Websites of the Week

http://www.tiny.cc/   Ever need students or co-workers to visit a website, but the URL address seems a mile long? In most cases, unless you are able to click on the link directly, you'll have to retype it trying to figure out exactly where you went wrong.  Tiny.cc allows you to copy and paste the long URL and it will generate a smaller version that is easier for everyone to type and even email without wrapping or breaking.

http://www.free.ed.gov/index.cfmFederal Resources for Educational Excellence (FREE) makes it easier to find teaching and learning resources from the federal government. There are more than 1,500 federally supported teaching and learning resources included from dozens of federal agencies. Check this site often as new resources are added frequently. Scroll down to the subject map to quickly find your subject area.

Student Technology Standards: http://www.iste.org/Content/NavigationMenu/NETS/ForStudents/2007Standards/NETS_for_Students_2007_Standards.pdf

Teacher Technology Standards: http://www.iste.org/Content/NavigationMenu/NETS/ForTeachers/2008Standards/NETS_T_Standards_Final.pdf

http://ecedweb.unomaha.edu/lessons/lessons.cfm

http://www.younginvestor.com/ 
With so much emphasis being placed on the economy in today's news, it is only natural for students of all ages to question you about the economy, what the headlines mean, and what is going to happen. This week's websites of the week will help you teach the economy and answer those hard questions.

This week's website of the week is a computer-generated behavior report card available through Intervention Central. The site allows you to create a customized behavior report card tailored to your students' needs. Choose items to appear in the report card, write your own choices, or select behavior items from the list and edit them to suit your needs. Then rate the students' progress daily, weekly or based on your own monitoring chart and provide feedback based on their improvement of the targeted behaviors.
http://www.jimwrightonline.com/php/tbrc/tbrc.php --Behavior Report Card
http://www.interventioncentral.org/ --Intervention Central

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/templates/FX102637481033.aspx 
At this site (not one that most people would think of to go to) teachers can find lots of instructional materials and information, including lesson plans, tutorials and how to articles. Also, there are tons of educational templates ranging from newsletters to achievement certificates to inspirational posters to even seating charts. Before you create it yourself, why not check here to see if it has already been done for you?

This week's website is one of my personal favorites. www.ikeepbookmarks.com is a free site that allows you to save all your favorite websites in one location. In the past, if you bookmarked a website on a computer you only had access to that favorites list on that computer. ikeepbookmarks allows to get to your favorite websites from any computer/any location. Plus, you can create folders to categorize your sites and write a brief description. This organization certainly helps when you can't remember the address of the site, only what it does or the information it contains.

Remember, it is a free site, but you must create an account in order to save your sites. I've been using ikeepbookmarks for almost five years, so I don't think it is going to disappear.

www.TeacherTube.com is a video sharing website similar to YouTube. It is designed to allow teachers to share educational resources. The site contains a mixture of classroom teaching resources and teacher training videos. As of this summer, the website contained over 26,000 videos.

www.SchoolTube.com is another similar site that provides students and educators a safe, free area for sharing media. All student created materials on SchoolTube must be approved by registered teachers and follow SchoolTube's guidelines. What a great place to display your student's media festival projects!

I'm asked often about free sites to teach keyboarding skills. Even at the high school level, students continue to hunt and peck at the keys on the keyboard. 
For keyboarding practice for your students, try one of these site. http://www.freetypinggame.net/free-typing-lesson.asp (lessons)  http://www.freetypinggame.net/play12.asp (practice game) http://www.keybr.com/ (timed practice)

http://www.instructables.com/index 
The Instructables website has around 10,000 how-to projects. There's arts and crafts and food and photography, tech projects, ride (bikes and cars), home projects, green projects for making your life greener, and offbeat projects including home repair to taxidermy.  The projects recently featured on Instructables' homepage include making earrings out of old bits of electronic circuit board, a hexabot (six legged robot), a Lego USB stick, etc.

http://www.handsonbanking.org/en/ 
Wells Fargo provides a free curriculum that is engaging and fun for school-age students and meets or exceeds standards for economics, financial literacy, mathematics and English language arts. Their are age-specific lessons to help students address real-life financial situations. Hands on Banking covers topics including budgeting, the importance of saving, bank accounts and services, establishing and maintaining good credit, planning for college, buying a car, basic investing, and more.

