Group items tagged

David D Castle 2/7/12 Overview: The site consists of a huge list of links to other sites that provide lesson plans, activities, resources, museums and exhibits. The intended audience is teachers, and most of the links are for Spanish and French classes. The site doesn't seem very professional, and is takes time to navigate. There are only three main categories of links, but every entry is just listed in alphabetical order. Content: Most of the links don't work, and there's no information concerning copyright, dates of revision, how to contact the creator, or if the site is commercial or solely informational. The categories are very broad, and it's hard to find a refined or precise link for what a teacher might need. Because most of the links are broadly named and described, it's difficult to find anything precise. This site is not worthwhile. Design: The site loads properly, but nearly all of the links are dead ends. There aren't any graphic or audio files, and because the homepage has so many links it's unappealing and difficult to use. Because the links don't work, there isn't sufficient information to make the site worth visiting. There's no date of revision or copyright information, and there's no way of knowing where the information came from. I'm no expert on web design, but this seems pretty terrible.

David D Castle 2/7/12 Overview: The site provides access to worksheets, lesson ideas, and other classroom activities, but requires yearly subscription. There are links to other educational websites (some free), Facebook, and Twitter. School subject pictures immediately grab your attention and provide links to worksheets, but without being a member it always brings up a "join now" page. Content: The content presented on TeachFuzz would be very useful for elementary teachers because it provides not just worksheets but lesson ideas, calendars, themes, and other miscellaneous activities. The links to other sites work well, but none of the links within the site are available without subscription. There is both a toolbar of subjects near the top of the page and a set of large graphics depicting the subjects. Design: The site seems well-designed and easy to navigate. The icons are large and clear, leaving little room for confusion. The site isn't cluttered with advertisements and links to tons of other sites which is nice. This site also has a custom search box in the middle of the screen provided by Google, which would be very convenient when looking for a specific worksheet or assignment.

Overview: This site is clearly for students K-8 as well as teachers and parents. It is a site about the weather that is benefical to students, teachers, and parents. Students can explore the weather, teachers can find lessons and experiments, and parents can help teach their kids at home. Content: It provides alot of information about the weather such as hurricanes, tornadoes, winter storms, clouds, rain and floods, thunderstorms, lightening, wind, etc. There are lesson plans, experiments, and science fair projects ideas for students and teachers. It provides a lot of useful and helpful information by the author. She is a meterologist. She also provides games, flashcards, and facts about weather safety for students to help them learn. Design: This web site looks like it was designed mainly for students. It's got lots of graphics and I think it would be appealing to them. Since it's for kids, it's easy to use and navigate through. It seems like a fun site that I think kids would enjoy.

Illuminations is a NCTM site that provides and lesson plans interactive manipulatives for mathematics teachers and students

Paige Hanewald 10/21/13 Overall: The purpose of this specific branch of the HippoCampus website is a resource that can be utilized by both teachers in explaining lessons and high school students in interactively researching reading and writing strategies that concern evaluating text, forming a thesis, writing fundamentals, characteristics of specific types of essays, and more. Overall, I believe that this is a simple resource that could provide a lot of insight to students having trouble in reading and writing content areas. Content: The content provides lessons as well as some interactive activities. It explains certain aspects in writing that teachers seem to assume students already know such as passive and active voice, punctuation, grammar, forming a well-thought out thesis statement and other fundamentals of writing. Unfortunately, because of the features presented on this website, you must have good Internet and either Adobe Flash Player or Quicktime. Design: This site looks boring. While it is very informative, so much information with such a lack of "oomph!" can bore a middle or high school student and put him or her to sleep. While it is very easy to navigate, compared to other websites, the interactive components such as videos and activities don't seem as engaging to kids above the 6th grade.

This website is called The Biology Corner. It's a website that is edited by a high school biology teacher who has a bachelor's in Biology and a Masters degree in Educational Technology. The Biology Corner is basically a compilation of useful links for studying, as well as links for worksheets, videos, and resources a teacher would find useful in writing lesson plans. The audience of The Biology Corner includes high school teachers of biology, and high school biology students. I think that this website would be very useful, and it's design is fairly appealing. On the homepage, it's easy to see what the purpose of the website is, with minimal reading. It is mentioned that the website is meant to be a resource for students as well as teachers. The author is clearly identified and there is even a link for more information on her qualifications. All of the content is easy to access and every link works. The website is catered to a single textbook (the one the teacher uses at her school) which causes it to be a bit less useful, but altogether, the website has very good content. The design of this website is okay, but not really appealing. It's very plain and there aren't that many photos or videos that are actually imbedded into the site. None of the important information (table of contents, links, revision dates, author) is missing from the site but it isn't presented to the user in the most attractive way. 

