Minchau School

Great list of different sites on habitats

Reading/Math site similar to Starfall...

The idea behind the site is to introduce students to a variety of books and form classroom book groups.  How does Extreme Speed Booking work?  A whole lot like speed dating.      Students spend a little time with each book and then rate them accordingly with "I want to read more",  "Interesting", "Not for me", or "I've already read".  Students can also make a note of how interested they are in reading the book (maybe a 1-10 scale)?  This process introduces students to a variety of books, genres and authors.  Students may come across titles and authors they wouldn't otherwise find.  It also helps teachers form classroom book groups that are of high-interest and investment to students because they had input. iLearn Technology

Museum Box is a great tool for creating virtual displays of artifacts that you find online.  Using Museum Box students can organize images, text, videos, links, and audio clips about any topic that they're researching. When completed , students' "boxes" become digital dioramas.

Alberta Legislature Virtual Visit

Animal videos and information

A short video of 2011 in review (more for grade 5/6s) 

To help you start off 2011 with some good resources to try in your classrooms, I'm posting a list of eleven good resources to try, today's list features language arts resources. In creating this list I branched out a bit to include ESL/ ELL resources.

 Sweet Search is a search engine that searches only the sites that have been reviewed and approved by a team of librarians, teachers, and research experts. In all there are 35,000 websites that have been reviewed and approved by Sweet Search. In addition to the general search engine, Sweet Search offers five niche search engines. The niche search engines are for Social Studies, Biographies, SweetSites (organized by grade and subject area), School Librarians, and Sweet Search 4 Me (for elementary school students). (Richard Byrne) 

Twurdy is search tool that automatically displays the readability of your search results for you. Twurdy uses a simple color-coded system to indicate how easy or difficult it is to read a particular website in your search results. There are three types of Twurdy searches; Just Twurdy, Simple Twurdy, and Twurdy with Pop. Here's how Twurdy defines the three search types: Just Twurdy - searches using Twurdy's basic algorithm with medium speed and medium results.  Simple Twurdy - searches using Twurdy's simple algorithm for fast speed but less accurate results  Twurdy with Pop - searches using Twurdy's most complex algorithm which includes looking up the popularity of words within the text. It has a slower speed with more accurate results. (Richard Byrne)