EdNET's Best for 2011: Teachers Select

www.brainpop.com is an online website that can expand your curriculum in all grade levels.  It has videos on every subject: Math, Writing, Social Studies, Reading, English, Health, Science, Art & Music. I use BrainPop lessons to help my students make understand a topic more. After the videos, there are quizzes that can be done right there on the computer, or they can be printed. The videos are interesting, fun and enjoyable. You do have to register and get an account, but many schools have an account set up for the entire school.  It is well worth the registration fee.  

www.donorschoose.org is a website where teachers can write a project proposal for ANYTHING they need for their classroom and random donors will sponsor their project. Teachers can build their classroom essentials or their classroom extras simply by creating projects on Donors Choose. There is also a support system established on Donors Choose chat walls for teachers to share their project ideas and chat with teachers across America about the profound impact this website has had on the lives of their students and their classrooms. The great thing about Donors Choose is once you start you will realize how easy it really is to develop your classroom! Check out Donors Choose at www.donorschoose.org and start getting free stuff for your classroom today!

The WeAreTeachers resource is a go-to place to find many free resources from both educators and companies. WeAreTeachers always has several grants available and they have made it so simple with it only taking 5 minutes to submit for a grant. WeAreTeachers also has over 11,000 teacher ideas that have been created by teachers. Teaching ideas range from topics on classroom management, Earth Day, promoting literacy or using the latest technology tools are all available for free.

WeAreTeachers

The free downloadable software available at https://www.dropbox.com/ allows users to store files online.  Drag a file to your dropbox, sit down at different computer and open your dropbox by either using the icon if it's a your computer or by logging in on the web site.  It makes storing and accessing files very simple with no flash drives needed.  It installs on PC, Mac or even Linux!  Great for students for use between home and school.

I believe Google Docs is the best free resource for education. Google Docs allows students and teachers to collaborate anytime and anywhere on research papers, spreadsheets, presentations and surveys. The web-based tool eliminates compatibility issues encountered with computer based software. Features such as revision history, equation editor, translator and widgets make this tool perfect for all content areas.

If your school doesn't have a Google Apps for Education account, teachers can still publish documents from their personal Google Account and have students collaborate on the document without signing in. Google Docs is flexible and is always improving. Awesome tool for teaching and learning! 

Verizon Thinkfinity is a free resource for educators, students and parents.  Consider it a web portal to a plethora of resources from partner sites like Smithsonian and ReadWriteThink.  This site has it all: lesson plans, student interactives, activity sheets and so forth.  Check out Comic Creator or Alphabet Organizer. Available professional development and an active online community are also part of this site.

My students and I love glogster - http://edu.glogster.com/

Glogster is an inneractive poster program.  You can add videos, pictures, text, annimated images and more.  My students love to express their creativity and show off their work using a glog.  As a teacher, I find it very easy for students to use and look forward to seeing their final products.

My favorite sustainability curricula organization is Facing the Future. They have fantastic activities that can be scaled from one lesson to a whole semester or year. Their website has loads of free downloadable stuff, a database of action projects and service learning efforts, and a community. They are always developing new curricula - like a companion guide to go with the Story of Stuff video that gets kids thinking about consumerism, where our stuff comes from and goes. They have lots of activities exploring the inter-connections and inter-disciplinary nature of sustainability: the environment, the economy and society. And they are fun! There are tons of environmental education curricula out there - Facing the Future is one of the best!!!  www.facingthefuture.org

I love Http://www.starfall.com. I teach kindergarten and when I do center time I put my students who needs help with sounds or identifying letters on starfall.com and they love it. Starfall show the letter says the letter and the sounds. Then they show pictures to the letters. For the advance kids they can read fun stories. The program has rhyming words, calendars and many more. It's one of the best free program I use to help my students.

The Verizon Thinkfinity site (www.thinkfinity.org) is totally FREE to educators, students, and parents! The resources have been developed by content experts for grades PreK-12 and are aligned to not only national, but state standards. Teachers have access to lessons, activities, and all materials to support each lesson. The lessons are set up to provide the standards, learning objectives, procedures, step by step thoughts about what to ask and how to approach the activities, with assessment ideas and extensions for each to support differentiation. The teachers even have opportunities for free professional development from 30-60 minute webinars, to online courses, to face to face sessions. Even better, teachers now have the opportunity to share, connect, and collaborate through the Thinkfinity Community ( www.thinkfinity.org/community)! Now you can join groups of common educational interests, make friends with teachers to share resources and ask questions of one another, and save your favorite resources all in one location. Students and parents may also connect and learn through www.thinkfinity.org by clicking on the At Home and After School tab!  

