MEd Program Diigo Group

Animated Science, Health, Technology, Math, Social Studies, Arts & Music and English movies, quizzes, activity pages and school homework help for K-12 kids, aligned with state standards

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I am eager to test out Slide Rocket. Seems like it surpasses PowerPoint and allows users to share and collaborate.

I just tried to use Slide Rocket and see that they are not accepting new users. They appear to have shifted to a company called clear view that is more for corporate use.

I have been exhausting this website for resources since I first discovered her through Twitter. I apologize that it's another language resource, but she has great activities for all different levels of proficiency and languages. The presentation and units with resources are aligned with ACTFL standards.

This site provides great, authentic resources in varying levels of proficiency for languages. The students can listen, decide how much guidance they need and complete a game like activity to practice vocabulary covered. I have used it as an audio resource in the classroom for incorporating cultural viewpoints and reinforcement of vocabulary. It does have a fee to become a member and students cost more.

I have used this in my personal life to get together with busy friends. Can be a great way to coordinate meetings, especially when a "meet every Tuesday" strategy doesn't work well for you.

Vectorworks is another technical design program that is free for students. Many colleges use Vectorworks rather than Autocad.

"Creative resources for teaching drama" Fantastic page with games, lessons, and links to plays for the drama classroom

This website is a great resource for the early childhood classroom. The "picture pairs game" helps with letter recognition.

This is a website with some fantastic alphabet activities including ways to help children recognize the alphabet, help with learning upper case verses lower case letters, help with phonetics and a book list to help with all these skills. This website has some fresh ideas that will work well in a pre-k classroom.

Within the website "Starfall" for beginning level readers there is an entire letter practice session; it is in the form of an interactive game. All of the letters of the alphabet are presented and students are able to click on one. It then takes the student through an interactive presentation (visuals and sounds) of that letter: it shows the upper and lowercase form of the letter, makes the letter sound, shows and says words that begin with that letter and dictates a sentence to students using many words beginning with the chosen letter. This would be good for students who are struggling to identify the letters of the alphabet and their sounds; good for repetitive, independent practice as students could use this by themselves on a computer.

On Starfall.com, there is an entire phonics section titled "Learn to Read" that begins with focus on beginning sounds, making words and word families and gradually gets harder as you progress through. It is an interactive making words game where students that are playing can hear a word, see a matching picture, select a letter that begins the word, hear the sound that the selected letter makes and hear the completed word - all in the context of word families. The game is also self correcting - there is a buzzer noise if you select the wrong beginning sound/letter, so students know to choose again. Within the "Learn to Read" section, there are also books that use the words from the making words activities and videos for students to watch. This would be a great tool to use for a student to independently practice phonics at a literacy center when they can't be working with the teacher because it is visual, it reads to the student, it is easy to use and follow, and it is self-correcting so that students are practicing correctly.

This article provides detailed background information regarding explicit writing instruction, especially regarding students with special needs such as ADHD, but the strategies discussed can be adapted and used with all learners regardless of ability or grade level. The article begins with a focus on strategies for providing students with motivational contexts for their writing as well as making writing a routine that they enjoy. The rest of the article is divided into sections based on students' ability/age level (basic skills, revising and editing, and motivation). This article discusses strategies that can help address teachers address students' learning gaps in elaboration and explaining their ideas fully in expository writing tasks. Be sure to click "Single Page" at the bottom right of the article so you can see the entire article on one screen, and explore the links to the left of the article for more information about writing instruction for different populations!

This is a collection of instructional strategies that can be used to improve student writing and cooperation and encourage critical thinking. Links to strategies are sorted by teachers' needs: Monitor Progress, Compare and Contrast Ideas, Form Groups, Get Moving!, Work Together, Adapt Content, Share Ideas & Opinions, and Take Notes. Within these categories are several links to various strategies to meet these needs. Each of the links leads to a clear description of how the strategy can be used and multiple examples and clickable resources that can be utilized by teachers immediately. This site has a plethora of interesting activities and tasks for students to encourage better collaboration and thinking. An instructional gap our team recognized that is quite prolific among middle school-aged students is the lack of elaboration or explanation of details in their expository writing pieces. Students can organized paragraphs and essays write clear topic sentences and conclusions, but they struggle supporting their claims with specific details and then explaining how their details relate to the topic.

This document provides a detailed overview of the writing process for teachers of and students in secondary schools (grades 7-12). It provides numerous strategies teachers in all content areas can employ to encourage students to write more frequency and with more fluency. The document is organized in chronological order according to the steps of the writing process (Generating Ideas, Developing and Organizing Ideas, and Revising and Editing). Each of these steps in the writing process is described and accompanied by detailed activities. The explicit guidelines (instructions) for each activity could be easily utilized by a novice teacher, but even a seasoned master teacher can benefit from exploring the strategies posed in this document. To address our identified learning gap (that secondary students struggle to elaborate on initial ideas in their writing), the section on "Adding Content" on p. 104 of this document is especially helpful.

Blog post: This is a collection of educational resources by high school teacher and prolific blogger and author, Larry Ferlazzo. These resources are organized by subject, such as art, music, science and Web 2.0. Each link takes you to a blog post that describes a resource, activity or lesson and how it can be used in the classroom. Be sure to scroll all the way down the page to see all the many subject matter resources available! Students of EDTC 615 might wish to start their Strategies Search here!

Not every school has the resources necessary to take their students on an airplane . . . or spaceship. The iPad can bring the world to your students' fingertips in ways never before possible. Many national parks and museums have apps designed for onsite visitors.

Teacher resources and professional development across the curriculum.

A great Web 2.0 tool for creative writing. This would be useful in a Social Studies class for students to work together to create a story based on the time period being studied. I have found this very easy to use.

This blog post discusses the advantages of doing a search in Diigo using the 'community' search function as opposed to doing a search in Google. This can be used to demonstrate to colleagues as well as students the benefits of doing educational searches via curated social bookmarking sites such as Diigo.