to training, implementing lessons, and sharing what they did.

TestWiz and other programs like it, such as Elements, are essential test procesing and analysis tools for data administrators, local school technology coordinators, administrators, and teachers. These systems provide data in a hundred or more demographic fields so as to hone in on sub-groups that need the most help. Due to the results-based high-stakes testing era we are now in, tools such as TestWiz are now essential to ensure schools make AYP at the end of each academic year.

This article, retrieved from "Tools for TEKS- Integrating Technology in the Classroom" site, goes into why teachers should harness many of the new powers available to them now that read/write web (Web 2.0) programs are so readily available. Now that students have cell phones and are constantly posting to blogs, wikis, and YouTube, the author argues that we as teachers should put these things to good use in the classroom. Cell phones, as well as other digital audio and visual recording devices, can be used to gather and later present information for class projects.

According to the website, Georgia Public Broadcasting "creates, produces, and delivers high quality educational resources that enrich, inform, and support the Georgia learning community." GPB provides multimedia educational programing with supplementary materials and training on classroom technology integration. The statewide network empowers teachers across the state to collaborate by connecting them with other teachers in and out of their fields.

This site provides teachers many teaching points on Georgia's five main habitats as well as the plants and animals that live within each one. While the Habitats Research page is a preporatory page for the in-school "field trips" the company provides, it is still an excellent resource for science instruction (regardless of whether you order the program or not).

Michelle Moore uses technology to teach language art to elementary students. Video describes innovative methods of using the Internet as well as Microsoft Office programs to increase literacy skills.

High school promotes literacy and increases student motivation to read through a "reading across the curriculum" program.

New Zealand's Manukau Family Literacy Program shows that parents and children can help educate each other.

This article points to the importance of proper teacher training and use of technology to garner student academic achievement. Students need to have the technology tools accessible to them to be sucessful. Test data needs to be collected (from programs like TestWiz) in order to identify learning strengths and weaknesses. Finally, the author states that it takes a "community of educators and a host of technology tools" to ensure students meet No Child Left Behind (NCLB) standards.

TeacherLine Southeast provides online professional development courses for PreK-12 teachers in South Carolina, North Carolina, and Georgia. These PBS TeacherLine courses are standards-based and proven effective. Georgia PLU credits for recertification are available through their programs. As a result of these courses, teachers are better prepared to help students meet NCLB requirements.

A lesson integrating language arts and technology in the classroom. Older students are split up into groups and they are to create photo stories and newsletters for a younger classroom. This lessons says kindergarten, but depending on your grade level you could use a first or second grade class too. The sort of act as reporters and pick out photos and classroom stories to put into a layout program for that class.

integrating english, math, science, and technology into a lesson where students ranging from ages 5-10 could explore one letter of the alphabet through books the computer and make an entire page of objects and things pertaining to that letter. This would work on research skills and also could use programs like kid pix for pictures.