-Available free on the Internet, CD-ROM, and printed curriculum -Colorful, interactive instruction in English and Spanish for four age groups, from 4th grade through adult -Animated, narrated, and closed-captioned           -Special online features including calculators, ATM simulator, online banking tour, dictionary of financial terms, library of reference articles, and helpful web links -Ideal for self-study or classroom use -Teacher's Guides include worksheets, teaching tips, classroom activities, assessments, and more

http://www.bos.frb.org/peanuts/indexnosound.htm  Another fun site is the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston's interactive baseball game that tests your knowledge of economics and pro sports trivia. Sports are the hook, but Peanuts & Crackerjacks is really about using economics to gain a better understanding of everyday life.

Exploratree is a free web resource where you can access a library of ready-made interactive thinking maps. You can print them, edit them, make your own and even share them and work on them in groups.  You do not have to register to use the site, but if you would like to save them, email them or work on a collaborative project, a free account is required.  (This is a great resource for students who need to create thinking maps at home and don't have access to Inspiration.)  www.exploratree.org   

http://www.footnote.com/   Footnote is a website where people connect with history and with each other. The site includes millions of images of documents from American history. Included at the site are microfilm reels from the National Archive that have been digitized. What's different and especially nice about Footnote is that users can share their comments on the documents, and are encouraged to scan and upload historical documents, such as photos and letters.

http://tones.wolfram.com/  WolframTones works by taking simple programs from Wolfram's computational universe, and using music theory and mathematical algorithms to render them as music.  It's all original music--fresh from "mining" Wolfram's computational universe. It is a great site for students to use to create original music in their podcasts, powerpoints or any other multimedia presentation.

Looking for a way to present current events in a different way? Wanting your students to get excited about reading the news? Try http://tenbyten.org/10x10.html. 10x10 presents the news in a 10x10 grid of photographs. Instead of headlines, a grid of 100 photos guides viewers to the top stories of the hour. Just click on an image and several headlines related to that image pop up. Then just click the headline to read the article from sources all over the world.  The articles are chosen based on elaborate mathematical and linguistic analysis on the text contained in the top news stories. After this process, conclusions are automatically drawn about the hour's most important words. The top 100 words are chosen, along with 100 corresponding images.

Looking for a new way to teach vocabulary? Try http://www.wordahead.com/WordList/tabid/71/Default.aspx . WordAhead is a ground breaking free video vocabulary builder. The website has a collection of short, simple and fun video clips with pictures, illustrations or animations and an audio narration to correctly pronounce, define, and provide examples of words in context. The website is a great learning and teaching tool equally benefitting both students and teachers.  Also, why not assign your students to create a quick 30-45 video to teach others a new vocabulary word? Then, upload it to WordAhead for others to use.

http://www.internet4classrooms.com/assistance.htm   Not a particularly fun-sounding site? Well, this actually is a diamond in the rough for classroom teachers. Two educational consultants have searched the Web for the main concepts covered in most state standardized tests, listed those concepts, and then listed the online games that address those concepts. Is your sixth grade class struggling with place value? Check out the five games recommended for reviewing place value. Want games that specifically address mouse skills for pre-k? They are there too!

http://www.whichbook.net/   Whichbook is a site that gives readers an enjoyable and easy way to find books to match their mood and idea of a good book.  Instead of starting from the overwhelming choice of books available, whichbook starts from the reader and enables each individual to build the elements of what he/she considers a good read. Just click on the bar and then adjust the arrow to the left or right depending on your preference. Example: Click on the Happy--Sad bar and then move to arrow to match the type of book you want to read. You may select up to four bars or criteria.

http://www.learninggamesforkids.com/       Learning Games for Kids is a great website that has games for every subject even including art, health and keyboarding. Studies have shown that gaming is a great way to reinforce curriculum and "trick" students into learning.

