Group items tagged

Ok, so you've probably seen some of these, but I needed a snazzy title. I recently compiled two lists of sites from Richard Byrne's Blog - the site is an amazing resource, and I'm pretty certain that Richard doesn't sleep. These aren't in order of greatness - they all have their own specific applications for education. A few of these appear on my Sites for Kids (and Teachers) page. Enjoy!

Aimed at young or inexperienced Web users, this video explains the long term risks of sharing inappropriate information online.

The concept of developmentally appropriate practices refers to providing an environment and offering content, materials, activities, and methodologies that are coordinated with a child's level of development and for which the individual child is ready. Three dimensions of appropriateness must be considered: age appropriateness, individual appropriateness, and appropriateness for the cultural and social context of the child.

60second Recap™ wants to make the great works of literature accessible, relevant, and, frankly, irresistible to today's teens. Through 60second Recap™ video albums, we seek to help teens engage with the best books out there ... not just to help them get better grades, but to help them build better lives.

"PaperRater.com analyzes documents immediately, 24/7, in real-time. We provide in depth analysis to help the student improve grammar and writing. You would expect PaperRater.com to take into account all rules related to spelling and grammar. However, you may be surprised to learn that Paper Rater also helps the student to improve the document's readability, word choice, and style. Additional analysis and comments are provided that help the student to improve his/her writing, not only on this assignment, but in all future writing assignments."

"A 3 minute introduction to the basics of cloud computing "

"These are just a very few examples of different types of poetry. Most of the definitions have at least one example of each particular type of poetry for better understanding. All examples were provided by the members of Shadow Poetry or previous Egroup. More definitions for related poetry items may be found in the Shadow Poetry Handbook (link located above). As a bonus, we feature poetry forms created by selected poets as new and challenging writing styles. Try not only the traditional forms, but some of the rewarding invented formats as well!"

"Learn a Language - or Learn 8 of Them! Learn a language here with Visual Link® Languages. You can learn over 1,400 words for free here! There are interactive audio/visual flash cards to help you learn a foreign language. There's also an addictive Lingo Dingo game to help you on your online language learning journey. As seen above, you can learn any language of your choice. You can also learn important phrases like greetings, survival expressions and slang words in the language of your choice. If you want verbs, there are over 350 verbs to help you with your language study. To our knowledge, this is the most extensive, free website dedicated to online language learning. Be sure to use it and pass it on to others. "

A virtual boatload of links and sites for ESL students

Instant Poetry forms.. enter your own information and a poem is formed. A lot of different options!

Buzzwords are frequently used in news media. These are words that do not typically occur in everyday speech, but are common among newscasters, talking heads, and pundits on cable news.

Word Tamer is a neat site for learning the process of developing characters, settings, and plots in creative writing. Word Tamer is set up as an interactive journey through a carnival of literary devices. As students move through the carnival they develop characters, develop a setting, and develop a plot for their stories. At each stop in the Word Tamer carnival students can print out the words they have written. Along the way there are videos to help students understand the roles of characters, settings, and plot development in crafting a good story.

As educators, we know that learning takes place every day and everywhere. But with the need for information and expertise in all sorts of related and unrelated fields these days, we just can't learn quickly or deeply enough to satisfy personal or professional demands. Consider the following approaches most people take:

Met Any Good Authors Lately? Classroom author visits can happen via Skype (here's a list of those who do it for free) Classroom author visits can happen via Skype (here's a list of those who do this for free)

This lesson will help students sort through the myriad points of view offered on the Internet and evaluate the sources and purposes of news articles and Web sites. Students will read articles from National Geographic News and answer questions describing each article's source, purpose, and viewpoint.

(PDF 251KB) The recently updated Lesson Activity Toolkit is a Gallery collection of customizable tools and templates, including activities, games and graphics, and tools that you can use to create professional-looking, interactive and engaging lessons.

One web page for every book ever published. It's a lofty, but achievable, goal. To build it, we need hundreds of millions of book records, a brand new database infrastructure for handling huge amounts of dynamic information, a wiki interface, multi-language support, and people who are willing to contribute their time, effort, and book data. To date, we have gathered about 30 million records (20 million are available through the site now), and more are on the way. We have built the database infrastructure and the wiki interface, and you can search millions of book records, narrow results by facet, and search across the full text of 1 million scanned books. Open Library is a project of the non-profit Internet Archive, and is funded in part by a grant from the California State Library. We have a small team of fantastic programmers who have accomplished a lot, but we can't do it alone! This is an Open project - the software is open, the data is open, the documentation is open, and the site is open.

You can use this tool to map out your informational essay. Enter your name and a topic for your map, and click OK to get started.

A plethora of writing resources to use with students.

ReadWriteThink offers a collection of online Student Materials to support literacy learning in the K-12 classroom. These interactive tools can be used to supplement a variety of lessons and provide an opportunity for students to use technology while developing their literacy skills. Click on the name of each interactive for a brief description of the tool and a list of the ReadWriteThink lessons that use the tool. From there you'll also be able to directly access the tool and use it in your classroom.