EDU505

This is a great resource for free writing activities. The site helps engage the entire brain in the writing process and the students really seem to like the creative limitations put on their writing.

List of strategies to differentiate instruction in a social studies classroom. While teaching my high school students, I have noticed they enjoy moving around the classroom. Once of the most effective strategies of doing this is by having a "gallery walk".

A look at the "executive functions" that help when teaching students' whole brains. A thought provoking look at how to approach those kids who don't know how to "do school".

Randy, this also correlates with a couple of your observation forms, too. Don't forget to add a tag to the resource.

This resource is especially useful for activities dealing with geography for both guided and independent practice. It also has short video clips for hooks, and great ideas for lesson plans!

Khan Academy has great video clips with detailed explanations of every middle and high school math topic (including linear algebra and statistics!) It's great for giving some variety in INM for students and having students practice note-taking skills by watching short video clips. It's also a great place to figure out how to explain complicated math topics.

Sejin, this is one of my favs! Science teachers and social studies teachers there are also excellent short clips on chemistry, biology, physics, economics and money and banking. Sal Khan's story is worth a look. He's a Ted talk presenter, has been featured on several news programs. This resource is excellent.

RubiStar is a tool to help the teacher who wants to use rubrics, but does not have the time to develop them from scratch. I use it at the elementary level but it is great for all teachers!

This is an amazing resource - I've used it for years. Note also that rubrics can be saved on Rubistar and shared, or just use the tool to get a jump start on your rubric and copy and paste into Word.

El Pais is a Spanish newspaper, which writes articles on everything from politics and world news to sports. It's great for pictures, too. It's great for reading, building vocab, and introducing more in depth cultural topics. I use it for my Spanish 3 class.

Prezi is a way to jazz up your class presentations. As a visual learner, my attention is held better by something that is visually stimulating (e.g. not a white slide with black lettering). Prezi allows you to present the exact same content you would in any other presentation format, but allows for more excitement. We used this a bit during institute this summer and it was awesome. This link is just as much a resources for me, because I want to start using it more as well. I would encourage you to check it out if you do a slide show every day in class.

My students were getting bored with just completing basic worksheets or problems from the book; so i went looking for something a little more fun that wold not take me forever to create. In my search I ran across these PDF sheets. This is a collection of math worksheets where your answers solve a puzzle or riddle. My students like having these puzzles to solve and though they may act disinterested, they are always proud when they are the first to solve the riddle. This is just a simple way to make practice a little more fun.

Great resource for math teachers...this website provides all different templates for graphs, numbers lines, etc. I use it on a daily basis--it's super easy to copy and paste these blank graphs into worksheets, and they are super clear when you copy them in.

great worksheets and activities for students in Elementary grades. This website has both math and ELA activities as well as many holiday and seasonal activities.

Provides a variety of tools to help students study. I personally use it to help my students prepare for their weekly spelling/vocabulary quizzes, but I think every content area could find it useful.

An online timeline maker. Useful for history teachers, but also fun to create a common login where students can add their own pieces to a full class timeline. Requires Flash to edit.

This is a collection of resources for science demonstrations. I teach 8th grade science and my kids just want to do something fun everyday. They learn better when they can manipulate something or ground abstract knowledge in something that they see in real life. Starting with a demonstration almost every class is a great way to reel in the students!

This is a site that provides a great number of study aids for biology and anatomy teachers.  I've used the site as a great way to lead guided practice in my classroom by playing the review games as a class, letting individual students come up and fill in answers.  The pictures alone are fantastic for teaching everything from the skeletal skeletal sustem to histology.

Research suggests that small-group teaching is the most effective way of having new information learned. In addition, there is plenty of evidence suggesting that reading centers that focus on specific sub-skills are an excellent approach to teaching reading, comprehension, and fluency well. Therefore, I particularly benefit from this website, as it offers a wide variety of sub-skill targeted reading centers for kiddos in grades k through 5. Again, this is a WINNER of a site (with a lot(!) of resarch to back it up)!

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.

"This learning theory is based on the structure and function of the brain. As long as the brain is not prohibited from fulfilling its normal processes, learning will occur."

Courtney, did you happen to scroll down the page and read on? There are very simple approaches to BBL that any teacher could begin using right away. I really like the idea of "relaxed alertness" and "active processing."

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.