TeachingBooks.net has tons of resources to support exploration of books for elementary and middle school students. The cost tof bringing an authur to visit a school is an extraordinary one, TeachingBooks.net is a great way to bring authors directly into your classroom for free!
You can log by using the same username and passord: rocklandsls
Dabbleboard is an online whiteboard. The best way to learn about Dabbleboard and how it can benefit the classroom is to visit Dabbleboard and watch the video. See the Top 10 Reasons to use Dabbleboard.
Free Rice is a vocabulary game to help you enhance your speaking, writing and thinking. Free RIce is non-profit organization run by the United Nations Free Food Program. For every vocabulary word you get right, 10 grains of rice is donated to the program. The goals of the program are to help end world hunger and to provide free education.
If words are your game you also might want to check out Word Masters
Yesterday a group of us reviewed AYIT as a classroom tool. This challenging role playing game created by the High School students in Global Kids with the game developers at Gamelab, in which you take responsibility for a family of five in rural Haiti. We found that it puts survival into a practical perspective, forcing students to realize the reality of our basic needs versus things we want in order to better our lives. Students in grades 4-12 will likely benefit most from this because of its required background knowledge and ability to interpret deeper thinking from its activities. This tool is especially helpful when teaching social studies, geography, sociology, and economics. Students can interact with it thoroughly because it is aesthetically appealing and puts the students in control.
None of us were able to survive this challenge; hopefully your students will have better luck!
If we believe that blogging allows students to identify, evaluate, and reflect on their own learning and make adjustments when necessary, should individual classroom blogs be locked down with a student password? Or should the blogs be authentic and available for the world to see? What do you think?
I was at a workshop today and the article 10 Technology Enhanced Alternatives to Book Reportswas shared with the group. These are great alternatives to book reports that will keep your students engaged and motivated. Most of the mentioned tools have the added benefit of being able to be embedded into your blog, website, or wiki.
Danny Nicholson operates a blog titled, " Whiteboard Blog." I would like to thank him for sharing all of his inspirational writing, whiteboard tools and awesome resources!
If you have any resources that you would like to share, please let me know.
