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Great article about Essential Questions. Author also includes links to other "essential question" resources. I appreciate these technologies that support cues, questions, and advanced organizers which assist me with gathering and organizing students' responses into useful information quickly

Looking for activities and lessons for preparing students for the 21st century? Well, this is the jackpot of resources. I was introduced to this site at a conference on the subject of 21st Century curriculum, and this site is loaded with ideas for alternative forms for assessing students. You will also find various links to websites that offer interactive and student owned activities and projects.

I like this one. I had fun playing with Google Image Swirl. Does anyone use any of the curriculum mapping resources. Some of them looked similar to what we're using in the "Best Practices" course.

Using Quia, you can create your own or use other teacher's activities to provide students extra practice and extended learning time! There are activities in all subjects and levels and you can browse by category, activity type, or most popular activities. I found numerous Java games that were created to reinforce music skills. For example, my students could use the site to study for our upcoming terms, signs, and symbols quiz. There were free, online flashcards, matching, concentration, and word search games that reviewed all the terms I've been teaching. You can share all activities you create with other teachers and you can copy and modify other teacher's activities and contact them if you have a question. If you create a quiz in Quia, it will automatically grade it for you and track student's test scores throughout the year. You can also track how long a student spends on Quia activities. The site offers online surveys, activities in 100 languages and a calendar feature for communicating deadlines and assignments to students and parents.

This site has pretty much anything you could want to help students practice or review content. I checked out the math, biology, and art sections and found literally all kinds of interactive games, flashcards, and quizzes on a variety of topics. The site is very easy to use and find the topic you need; the search function allows you to search by category or textbook. If you make an account, you are able to create your own activities and quizzes and also view your students' results for the activities they have completed. I will definitely come back here.

NBC News Archives on Demand (K-12) is a collection of NBC News videos, primary source documents, images, and resources specifically designed for use in the K-12 classroom. Thousands of searchable and downloadable resources (1600s to Today) Video content aligned to State Standards Current Events updated regularly Sciences, Social Studies, Language Arts, Health and Business Personalized playlists for teachers and students Revolutionary flippable media player. I showed my students clips showing how the climate change is impacting our planet.

This website has many different strategies for lessons (including assessing students) in the elementary grades.

This is a site with many useful resources. Some of the resources are in PDF format and well designed. For example, a form for students to write a current event article is perfect for upper elementary and middle school students. I will use this in situations when students are absent on the day of our weekly NewsGame. The site is well designed and has a real teacher-friendly feel to it.

Looking for an alternative way to search for images? Tag Galaxy is a site where you can type in a subject, such as "The Revolutionary War", and you'll be directed to a selection of photographs about the Revolutionary war. These are photographs that people have tagged, and many of the photos come with descriptions. This is a great site for visual learning.

this is a very useful site to find images, is there a way for students to copy or use these photos?

I was able to get back to the original Flickr page by clicking on the image (double click?). Once there, I found the ones I looked at to be "all rights reserved."

This is a fabulous site, but unfortunately it cost $60 per year to have full access. One pro is that there is absolutely no advertising and the material is very well organized. The content is suitable for elementary school children to practice and review skills in all subject areas. You can specifically select the grade level and subject. They do offer a free trial.

great resource for teachers and students for how things work for just about every topic/subject. all information is up-to date and many photos are included.

Great way to create visual projects!!

This site can be used make a visual representation of text. You could also use it to help kids evaluate a writing piece's word choice, for words that are used most often are displayed the largest in a wordle. Students could then revise their writing and show word choice changes by creating a second wordle from their modified writing piece.

A great place for students to practice spelling words, adjectives, nouns, etc by creating a word cloud. When you type the words, they only appears as plain type in a word processing format but once you click "go", Wordle does it's magic and creates the cloud. Word clouds are words scattered all over the page in all different ways. The more a certain word is typed, the larger it appears in the word cloud. You can also change background and font once the word cloud is made. This is a great website! So much fun and so many possibilites!

I like the way this system of note-taking guides the student to first sift their notes for important ideas, then to summarize. Both of those processing activities help learning.

This is a really cool website for students and/or adult s who are either an ESL student, studying English as a foreign language or who just want to brush up on their English. This website offers everything from games to pronunciation to slang and idioms. This site can also be used in the classroom to help students studying specific components of English such as figurative language. Students can practice what they have learned by taking the quizzes or play a word game. While searching through this website I actually learned a few new things! This website really does have everything!

StumbleUpon, while blocked by our schools servers, might be helpful for teachers at home. After you create a free account, you can build your "profile". Your profile tells the website what you are interested in. There are numerous topics to check. After you have entered your interests, you click the "stumbleupon" button and the website will take you to a random web page that it things will interest you. You can either "like" or "dislike" each page that it takes you too, and the web site will learn more what you like. This site could be particularly helpful in finding activities for your students that you couldn't find by searching on Google. I just found out about this site from a friend, and so far I've found some pretty cool resources that I don't think I would have found otherwise.

Wow, I just signed up... that is very cool. I think middle school and high school students would really like it. It would be very fun to use at school with the kids, but by only having control of topics and not knowing what you're going to get for content, we need to be cafeful. I really like it and can see spending hours in there.

I submitted it for review. We'll see what happens.

This easy-to-make Play-Doh can be used within a classroom as a way for students to make multiple representations.

My favorite thing about this recipe is that if the play-doh dries out, you can easily add water and it comes back to life. Talk about a renewable resource!

I made this with my Kindergarten class and they loved it! Thanks for the recipe!!

Dipity allows the user to create a timeline that can make events come alive using media tools.

Wow! What a great tool for making timelines fun and interesting for students!

I will share this website with my own high school age children! It definitely gives students an opportunity to present information in an interesting fashion.

This is a website that allows you to add up to six events to a timeline, which can be a great way for students to organize and make sense of materials, especially in a book with a confusing plot.

This site really makes it quick and easy to create a timeline with both dates and descriptions. I plan to utilize this site for reviewing a few social studies units. As we are studying the Constitution, I have students record in their notes a list of major events in chronological order. They might actually enjoy creating a timeline using this site and printing out the results.

This timeline seems pretty simple and easy to use. I think that I could use it in my new Music Appreciation class that I'm teaching next year. It would really help students with remembering composers/artists dates.

Helps to collaborate and summarize collective notes

The Big Six is an information seeking strategy developed by Michael B. Eisenberg and Robert E. Berkowitz that assists students in information problem solving. Teachers and librarians would greatly benefit from this organization tool to get students organized BEFORE they begin their research. Once students have their topics for research, they are able to use the Big Six strategy to guide them through their research. This pdf file will allow students to save it and once saved, they are able to click on comment and type their information into the file. There is another version of the Big Six for elementary called: Plan, Do, Review.

Interactive way for students to practice a variety of geography and math exercises.

I tried this out and really liked the math practice. I can have my students practice their addition and subtraction facts easily. In addition to that they can select how many digits to add or subtract and if they will be required to carry or borrow when doing so. I also really liked the Little Farmer money practice. This is a major concept we work on in second grade, so this site would be perfect!

Thank you for sharing this, Greg. I appreciate how the different activities are leveled. I will plan to use this to help my students practice long division, a skill that they are all over the place on in terms of abilities.

This Nat Geo site has a variety of custom overlays for maps.  Has applications for science, social studies, and more.

Up to 5 GB of FREE storage in the cloud. This can be accessed at school and can eliminate the need for flashdrives. It is more user frinedly than Googledocs.