Grades K-12
Classroom Connection: Gives students finance and real world lessons for economics. This gives scenarios to real life dilemmas.
Cons: Although it is for all grades, it is primarily the older grades.
Grades K-12
A resource for lesson plans, activities, printables and graphic organizers.
This site offes many resources based on specific grade level and subject areas. There are a variety of themed activities for teachers to utilize.
Grades K-12
Classroom Connections: There are tabs at the top to direct the viewer to the correct grade level. This site gives easy to read explanations of social studies concepts for kids.
Grades K-12
Collection of lesson plans, thematic units and activities for teachers to use in the classroom.
This site offers many user friendly lesson plans and activities for all subjects and grade levels.
Purpose of the Website: This website offers hundreds of different podcasts that are appropriate for use in classrooms. Using the directory, you can search by grade level and subject to find podcasts that work well for your class's needs.
Grade Level: K-12, Professional
Classroom Connection: Students can use podcasts on a weekly basis to help develop their listening skills. One way this can be used in a classroom is possibly listening to weekly current events and having the students create a class newspaper sharing events that are happening around the country or around the world.
Negatives of this Website: A lot of the podcasts available of the website are created by students and schools. It might be a great idea to include some podcasts that are professional created and approved by teachers.
Purpose of the Website: The purpose of this website is to create an internet-based resource for collecting materials that are used during teaching. Teachers can create an share units and save online resources, as well as computer files. This is an environmental way for teachers to save and update their units from year to year.
Grade Level: Professional
Classroom Connection: This resources is a wonderful way for grade level teachers and departments to collaborate on units that are taught throughout the year, as well as keep teachers organized. One example for how it can be used is for teachers to save various math games that relate to each unit of study in math. It will make it easy for teachers to find the resources they are looking for quickly and easily.
Negatives of this Website: I have had a lot of trouble trying to upload files from my computer to each unit. I wanted to save worksheets and tests that I use with each unit in the various subjects, however, I have not been successful yet. So I am currently saving websites I use for each unit.
If you haven't looked at this site in a while, it's worth another look. Appropriate for all grade levels. This is a free online grade book. Recently they have added more sophisticated communication tools, class calendars, the ability to upload files and much more. The discussion feature could double as literature groups or Socratic Circle. The one downside to this is if you do not wish for students to have access, as soon as you print them out a progress report, they have their student code and can get online and check their grades at any time. This could be difficult in the instance that students and/or parents are wondering why this person's project is graded and theirs is not.
Check out the new wiki feature.
Elementary Grades appropriate
Classroom Connections: This website that explains to students how the U.S. Constitution came to be. Teaching 4th Grade social studies, I want my 9 year old students to understand what they are learning about and specifically the hard work our forefathers put into our government. This is a great site to do that.
It also gives a section titled "show what you know" to give students a chance to review what they learned.
This site also gives more information on governmental social studies topics.
Grades 3-8
Classroom Connection: New York State Perfomrance Indicators for math. This direct site allows teachers to follow what is expected before and after the state exam in the content area of math.
Pre k- grade 8
Math practice for students. Organized by skills, by grade level. Multiple choice / fill in questions. Immediate feedback, explanations, reinforcement of concepts given for incorrect answers.
Classroom Connections:
* To introduce new math topics
* As a math center activity
* As Whole Group interactive practice/ SmartBoard
Grades 3-8
Interactive- step by step process for students to do a research project. Links are included at each step--to provide students help with that step/skill.
Classroom Connections:
* Use to teach each step of the process whole group- interactively using SmartBoard--Teaching one step per day.
* Students can do interactive activities as a center choice
Purpose of the Website: This is an unbelievable tool for introducing the research process to students. The website is particularly helpful for the visual learner. Students can explore different ways to plan their research, search for information, take notes and use the information they find.
Grade Level: 3-8
Classroom Connection: Using this website as a learning tool, students can use guided inquiry to develop a plan for research. Students could also use the information on this website to participate in a webquest in which they need to develop a "research guide" for their district to help new students understand how to perform a research project.
