Wissahickon Staff Developers

The official portal to the Standards Aligned System, with standards, frameworks, instructional materials, resources and much more.

Below is the list of websites that I use on a regular basis to enrich and differentiate instruction and content.  The services of the sites listed are free or of minimal costs. A really nice list of tools, not overwhelming, and very resourceful.

Real life experts in the field share their knowledge. Great resource for teachers wanting to provide first hand digital tellings.

FREE lessons and ideas to educate our students on the ins and outs of digital responsibility

"For a web-based learning to be truly effective it must be interactive. This means that it is not just a reformatted canned lesson of printed worksheets placed on the web. The web-based activity is inquiry-based and incorporates the full features available on the web - interactivity between computer and student. The learning activity must engage student critical thinking skills by using the scientific inquiry process."

a site that dares to enlighten about pedagogy and theory in education today

"Speck (1996) notes that the following important points of adult learning theory should be considered when professional development activities are designed for educators: "

It's another source for information on web 2.0 apps used in schools.

Google Wonder Wheel is a new great feature from Google which allows you to see relevant search results to your query in a unique semantically relevant and graphically design way. The following is a step by step guide on how to use the GoogleWonderWheel tool:

"The use of this interactive wireless technology is ideal for stimulating student involvement using both interactive whiteboards and for one computer classrooms. "

This is an amazing resource for teachers of all content areas. Along the same lines as NLVM, but with more content areas covered. Many lessons may be used with your ESL students.

More content than NLVM, AMAZING resource for interactives, videos and lessons. Good for all grades. Worth promoting with your teachers!

"Home of SMARTBoard Mini-Movies - Flash animations that teachers can download and use on their interactive whiteboards!"

"More and more educators and students are using Prezi in the classroom. We want to capture the ideas and experiences of our educational community by sharing, adding, and cataloging great prezis used for educating around the world. "

Excellent videos and images free to use in the classroom. Science and Social Studies resources significantly more engaging than math.

Wouldn't it be great to invite authors into your classroom or library to video chat with students before, during, and/or after you've read their books? We are growing a list of authors who want to make that connection with you. See the alphabetical list in the scrolling author box on the left. Read on to find out just how easy it is!

"When instructors adapt their course materials to the online environment, they should be sensitive to the advantages and disadvantages of the Virtual Classroom. Web-based learning is well-suited for communications, collaboration, and information acquisition, but not for reading long text files. It is difficult to read screen after screen of text on a computer. In the Virtual Classroom, text-based lectures should be short and few. With this being the case, where are students going to get the information they need in obtaining the learning objectives?"

this online program allows students to create a variety of data organizers and is easy to use

A great list of things you can learn from Twitter, and reasons why you should be on Twitter yourself!

"Online professional development (PD) fits today's fast changing K-12 educational environment where demands on teachers and re-certification require teachers to continually learn new and challenging content and pedagogy. Online professional development has the benefit of supporting teachers in their daily practice and connecting them with a network of like-minded professionals so that they can learn and share with each other."