Web+Resources+for+Teaching

toc This page contains information about how to find resources as well as a lot of resources I have found.

How to find resources:

You can find resources in different ways.

=Searching= One of the challenges of finding resources is that what you call something may or may not be what someone else calls that thing. Try your words but be prepared to change them when you figure out what your thing is called by other people.

Sometimes a general search such as "web resources for education" will lead you to web sites with a lot of resources across the curriculum. You can add other general descriptors such as "k-12"

One of the challenges of searching is that you come up with a lot of junk. When you use quotation marks in your search, you can narrow down your findings to those which have the quoted phrase somewhere in the web site (it's not always obvious where the phrase is, but this technique does make a search better).

Many search engines have options that can make your search better. Go to: [] which has a lot of options (you can search patents, for example). Also [] gives you the different symbols you can use in a search to help with finding what you want.

StumbleUpon StumbleUpon ([]) involves jumping around from page to page every time you hit the stumbleupon button. If you join (it's free), you can specify the types of pages you want and it has social networking features. Members rate pages. so you frequently stumble on really good resources that you can bookmark.

Here are some of the great web sites I have found over a number of years of StumbleUpon and general searching. As of September 3, 2010, these links work.

=Teaching:= http://ckapenga13.wikispaces.com/Teaching+Resources

=**Literacy:**= [] This is a comic creator--a great place for reluctant writers to start writing. It's endorsed by the International Reading Association, so it is high quality.

[] Resources for teaching reading.

[] Make your own pop ups. Great for creating greeting cards or illustrating a student-written book.

[] Grammar tips

[] Thesaurus.

[] Poem made from confusing English words that don't follow consistent pronunciation rules.

[] Really high quality lesson for reading (starts with the newspaper and goes on from there). Portions of this set of activities could be used as well as the whole thing.

[] Shakespeare invented a lot of words!

[] An alphabet created from Google Earth images.

[] Teaching writing

[] Write a letter and print out one of these envelopes to mail it in. Uses Google Maps

[] Visual dictionary

=**Unclassifiable**= [] This is a place where you can design rooms. You might be able to use it to design your classroom's floor plan and it could be useful in kids' projects--to give them yet another perspective on something they are studying (e.g. homes around the world) or to give them an opportunity to map things or just to play with.

[] Click on an area in the image. It magnifies and you realize it is made up of tiny pictures. Click on one of these and it magnifies....to infinity, I suppose.

[] Creativity tools.

[] Information about gangs.

=**Humor:**= [] These are pictures of cats who are in sinks.

[] Why did the chicken cross the road? Answers as if written by famous philosophers.

=**Programming:**=

=Reading:= []

=**Educational Psychology**:= [] Electronic journals in psychology. Some of them you can read for free. [] American Psychological Association. Lots of interesting psychology-related information. [] Why do New Years Resolutions fail? Here's a psychology-based answer. [] Psychology resources on the web--covers a huge amount of topics. [] Educational psychology informational resources [] More educational psychology resources. [] Dictionary of psychological terms [] Resources on psychology [] Lots of resources related to concerns teachers might have (e.g., ADHD) [] Yet more resources. [] Still more resources. [] In case you didn't have enough resources...here are still more. [] Dictionary of psychology terms [] Another dictionary [] Another great resource for information on psychology. This one is a wiki. [|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downing_effect#Intelligence] Dunning Kruger effect [] Stanford prison experiment. This is a famous experiment about how ordinary people can become people with a prisoner mindset or guard mindset. The experiment had to be called off early because of the impact the experiment was having on the participants. [] More info on psychology [] Loads of information on specific disabilities [] Anti-bullying strategies. =**Animation:**= [] Example of stop motion animation (like claymation but with drawings).

=**Social Studies:**= [] Russian history (Tsars)

[] Library of Congress U.S. History site for kids.

[] Nineteenth century journals (newspapers). Primary source.

[] Appalachian history

[] All World Wars. Great resource for looking up background information. Has pictures from the time periods.

[] State of the Union addresses from 1790 to present

[] News videos from famous events in history.

[] Civil War archive file

[] A History of the World from BBC

[] Best history web sites

[] Great timeline. The goal of the website is for it to be a help for teaching and research.

[] What's happening right now? This website compiles images from lots of web cams (e.g., web cams of New York City streets).

[] History of the Viet Nam war in pictures

[] Resources for teaching about the Holocaust

[] Pop culture responses to the atomic bomb.

[] History of atomic bomb

[] How two specific towns were affected by the John Brown raids.

[] Archive of early america

[] Archive of materials on eugenics, a philosophy shared by Hitler and the founders of the Educational Testing "Service."

[] Maps of the world with freedom-recent statistics such as on voting rights.

=**Science:**= [] Links to a lot of neat websites that can be used for teaching.

[] Blosics 1 which is a physics-based game (think Newton's three laws of motion). This game is really fun and somewhat addictive. It has several levels you can play.

[] Blosics 2. Even better than Blosics 1.

[] More physics games.

[] History and science

[] Shows how much daylight there is per day at any latitude. This is a simulation so students can discover different aspects of seasons across the different parts of the world.

[] This page provides links to several websites where you can do virtual surgery. You can do a heart transplant or replace a knee. The website warns of which ones are a little gory. This is an example of a way students can participate in something even without training and they can learn a lot about it. Way better than the old game "Operation."