Framework, activities, resources for reading comprehension strategies
Can be adapted for all grade levels
Classroom Connections:
* Comprehension activities can be used to set a purpose for reading and to organize and make sense of information in the content areas and literacy
* Activities can be used to differentiate learning in the content areas
* Framework and activities reinforce skills needed for the NYS ELA tests--without "teaching to the test"
Grades 3-8
A website for teachers that explores comprehension and content reading strategies and when to use them in social studies.
This site can be used to help teachers enure their students have the necessary strategies to understand social studies content.
All grade levels
Teachers enter in spelling/vocabulary lists that the site generates into interacive learning activities including games (hangman, word searches, matching games). Also includes a "teach me' and "test me" option- generated from entered words.
Classroom Connections:
* Literacy-Introduce spelling and vocabulary words
* Whole group instruction of literacy- spelling/vocabulary words
* Math/Science/Social studies- create lists for students to reinforce spelling and vocabulary in all areas
* Independent practice- use as a choice for center work to reinforce spelling/vocabulary in all areas
* Whole group practice- Interactively on SmartBoard
Grades 1-5
A resource for interactive activities to give students practice with weekly spelling words.
This is a great activity for students to utilize at home when practicing weekly spelling words. It is a more engaging activity for students to complete spelling activities.
All online newspapers overlaid on a Google Map. Search for content, zoom in and click on a placemark to view the paper. The website also has the ability to translate.
Classroom Connection:
*Foreign Language - read newspaper in the native language
*Social Studies - compare/contrast a particular topic based on the location of the report; how would an incident in Egypt be reported out by American newspapers as opposed to an Italian newspaper?
Grade level- 7-12
CC- Students can analyze different perspectives on a current event by looking at all the different newspapers.
Overview- Using google maps, a user can look newspapers from across the world.
COns- Some newspapers do not correctly translate into English.
Grades K-12
Math lesson plans, interactive online activities and web resources.
Teachers can use this site to prepare math lessons based on many different math skills and concepts.Students can utilize this site in the classroom or at home to pratice math skills.
All grade levels
Interactive "Word Cloud" generator, allowing user to enter various words, fonts and layouts in their design
Classroom Connections:
Students can make wordles of:
*spelling words
* vocabulary words
* related words from content area concepts
* words indicating a grammar skill-i.e.- homophones/synonyms/ antonyms/ rhyming words/ parts of speech
* math concept words
K-12
This is an online interactive tool for students. This is great for students to be able to observe labs that might be too sophisticated or hazardous to complete in class. It's also great for students to practice newly-acquired Math skills. One con is that teachers sometimes "play dead" because of how well the program grabs student's attention. Too much of this would not be a good thing, because they would be lacking that human contact.
Grade K-3
Provides educational movies, homework help, leveled quizzes, games and activities for kids.
This site offes great visual aides and activiites to go along with many different topics across all subject areas.
Teachers can use this site to introduce concepts to students as well as reinforce ans assess students understanding of concepts.
Grades K-12
Internet based science learning experiences, lesson plans and resources.
This site can be used by teachers to help plan engaging and interactive science lessons and give students necessary resources to go along with lessons. Students will receive interacitve activities to help reinforce conepts.
Purpose of the Website: Students and teachers can create collaborative multimedia projects that incorporate video, pictures, and voice. This will allow students and teacher to present materials in a visual way.
Grade Level: K-12
Classroom Connection: Voicethreads can be used for a variety of activities, but one possible project could be for student to share their experience on a field trip. Students can take pictures of their day on a field trip and create a voice thread to share what they learned about their experience.
Purpose of the Website: Glogster is a tool that allows the user to create an interactive poster on various topics. It allows student to express their creativity with many tools that are available to them.
Grade Level: 4-12
Classroom Connection: Glogster would be a great introduction activity at the beginning of the school year. Students could create an interactive poster about themselves, as an introduction to their new classmates.