EDU505

This is a great site to use for Vocabulary. You can level up the words or even change the subject.

I love love love both the NYTimes educational supplementary materials and the fact that they exist. Recently I tweaked a Times lesson plan on writing your own obituary to help the students set goals. As we move toward the Core Standards, it's more important than ever for kids to read non-fiction and journalism.

$10 app but so worth it. This gradebook is really awesome and helpful. It's the only one I have found that lets you exempt grades for absences, etc. And if you're technologically challenged like me, it is very user friendly! I thought I would share it with you guys!

Link for educator account - free and provides extended length videos

For the other Spanish teachers or even Social Studies/ELA could use this for a cultural component to a lesson.

Researched based high impact teaching strategies (HITS) that affect student achievement (includes tech integration and gives examples)

This site provides specific tactics to help alleviate the attention-deficit woes of your most inattentive students. Typical suggestions include decreasing the length of your lessons and structuring some guided daydreaming time.

Here is a great song that I taught to my students and that we do as a break in between lessons. It is song to the melody of farajaqua. There are also hand movements: North America: lift your right arm up South America: right arm down below the waist Africa: arms rocking back and forth across your midsection Europe: lift your left arm up Asia: keep your left arm up high, and move it to the left Australia: bring your left arm down below the waist Antarctica: waddle like a penguin (they can also turn around as they waddle) This song really is great for play breaks, and when we are done, students are more focused. We sing it four times: First is in a medium voice, second in a low voice, third whispering, and fourth silent, just hand movements.

Great for article of the week, political cartoons, and current events

I use this as a great resources to get some really challenging activities to help with critical thinking and problem solving skills. Caution: They are really addicting if you like challenging puzzles!

Students create an Amazing Race challenge for another class. Students are put into production groups to create a show segment for The Amazing Race.Each group represents the different United States regions, investigates the various types of geographical regions, creates a digital poster or poster board presentation to be posted on classroom wiki for study reference, include an "artifact" (e.g. geographic tools/ technologies, stories, songs, and pictures) to further describe their specific region. As a class, students will present their final product and regional artifacts to another class as an Amazing Race challenge.

Reading A-to-Z is a popular and effective reading resource. Not only are the texts leveled, but each text includes an extensive lesson plan, teaching strategies, and extension activities. OVerall, a total winner!

I've used it mainly for the reader's theater for a club I am running. There is a small fee to use the resource, but if you contact me, I can give you my login!

THAT's what I'm talkin' about! Look at these teacher's sharing.

Excellent Reading Resource that specifically addresses a wide variety of reasons WHY children struggle with reading and HOW to help them overcome that particular obstacle.

animoto releases new version that includes many more features. Not sure if these are included on the iPad app version yet.

Several types of concept maps (in INTERACTIVE pdf format) This means you can link to them, students can access them, complete them, save and turn in electronically. They can also be downloaded and printed if there's little to no access to classroom computers. Or do some collaborative/small group work. Have small groups of students complete a task, work together on completing and explain/defend their concept map to whole group. Non-linguistic representations are a high impact teaching strategy that work especially well with visual learners. Consider using these for organization, pre-writing, summaries, etc.