Westport Public Schools - ITL

"A Planning Guide for Empowering Learnersis a program evaluation, planning, implementation and advocacy tool that will ensure school library program planners go beyond the basics to provide goals, priorities, criteria, and general principles for establishing effective library programs. The guide includes a revised School Library Program Assessment Rubric, a tool that allows school librarians to assess their program on 16 different sets of criteria. You can immediately start using this valuable resource to plan for your 2010-2011 school year!"

"BookFest Celebrate. Discover. Discuss. Saturday, October 30, 2010 9:30 am - 3:00 pm"

"Next Vista for Learning and CUE are sponsoring a video contest asking students to create short videos creatively explaining any concept one might encounter in elementary, middle, or high school. In 60 seconds or less, your video should help a student understand some concept encountered in school: covalent bonds, adding fractions, haiku poetry, the Magna Carta, the difference between por and para in Spanish, or anything else for which you have a clever insight."

from Free Tech 4 Teachers: "C-Span Classroom has created some new resources and updated some old resources for teachers for the 2010/2011 school year. C-Span's video library includes a section called Constitution Clips. Constitution Clips is comprised of videos of members of Congress and Presidents giving speeches that relate to sections of the US Constitution. For each section of the Constitution there is a selection of videos ready for you to use in your classroom. The videos can be embedded into your class blog or website."

"This tutorial is designed so that you can learn how to use the tools of web 2.0 for your classes or for fun."

free e-book: "Students have more information at their fingertips than ever before, yet the challenge remains for them to find, evaluate, and apply the information they discover in the classroom and beyond."

from the site: "Dimensions is an experimental prototype for the BBC. We want to bring home the human scale of events and places in history. The D-Day landing beaches measured from London to Norfolk in the UK. How far would the Titanic stretch down your street?"

Turn your Google search into a visual story!

possible lesson for connecting search ideas

"Forty years ago, advances in fertilizers and pesticides boosted crop yield and fed a growing planet. Today, demand for food fueled by rises in worldwide consumption of meat and protein is again outpacing farmers ability to keep up. It's time for the next Green Revolution. To explore the Wired Atlas, use the thumbnails to navigate from page to page. Click the main image to zoom, and click again for the navigation box to scroll through the spread."

" Developed for students as well as the general public, these interactive learning activities are designed to give you a fresh perspective on how the United States Congress works, your role in the process, and peoples' perceptions about Congress. To open the modules, click the graphic."

This activity illustrates how seismic waves are used to determine the magnitude of an earthquake and to locate its epicenter.

digital publication

teaching resources

From Free Tech 4 Teachers: "The Nagasaki Archive places the images of survivors and their stories on a Google Earth map. Some of the stories are only available in Japanese while others are available in English. The map also contains images of the destruction caused by the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki. The Nagasaki Archive uses the Google Earth plug-in."

free, open-source desktop-publishing option