The purpose of this site is to interactively be able to learn and create a food web. The specific audience of this site is students around a middle or elementary level. I thought that it was a good website to use interactive learning techniques to learn and review the dynamics of food web interactions. This site is a good introductory level basis for learning about food webs and how different organisms interact with each other. Content It could be a good site to use as a whole class as a supplement to the lesson and have the kids tell you where to put the different organisms and how to link them together. I would hesitate to make this site an activity in class outside of using it to augment the original lesson. Design The design of this site was very simple as well as easy to use. The people that set it up did a good job of making this site accessible to anyone. It had good help menus that would help you navigate the site with ease if you ever got tripped up trying to use the site.

Overview Code Academy is a website that is used to promote the proper teaching of different computer languages to people of all ages. It is mostly aimed at people who are in computer science classes from middle school through college. The site has a number of corporate sponsors as well as many 'teachers' that donate their time to creating lesson plans for this site. They really advocate the teaching and learning of these computer languages. For being programmers, the site is actually fairly simple and had some glitches on my computer. I will attribute that as much to the computer as much as their programming.

Overview: The purpose of this website is to help teachers and parents teach students math, especially if they are being home schooled. The audience of this website is more of parents and teachers rather than students. Although there are some activities that students can practice. This would not be a very attractive site for just students, but it does have some very useful lessons and worksheets that teachers can use. Design: The design of the website is very organized. It is easy to navigate around and find the certain lesson plans and worksheets you can work off of. This is not a website for students to navigate through because it is more of a teacher site than students in the sense of activities. Content: The content contains information of how to teach students math. It is easy to get a hold of the creator of the website. She also provides very useful information about herself and what she has achieved in her math education.

Free elementary, middle and high school teacher resources, including puzzlemaker, student games and activities and lesson plans.

TeacherTube is an educational resource found at teachertube.com. It is a filtered, child-safe video website based off of the popular video site called YouTube. The site, geared towards teachers and students, was initiated by a superintendent from Texas named Jason Smith and is maintained through uploaded user content. TeacherTube is a fantastic source of videos to supplement lessons of all subjects in an elementary classroom. All content on this educational website is current, and its copyright has been updated as of 2015. All video links are informational and relevant, and some information about the people who uploaded each of the videos is available; however, no contact information is provided for the website. Also, the audience and subject matter of the videos are easily determined. The site's credibility is improved by its associations with the American Institute for History Education, Glogster EDU, NASA Ares, and other highly esteemed educational online resources. Over all, TeacherTube provides reliable, audience-appropriate, educational content to students and teachers alike, making it an excellent tool to use in a flipped-design classroom or to supplement any lesson in an elementary classroom. The website's design allows users to easily navigate TeacherTube's videos. The homepage displays a sample of educational videos and organizes them into rows by audience and then by subject matter: teachers, parents, students, and then math, science, and history. Each video shows appropriate content according to the subject and audience it is labeled. Additionally, users can search video channels or specific usernames of people who upload videos. This simplistic format of the homepage is consistent with all other pages, making navigation easy for users of many ages and ensuring efficient loading on any web browser. Clearly, TeacherTube is a well-designed, user-friendly, educational resource for teachers, parents, and students to find credible and informational

A free community for sharing instructional videos and content for teachers and students. We are an education focused, safe venue for teachers, schools, and home learners.

Extremely comprehensive online math, science and programming video tutorials. Watch our sample lessons to see why students all over the world learn with Educator.com.

