Group items tagged

"What Makes a Great Teacher? Image credit: Veronika Lukasova Also in our Special Report: National: "How America Can Rise Again" Is the nation in terminal decline? Not necessarily. But securing the future will require fixing a system that has become a joke. Video: "One Nation, On Edge" James Fallows talks to Atlantic editor James Bennet about a uniquely American tradition-cycles of despair followed by triumphant rebirths. Interactive Graphic: "The State of the Union Is ..." ... thrifty, overextended, admired, twitchy, filthy, and clean: the nation in numbers. By Rachael Brown Chart: "The Happiness Index" Times were tough in 2009. But according to a cool Facebook app, people were happier. By Justin Miller On August 25, 2008, two little boys walked into public elementary schools in Southeast Washington, D.C. Both boys were African American fifth-graders. The previous spring, both had tested below grade level in math. One walked into Kimball Elementary School and climbed the stairs to Mr. William Taylor's math classroom, a tidy, powder-blue space in which neither the clocks nor most of the electrical outlets worked. The other walked into a very similar classroom a mile away at Plummer Elementary School. In both schools, more than 80 percent of the children received free or reduced-price lunches. At night, all the children went home to the same urban ecosystem, a zip code in which almost a quarter of the families lived below the poverty line and a police district in which somebody was murdered every week or so. Video: Four teachers in Four different classrooms demonstrate methods that work (Courtesy of Teach for America's video archive, available in February at teachingasleadership.org) At the end of the school year, both little boys took the same standardized test given at all D.C. public schools-not a perfect test of their learning, to be sure, but a relatively objective one (and, it's worth noting, not a very hard one). After a year in Mr. Taylo

Interactive whiteboards (IWB) allow science and math teachers to teach multi-sensory lessons, seamlessly jumping from one type of media to another. Interactive science or math lessons can easily integrate text, sound, video, and graphics based on the tactile nature of the IWB.

USA resource Thinkfinity.org makes it easy for educators to enhance their classroom instruction with lesson plans, interactive activities and other online resources. Thinkfinity.org also provides a wealth of educational and literacy resources for students, parents and after-school programs. All of Thinkfinity.org's 55,000 standards-based K-12 lesson plans, student materials, interactive tools and reference materials are reviewed by the nation's leading education organizations to ensure that content is accurate, up-to-date, unbiased and appropriate for students.

This is a wonderful site for designing lesson plans and collating resources to push out to an iPad app for students to access and interact with. You can put together websites, videos, audio, documents, images and instructions. You can make quizzes for your students to answer to provide you with instant feedback about how they are doing. Your students can make their own notes about the lesson from within the app. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Planning+%26+Assessment

Much more than learning about frogs. There are lessons about water conservation and pollution, scientific study, geography, 

For ten interactive games featuring ambibians, including frogs: http://www.learninggamesforkids.com/animal-games-amphibians.html

Teaching with maps (whether on the whiteboard or using a set of personal computers) makes learning much more visual, exciting and personally relevant. uLearn is the easiest way to access a range of Ordnance Survey mapping in the UK, plus stunning aerial imagery and historic maps, all in a safe educational environment. Much more than just Geography Use maps as an index, not only to study geographical locations but also alongside uLearn's enormous library of geo-referenced resources. Explore the historic, cultural and factual aspects of your chosen locations across the planet. Just select a topic, zoom in to a place of interest and the resources available will automatically light up. And uLearn's mapping tools are interactive - stitch maps together, add your own photos and videos or annotate them to highlight your teaching focus. uLearn's maps and resources can be manipulated to meet your classroom needs, whatever the curriculum area. Really simple tools for creating lessons Whether using the resources already in uLearn or uploading your own resources, uLearn allows you at the click of a button, to capture the maps and resources for your lesson, ready to use in the classroom. It's as simple as clicking the 'Save current view to playlist' button!

Create an interactive online lesson with this brilliant site. Upload and curate all the resources for a lesson in one place and access them with one click. The site works with Office files, PDFs, flash files, small videos, images and internet links and even connects to Google Drive and Dropbox. Then simply share the link with anyone who need to use view it. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Planning+%26+Assessment

This is a wonderful site for designing lesson plans and collating resources to push out to an iPad app for students to access and interact with. You can put together websites, videos, audio, documents, images and instructions. You can make quizzes for your students to answer to provide you with instant feedback about how they are doing. Your students can make their own notes about the lesson from within the app. Download the app at https://itunes.apple.com/in/app/id467088232 http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Planning+%26+Assessment

Great Collection of sites. I got this link from my friend Elaine Plybon via twitter @glad2be

Our goal is to help classroom teachers integrate technology into their curriculum by identifying and providing interactive Internet resources addressing specific objectives.

A compilation of lessons created by 7 districts in the Houston, TX area.

Nature Works Everywhere gives teachers, students and families everything they need to start exploring and understanding nature's fantastic factory - videos, interactive games, and interactive lesson plans that align to standards.

Find Lesson Plans for Your SMART Board and Connect with Teachers

Learn to play guitar with this beautifully designed site. Work through the lessons using your own guitar along with your computer's microphone so the site can interact with you as you play in real time. The site will even help you tune it. If you haven't got a guitar to hand, you can use the on-screen virtual guitar. The course is designed for beginners, but lessons progress quickly. The site seems to work best on Google Chrome. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Music%2C+Sound+%26+Podcasts

Electricity Story Electricity and Magnetism Demos Electricity Shocking Brainpop Electricity Charged Themes and Links Energy Experiments Theatre of Electricity Articles on Electricity Resources Zoom School Static Basics Pro Teacher Lessons Interactive Simple Circuits Bibliography Word Document Lessons Circuits and Schematics Science Toys Electrical Safety

These are complete mini-topics that are a week's worth of activities and lesson plans on each topic for ages 4-11. This pulls together lesson plans, interactive whiteboard resources, and printables and will be helpful for teachers in a tight or who need to quickly emphasize a topic where they know students have problems.

"The iPad generation. That's what I call the children of today. Now that's neither a positive or a negative nickname, just a nickname, however, whatever view you have on it, the impact on our teaching is huge. Children are brought up with bright colours, avatars, HD and 4K screens, virtual worlds full of weird and wonderful characters and then there's school. I believe that it is vital that we, as educators, sit up and take note of this and rather than fight against it, embrace it. Make your teaching as fun and as interactive as you can. Bring lessons to life with hands-on experiences, opportunities to enquire and lessons where the children can investigate the world around them."

I am convinced that the power is IN THE SOFTWARE. But not the software itself, but how it is used as a tool to present the lesson in a new way, for a different learning style, for access outside of the classroom.

Tons of great resources for teachers. Integration and technology use ideas galore!

For a web-based learning to be truly effective it must be interactive. This means that it is not just a reformatted canned lesson of printed worksheets placed on the web. The web-based activity is inquiry-based and incorporates the full features available on the web - interactivity between computer and student. The learning activity must engage student critical thinking skills by using the scientific inquiry process.