http://www.thinkfinity.org/standards_alignment.aspx     Thinkfinity is in the process of aligning state and national standards to the countless number of resources they have accumulated over the years. Just use the gold box over on the right hand side of the page to search for lesson plans, interactive sites, etc. I've sent several sites from Thinkfinity in the past (newspaper generator, comic strip generator, etc.), but this new feature will make finding lessons and activities aligned to our standards much easier!

http://www.dogonews.com/  I found this site today while searching for some "math in the real world" videos. It is a website for kids that includes news children would be interested in (Lady GaGa is designing a wardrobe for Barbie), websites and videos. Make sure you click on Earth to see where the news articles relate to. You can search by subject or do a keyword search. The math videos and websites I looked at seem very interesting and hopefully beneficial for you and your students.

This is a neat site for vocabulary website that features a different word every day in a video. You can also create your own video of your current vocabulary words.   http://vocabahead.com/Home/tabid/37/Default.aspx

FableVision is website that provides free inspirational posters for students and teachers. You can print, download or save the poster of your choice. Keep checking back though because they are constantly updating the choices.   http://www.fablevision.com/posters/

Edheads is an interactive website that helps students learn through educational games and activities designed to meet state and national standards. Some of the neat online games they offer include performing brain surgery and hip replacement surgery, designing a cell phone, investigating a crash scene using forensics and other activities that focus on simple machines and weather.  http://www.edheads.org/

The state of Alabama has a great resource called ALEX (Alabama Learning Exchange) that is available and free to everyone. The link I have attached is to search for interactive websites for students to use in correlation to standards (Alabama's).  These websites are fabulous to use with your interactive tablets/slates in your classroom!  http://alex.state.al.us/searchWR.php?fa_submit=WR

Aviary is a suite of powerful creative applications that you can use right from the web. Their mission is to make creation accessible to artists of all genres, from graphic design to audio editing. The site is making this possible without have to purchase or download additional programs. It includes a number of tools including an image editor, color editor, effects editor, vector editor, image markup and an audio editor that are all free to use.  http://aviary.com/home 

Remember a while back I shared the website tinyurl.com with you? Well, if you liked tinyurl, you are going to love fur.ly. Using fur.ly you can shorten several related urls at once for students to use. It is easy to move between them too without a lot of typing on the students' part.  P.S. There is no .com, .org, etc. It is just http://fur.ly/

The National Library of Virtual Manipulatives is an National Science Foundation supported project designed to develop a library of interactive, web-based virtual manipulatives for K-12 education. Although the primary focus is math, there are several manipulatives that will work for other subject areas (bar graph, pie chart, converting units, etc.). These manipulatives would be great to use with the Easiteach software.  http://nlvm.usu.edu/

Lumosity Brain Games is a website for anyone who wants to improve brain memory and attention. According to the website, mental workouts can improve the brain's health and function. The games focus on speed, memory, attention, flexibility and problem solving. http://www.lumosity.com/brain-games

Next time you or your students are looking for quality images or other pieces of work that are in the public domain and copyright free, try Creative Commons. It is a site created by a non-profit organization that strives to increase the "amount of creativity (cultural, educational, and scientific content) in "the commons" - the body of work that is available to the public for free and legal sharing, use, repurposing and remixing."  http://creativecommons.org/    

http://www.factmonster.com/   Fact Monster is a great online resource that includes an almanac, encyclopedia, dictionary and thesaurus. Students can search by reference material, subject or can use the reference desk for homework help. You might also be interested in sharing with them the Analogy of the Day or Spelling Bee that is in the Features section.

http://www.awesomestories.com   AwesomeStories is large resource filled with primary-source information. Its purpose is to help educators and individuals find original sources, located at national archives, libraries, universities, museums, historical societies and government-created web sites. There are lots of stories available without logging in, but more are available once you register as an educator (for free!). In addition to text, narrations, slide shows, videos and images are available, in addition to lesson plans.