Bookmark Collection

Integrate the arts into your students' elementary curriculum with the innovative and engaging lesson plans provided in this database. Containing field-tested lesson plans for teaching dance, drama/theater, music, and visual arts, this easy-to-navigate web site may be the perfect resource for any teacher, beginning or experienced, seeking to enrich the education of their students.

Wondering how to promote learning in new and thorough ways by using the Web? This site offers extensive support and examples for faculty and instructors who are using WebQuests to help students learn. WebQuests are designed to use learners' time well, to focus on using information rather than looking for it, and to support learners' thinking at the levels of analysis, synthesis and evaluation.

A how-to hypertext on creating authentic tasks, rubrics and standards for measuring and improving student learning. Topics include: What is authentic assessment? Why do we need it? How do you do it? Answers to these questions as well as information on Standards, Rubrics, Portfolios, and Examples are also included. Educators at all levels will find this site useful.

This site was recognized for its innovative and best practices approach to cross-curricular investigation, discovery, and reflection for K-university learners. Since 1998, the Paper Project has been exploring the structure and beauty of paper. The project chronicles handmade and mould made paper through images produced by scanning electron microscopy and a scanning-laser confocal microscope.

This media-rich website provides access to current news that covers a broad range of interest. The front pages of dozens of newspapers from around the world are posted. The content is powerful, historical, and valuable for all educators, but especially for students from middle school through college, as well as their instructors. The rich resources provide concrete anchors for a wide range of curriculum development by teachers and professors. The potential for using this site as a teaching and learning tool is limited only by the instructor’s imagination. It could certainly be used for studying current events, history, and civics. Furthermore students can conduct independent study, reviews, research, and investigations due to the many choices and range in presentations.

Many instructors have found a WebQuest to be a successful way to engage student with an inquiry-oriented learning activity, but most instructors are limited to using WebQuests created by others because of a lack of web authoring skills. Bernie Dodge has provided a solution to this problem by introducing Quest Garden, a low-threshold application for and hosting WebQuests. The Teacher Education Editorial Board selected this learning material because it is a true interactive learning object that allows instructors to enter their own content into a template and publish a finished WebQuest that can be used in the classroom. (From the description in Material Detail on MERLOT, click to see the author's video).

Jing is a free, easy to use screen capture tool that allows for screen captures and screen casts. Jing, through Screencast, provides free storage space for users, but you can pay for more space or save your material to your own site. Jing is downloadable and available for immediate use on your desktop. If you save a screencast, a URL is generated which you can embed wherever you’d like.

A VoiceThread is an online media album that can hold essentially any type of media (images, documents and videos) and allows people to make comments in 5 different ways - using voice (with a microphone or telephone), text, audio file, or video (with a webcam) - and share them with anyone they wish. As teacher educators, we see tremendous potential for use both in and out of classroom

Free Technology for Teachers is a blog written by Richard Byrne that includes various free resources and lesson plans for teaching with technology. All previous articles are archived so there are many resources to choose from.

Teaching Like it's 2999 is a blog created by former Chicago Public School teacher, and now Digital Learning Coordinator for the Academy for Urban School Leadership, a network of 25 neighborhood Chicago Public Schools. Jennie Magiera wrote a grant for a full class of iPads in her 4-5 grade math classroom. The blog chronicles her learning during the implementation process and afterward. The material presented in this Blog provides a collection of training materials that promote effective usage of social media in the classroom to increase students’ voices that leads to positive outcomes of social networking. Examples of detailed description of training material include: How to sync an iPad with computer to make it an interactive white board by using a Doceri Desktop, How to use school resources , Benefits of using You Tube, and how to develop your own. The material also includes a pdf guide for setting up folders with sync and deploy iPads by using the Bretford Power sync cart accessible to anyone at any level, Secrets to Ed Tech Rollouts, Writing iPAD and Technology Grants,Screen casting(download free iTunes U course on Screencasting and digital differentiation through video, Amazing Apps,and 10 Ipad Tips.