This website, found at education.nationalgeographic.com, is geared at teachers, families, and student audiences. The encyclopedia resources on the site can be altered to better fit each of these audiences depending on the user's selected audience. In addition to encyclopedia resources, videos, photographs, lessons, and educational activities can also be found on the website. The website developer, National Geographic Society, does a wonderful job of providing external links and updated information on a variety of scientific and social topics which could be helpful in elementary classroom research activities. National Geographic's website content is relevant and correct, since it's most recent update took place in 2015. Although the site identifies its sponsor as the Verizon Foundation, no biases in the texts can be detected. On every educational page, whether it is an encyclopedia entry for K-2nd grade audiences or a suggested lesson plan for teachers, National Geographic provides a multitude of working links to back up the site's information and facts. At the bottom of every page, the website provides contact information in the forms of email addresses, mailing addresses, and telephone numbers for users to use in case of any questions or concerns. Clearly, the National Geographic Education website's content is accurate and very useful for science and social studies education. The design of this site is compatible with all web browsers and downloads efficiently. The Education home page offers an attractive, organized display of the website's resources and choice of audiences. This easy-to-follow format also flows onto every page on the website for easy navigation, and all links are integrated into the website's text for convenient learning and fact-checking. Over all, the presentation of National Geographic's content is attractive, organized, and current.

This is a resource for kindergarten teachers to learn new ways to make kindergarten more fun than the worksheets that they have been giving kindergarteners today. I think this is a great way to get ideas on how to make a lesson more fun, or this is a different approach to some lesson plans. I am not sure that all are entirely possible, but they can always be modified and made into my own. The colors are also fun, and I think the overall home page itself gets the idea of what they want the website to be about across to the audience. I love the idea of trying to make kindergarten more fun, and I think this is a great example for teachers to use. The content displayed in this is clearly identified by viewing the homepage and touring the different tabs that are available on either side of the picture. The author is very present in who he is and what he stands for. He makes all the sponsors of him and his curriculum present as you scroll throughout the website. If the current date of when it was updated is on there, it has not been updated for 7 years, which could make the information irrelevant now, since it may not keep up with the standards. The only complaint about the content is the grammatical errors. Some of the website was cut off a little bit, as you scroll down the homepage, so some of the wording and pictures have been cut off. Otherwise, the purpose is clear and you can contact the author with any further questions to the website, hoping that he is still around. The website has no glitches and can be easily accessed by anyone and everyone. The design and navigation are organized in a way that the person can pick what they want to know more about. All of the links open easily and don't seem to buffer or take long. The site has some useful information, but it is not updated and probably won't fit to the content standards any more; however, this is a great website for teachers to get ideas and then adapt to the content standards that now stand. The overal

K-5 Math Teaching Resources is a website for elementary teachers that provides example activities that are aligned with Common Core State Standards.  It is easy to determine the content of the site because of the navigation bar one the side of the page. Within this bar there are options to browse specific content areas, as well as the intended audience (grade level).  After you choose the content area you're interesting in planning a lesson for there are links that take you to site that provide information based on that content. The links with possible activities also provide you with information of which common core state standard the activity correlates with.  Another thing that I really liked about this website is that it gives you examples of outside resources you can use (titles of books, pattern block, etc.) that you can use to keep your students physically engaged in the activity and learning. No ads are present on this website, and all of the links provided work. There are also some resources that teachers can use for their school to incorporate special days for the students, like 100th day and states day, which keep the students engaged on special days of school.  This site is very easy to search through.  They also provide you with a link that states the terms of use at the bottom of the website page. It also clearly identifies that it was first published in 2010 and updated up through 2015, and is published through the K-5 Teaching Resources LLC.

kids.discovery.com Reviewed by Kristie Neises on 8/30/2010 Overview This site is a branch off of the discovery channel main site. It features the television series that are on the discovery channel for their younger viewers. It also has games and activities and some television episodes meant to teach that are themed with the popular shows. This site is overall good for its content and design but it can be a little overwhelming for the audience it is intended for. The site has great graphics and would capture the attention of any child visiting the site, it is worth the bookmark to come back to because of how well it integrates teaching with its activities. The useful information that adults might need is a little hard to find. The main down side I can find is that younger kids might need an adult to find games and activities that they can do on their own since the site takes in such a wide spectrum of age categories. Content The content of this site would not be rated very high by adults. Sponsors are not credited, there are no specific things like author information or reviews. Even finding the contact information is a little tricky. Copyright is not posted since each part of the site has a different one based on the show the game or activity is themed after. There are no links to other sites since it is made to go with a very specific set of content to match the television channel. It is very clear on what the purpose of the site is, it is to entertain and even have a little bit of marketing to advertise for shows and the television channel itself. The website has its obvious upsides in that it is something that has accurate information as an educational program and it is made easy to understand for the age group it is intended for. Design The design of this site is well done. It stays true to its roots and copies the same theme colors and graphics that the television channel itself uses such as the chomping teeth and themed background of the month

