Thursday, July 19, 2012

so about those educational websites...

Here's my list of 10 websites and a brief description that might be useful as a language arts teachers:


Word template for authors, EIAS Style B

Half.com
1. Many college students use this site to buy textbooks for their classes. This can also be a great place to buy books for (usually) much cheaper than from a brick and mortar store. To find a book, simply enter the book’s name or ISBN. The search engine will then scourer its affiliated sellers looking for the book. A list will then display the various sellers and condition of the book. Half.com is run by Ebay and has a ratings system for sellers. With school budgets tight, using this site can help stretch the funding a little further.

http://www.ncte.org/
2. This is the website for the National Council of Teachers of English. Their stated mission is: "The Council promotes the development of literacy, the use of language to construct personal and public worlds and to achieve full participation in society, through the learning and teaching of English and the related arts and sciences of language.” Tips of the trade can be found here. Many resources and ideas to inspire the Language Arts teacher. This is the largest professional group for Language Arts teachers and hosts various workshops.

http://freerice.com/#/english-vocabulary/1449
3. Kids (and anyone!) can play a multiple choice vocabulary test. For each right answer, 10 grains of rice will be donated through the World Food Programme. It’s a great way to build vocabulary and help donate food to those in desperate need.

http://www.ordway.org/education/performances/
4. Get out of the classroom! Here’s a low cost way to have students experience top quality performances at the Ordway. By following the link, you find tickets for $3.50-$5.00 to weekday matinees. There is also a way to request reimbursement for a bus so you don’t break the piggy bank on that either.  Do note that it is first come, first dibs. Tickets can be bought as early as the summer before the school year so plan ahead.

http://education.state.mn.us/mde/index.html
5. Here’s the Department of Education’s official website. I personally can not navigate it for nothing since they did an overall of the site right after I had finally figured it out. None the less, it is a must for staying on top of content standards, testing stats and other useful information related to being a teacher, parent and student.

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/top100speechesall.html
6. Inspire students with the greatest 100 speeches of all time. Each speech on this list as the name of the person giving the speech, title, audio if available, video if available and pdf. This could also be a site to analyze for biases based on who was and was not included. Overall a nice resource.

http://www.khanacademy.org/
7. I can not resist adding this to my webpage resources even though most of it has to do with math. I feel it is justified because now there are numerous links related to the humanities that can prove to be a fertile ground for researching topics that might come up in class. All the videos are free, usually no more than minutes and delivered in a way that usually makes sense while maintaining complexity of the topic.

http://www.eslcafe.com/
8. This is a website that focuses on English language learners. Much of the site is related to teaching English overseas but there is nothing to stop you from using it right here. The “Stuff for Teachers” tab is particularly amazing due to the number of ideas and links within it. I also like the list of idioms/slang under the student tab. You can forget how many there are and how confusing they can be to learners not native to the language.

http://www.readwritethink.org/
9. In one word: Overwhelming! I get lost with all the fantastic resources available at this website. There’s no shortage of lesson plans and ideas for the classroom. They can be searched by grade or topic. In addition to that, many great graphic organizers can be found at this link. Top quality material!

http://www.onlinenewspapers.com/
10. Last but not least is this website that links to 1000s of newspapers around the world. It is organized by area and then country. The reason I include this link is because of how powerful it can be to read news sources that came from other perspectives. It can also be neat for students from other countries to follow in their own first language news from their roots. For anyone though, it can encourage more reading as they explore other cultures and views. 

(There are so many more that could be added!)

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