The Learning Network - NYT

My experience with this site dates to its inception, when Alison Zimbalist constructed a group of pilot affiliates in schools nationally and worldwide. Katherine Schulten's direction and writing keeps The Learning Network a state-of-the-art point of engagement for everyone with a stake in educational outcomes, where learners are the key audience, as they should be. 

The Times is keeping its long-standing commitment to educators and students by making this blog and its linked articles accessible to educators and students without a subscription. It is a treasure chest of ways for students to learn and express their own opinions, and for educators  to become engaged in best practices that consistently raise-the-bar as well. 

Self described, "An online current and special events news site for grades 3-12; updated weekdays during the school year."
learning.blogs.nytimes.com/ 

This is a great website that gives students hands-on experiences using virtual manipulatives.  It is divided into grade bands and has manipulatives for numbers and operations, geometry, measurement, algebra, and data analysis/probability.  The site is user friendly and my students love to be able to use it for math concepts!

http://nlvm.usu.edu/en/nav/vlibrary.html

I use BrainPop lessons to help my students make connections between what we are working on right now in English / Writing classes and what they need to know now and for the future.  The videos are interest-catching, even for high schoolers, and they drive home the main points.  I can pause and emphasize what I want them to know.  I can use closed captioning to "force" my students to read as they listen, thus promoting independence in their reading.  I use the quizzes as a whole-class review of the materials just learned, then follow up the next day with a print-out of the same assessment.  This way they are familiar with the assessment instrument and the format, and it reinforces the previous day's lesson content.  I currently only use their English / Writing content, but they have info and video lessons on every core curricular area that I could tap into.

My students really enjoy cnn students news. www.cnn.com/studentnews/?iref=all search

CNN Student News is a ten-minute, commercial-free, daily news program for middle and high school students produced by the journalists and educators at CNN. This award-winning show and its companion Web site are available free of charge throughout the school year.

http://www.facingthefuture.org/

Buy, Use, Toss: A Closer Look at the Things We Buy

Unit Available as a Free Download

Facing the Future is an online resource that supports the teaching of sustainability and globalization.  I just completed the unit, Buy, Use, Toss , with my reading classes today and found it to be a terrific resource for systematically getting kids to think about consumer choices and where our stuff goes when we 'toss' it.  A highlight of the unit was digging through a day's worth of trash as garbologists!  Because several of the lessons have articles to read as part of the activity, I was able to incorporate reading with science and social studies while studying a very relevant and serious issue.  The lessons were easy to adapt to my learners' styles and I'm looking forward to comparing the pre- and post-assessment data from the provided test.  This unit was very hands-on and helped me think about the concept of sustainability in a way that I could share with middle-schoolers.

As an Eighth grade English teacher, I love to use wikispaces, it is really easy to use and totally motivates the students.  I have used wikispaces to make progressive short stories, to which different students log on everyday to add to a class story.  We also use wikispaces when we read our class novels.  I will post a discussion question about the novel and kids can add their thoughts. 

Storybird A hugely motivating site. The kids can write stories and publish them both online and off. The artwork is wonderful and varied. Not only is this site wonderful for writers but for artists as well. My 6th graders were able to write at a variety of levels using the artwork to support their stories. In fact, several purchased copies of their books and the quality was terrific. This is the best find for me in the last two years.

Thinkfinity provides all the tools any educator would use regardless of the educational environment.  Thinkfinity has first-class quality resources including lesson plans, interactives, podcasts, videos, activity sheets and virtual field trips.  Every discipline is covered from Pre-K to college and adult literacy.  Thinkfinity also provides the requisite Professional Development to accompany the proper strategies of integrating the resources into any curriculum.  To make this an even more viable educational site, a special Community has been established for teachers to save favorite resources and  communicate freely with each other.  And, all of this is provided without charge.   Join the millions of educators who use Thinkfinity every day.   

Thinkfinity is a free website with a database of thousands of resources that are available at your fingertips to use in any classroom with or without a computer. The resources include standard-based lesson plans, engaging online interactive learning tools, downloadable worksheets and assessments, videos, podcasts etc. and an online community where teachers can network with others who teach similar subjects or grade levels. Thinkfinity is supported by Verizon, who has partnered with leading educational websites, to create teacher-tested and approved material for your classroom. Additionally, there are resources for parents to help their children be more successful in school are available, as well as professional development opportunities for teachers.