Brienna Gregor 10/11/12 Overview: This website is very useful for students, teachers, and other educators in that it fulfills a plethora of scientific inquiries. This website is targeted for children from all grades and ages. Its purpose is to instill scientific exploration in children so as they grow older, they continue to be curious in the science world. This website provides many opportunities for both teachers and students to learn through interaction of available resources that include: Games, Puzzles, Activities, Quizzes, Tell Me More (further analysis for many different scientific interests), and more. I believe the design and content of this website is very, very well done. Content: The information currency and quality is superb due to the fact that it is sponsored and created by Discovery Channel. Contact information can be located at the bottom of the page through the link "viewer relations". This website is professionally done and very credible. Design: It is very easy to navigate and provides a huge amount of information. It is very fast, functional, and uses many different modes of media to stimulate children in their learning. Teachers can definitely bring their students to this website and build a lesson plan on one of its many subjects with ease and gratitude from the children. It is very appealing to the eye while stimulating little minds with information.

This website is very useful for obtaining lesson plans and understanding how to transfer the knowledge to the students.

Reviewed by Kelsey Bancroft 8/31/10 Overview This website targets educators. It is filled with lesson plans, technology integration, activity ideas, etc. for the classroom. Many teachers would benefit from this site, but especially teachers who are just starting out. There are many different links on this site to navigate to, but there are almost too many links. There is so much on this website, it's a little bit hectic for a person to find what they are looking for. The site is nice because of all the amounts of information that can be found, but it is a little busy. Content The content on this site for the most part is all very good. There is a lot of everything on this site to be found. The only downfall is the process of finding it. If a teacher or anyone has time to sit down and look for what they want, then it's a great site, but if they are crunched for time it may not be the right site for them. There is all sorts of lesson plans, technology integration, proffessional development, and so forth. There is a lot of information here on this site that is worth looking through and bookmarking. Design The design of this site is a little crazy. It is well organized by all the different categories being grouped together, but there is so much on the page that it may be hard to find exactly what one is looking for. The look of the page may turn someone away simply because of how much is going on, but if someone sat and looked through the information it gives, they might find it useful. The design could lose a little cluster.

Tyler Skinner, Aug 31 2010 The purpose of this website to to help give tips and ideas for history educators. From elementary to high school, this can be used for all different grade levels. Overview This website has all sorts of nifty tools. There are separate links for different education levels, helping instructors on what works best with each grade. Along with that, there are also videos on introductory subjects to help with lectures. Content Ranging from the Revolution to the Iraq War, Ancient times to the Present, there are all sorts of awesome tools to use in lectures. They help give more input and teaching techniques to make the lessons go more smoothly. Design The organization of this website is very clear. With links to the side for separate grade levels, its easy to locate what your looking for. Video clips and materials are right on the home page, and with a little click of the mouse information just bursts out everywhere. All in all, this website is a great resource to help out history teachers.

Amy Andreen 9-14-11 Overview: This site has great resources for those teaching history to elementary students all the way through high school students. There are activities, documents to review, lesson plans available to view, and picture to look at. It is a great resource to history and Social Studies Teachers to help with content and classroom ideas. Content: teachinghistory.org has an inexhaustible amount of resources available to the viewers. There is a section devoted to English Language Learners that I found to be extremely interesting and useful. There is also a section that allows you to ask questions to other teachers, historians, and digital historians. I also really like that it has areas of history that often go untouched and unexplored. Design: For the most part, this site was really easy to navigate. Everything was pretty well laid out. However, one issue I faced was that I wasn't always aware of where I was at within the site. This became slightly confusing at times. The information included was very important but not easily accessed. I did like that there were different areas for different topics like "Reviews", "Beyond the Textbook", a "Weekly History Quiz", and "National Resources".