[] This website allows you to explore other planets as if you were on them! This is not a cartoonized version of life on another planet. These people use scientific data to generate an accurate world.

[] Bug guide for North America and Canada. Includes insects and arachnids.

[] Primary source historical documentation on Richard Feynman

[] More primary source documents of Feynman--photographs

[] History of science blog

Web-based Applications: [] Converts documents from one format to another (e.g., you can create a pdf file here).

=**Math**= [] Collect data over time and graph it. You can find patterns that way.

[] Make your own graph paper

[] Just what it says--crazy paper thing that's easy to make (and looks like fun).

[] Lots of resources for teaching math

[] Primary source documentation on Benoit Mandelbrot.

[] History of topology

=Teaching Techniques= [] 25 ways to get kids' attention

[] Avoiding death by power point.

=Universal Design for Learning= [] speech recognition

[] embeddable text to speech

[] Web reader (reads text out loud, available anywhere because it is web-based)

=Research= [] MIT believes in open source information and they have made numerous scholarly articles available.

[|http://ilectric.com] research tool

=**Technology**= [] Free tutorials on various kinds of software and webware.

[] List of free/open source programs

[] open source programs in education

[] open source k-12

[] 3-d programming and story making software

[] How to work with Alice [] e-learning resources

[] If you get into trying out new software, here is one place to go. My personal preference is for open source rather than freeware (free) or shareware ($) but I will use freeware when there is no open source alternative. Open source uses "copylefts," which are different from proprietary software's copyrights.

[] Learning with/through technology

[] List of Open Source software.

[] A research article about teaching online.

[|http://www.digibarn.com/collections/index.html#collection] Technological nostalgia--has pics and info on very old (e.g. 40 years) personal computer systems. If you ever used a Trash 80 or an Apple IIe, you might want to look here. This also shows how far we have come in terms of computer capabilities.

[] You don't know what an operating system is and you are embarrassed to ask. Just go to this webpage in the privacy of your own home and read.

[] Lots of web resources for elementary teachers.

=**General:**= [] TED is a collection of talks about different subjects that people have given. These are probably not videos you would show kids but they can teach you a lot. One of my favorites is Johnny Chung Lee's talk about how he has used wiimotes and infrared pens: []

[] Free resources for teachers

[] Resources for educating oneself (also helpful when needing to provide material for advanced learners).

[] This is one of my best resources for interesting web sites. Not only can you search within the makeuseof site, but every day they have a feature called "Cool Websites and Tools." You can read previous days' entries, so right here you have a huge amount of interesting stuff. They focus on free stuff.

[] Gizmo's Freeware review. You probably can't use the software on school computers (system administrators don't like people randomly adding programs to school computers) but this site lists a lot of web-based applications that you can use.

[] Documentary Heaven is the home of lots of educational videos (never show a video from this site without having screened it yourself because this is not a kid-safe site).

[] Online books for free--lots of educational resources.

[] More free books

[] Royalty-free photographs. If you are going to use photos in the classroom, you might want to grab fifty or a hundred photos yourself and make those available to kids rather than letting them roam this site in school. Not kid-safe.

[] Another website for finding interesting websites. It's like makeuseof.com.

[] Lots and lots of educational tools. This doesn't look like your typical educational website and the material is dry but it can be great background for you to have. For example, they have a punctuation guide that you could use to refresh your own memory.

[] Web search engines that get to pages that are not indexed in regular search engines.

[] Free college courses, which can provide challenging material for students who are advanced in one or more ways. There's no credit for these classes, but working on one of these would be great preparation for college at the high school level.

[] Resources across the curriculum for teachers

[] Documentaries (watch before sharing with kids)

[] Dictionaries of every type you can think of and some you wouldn't have thought of.

[] Web resources for high quality teaching.

[] Ask a question to Internet Public Library

[] Text to a web-like mind map

[] Open source software for teachers.

[] Collects together creative projects and grass roots projects.

[] The five functions of education (e.g., engagement) and how seat time does not equal learning time. Getting beyond multiple choice assessment.

[] Test creating software, free. Includes other things such as the ability to create crosswords.

=**Art:**= [] Make your own pop ups. Great for creating greeting cards or illustrating a student-written book.

[] This website allows you to use your mouse and to create shaded (as if by a pencil) lines. It's really fun to play with.

[] This software takes a picture and creates a pdf. If you print the pdf, you will get a large size poster of your picture.

=**Music:**= [] Free online metronome.

[]

[] Free violin sheet music.

[] More free music.

[] Traditional Appalachian fiddler and banjo player

[] More free music.

[] Play cello on your computer!

[] Baroque music!!

[] Makes an argument for ending music copyrights. The open source philosophy meets the music industry...

[] modes

[] chords on the piano keyboard

[] Tools for learning improvisation.

=Web Apps= [] Brainstorm online

[] Create flow charts online

Stuff [] Create your own timeline [] Create animated videos [] create/record audio online [] Make stuff from other stuff [] Play drums online [|Educational Simulations Virtual Tour - StumbleUpon] [|Edmodo | Secure Social Learning Network for Teachers and Students] [|Chinese and Western Music - StumbleUpon] [|Teacher Tools - StumbleUpon] [|Viewing Pompeii] [|Welcome to STAT 557! | STAT 557 - Data Mining] [|public domain sounds | free sound library] [|The Open Cognition Project - OpenCog] [|Aristotle's Virtues, Means] [|Times Square Cam - EarthCam] [|OpenFaces] [] []