We were listening in on a virtual teacher chat and someone mentioned the Thinkfinity website. "Fabulous!" exclaimed one middle grades teacher. "I go there all the time." A curriculum coach replied: "I always ask teachers who are searching for a different angle: 'Have you looked on Thinkfinity yet?'" Thinkfinity is an amalgam of the earlier Marco Polo and Thinkfinity Literacy Network sites and is now partnering with other stellar resources like Illuminations and Read/Write/Think. There's a super search engine, right on the homepage, and by dragging your cursor over the appropriate button, you can see the special offerings for Educators, Parents, Students, and Afterschool.
FREE: Federal Resources for Educational Excellence
The FREE website, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education, has survived several national administrations -- and that's saying something! It's an excellent repository of teacher resources and tools, offering content in categories like Arts & Music, Health & Physical Education, History & Social Studies, Language Arts, Math and Science. FREE draws on materials developed by federal museums and archive collections, educational materials developed via federal agencies and programs like the National Science Foundation, as well as selected resources from sites like Scholastic Inc., the Alliance for Climate Education and other non-profits. There's a a link listing new additions -- and, of course, a Twitter feed!
Edutopia - George Lucas Educational
Foundation
One of the best sites on the Web for information and ideas about cutting-edge
teaching and learning. There's an emphasis on technology, but the resources
here go far beyond the tools. You'll find stories about innovative middle
schools, videos that show ideas in action, interviews with experts, and
whole sets of information around themes built around Edutopia's Core Concepts. You'll definitely want to explore this site -- it's worth a
couple of hours!
Awesome Stories
If you’ve been a MiddleWeb visitor for long, you know we’re BIG fans of the Awesome Stories website, where students and teachers can access hundreds of stories from history and current events, all peppered with links to primary resource material. The site is the passion of Carole Bos, a successful trial lawyer in Michigan, whose intellectual hobby has turned into a most amazing educational tool. In early 2009, Carole and her colleagues completely revamped the site with lots of new functionality. You can read about the improvements here. We think you’ll agree that new interactivity makes the site a core resource for educators.
Education
World
Supported by advertising and corporate contributions, the Education World
site just gets better and better -- it's both broad and deep, offering original
material on important education topics, lesson plans and teaching ideas,
a massive index to internet sites, and -- most important -- an energetic
and innovative staff that continues to search for ways to best serve educators.
This link leads to a site guide that will ease exploration of this large
site.
PBS Teacher Source
Includes more than 1,000 free lesson plans (matched to standards), teacher
guides and online activities. Begin by selecting your grade level on the menu bar at the top of the homepage. You'll find free webinar offerings, classroom activity packets, and highlights of upcoming PBS shows with classroom connections. Recent additions include a PBS Teacher Community (with discussion boards) and the Media Infusion blog, with teacher contributors.
DiscoverySchool.com
for Teachers
Lesson plans, teaching tools, chat listservs, classroom customizers, a clip
art gallery, a puzzle generator, and access to Kathy
Shrock's famous collection of education weblinks in every imaginable
category. Start with Shrock and explore out from there.
Middle School Portal
This K-12 site, developed with National Science Foundation support, offers teachers a direct path to resources from the National Science Digital Library. Enter the Science or Math subject pathway to browse a list of topics and take an in-depth look at teachable concepts.The resources have been selected by math and science educators and can be searched by topic, keywords, etc. The Portal is supported by folks at Ohio State University, who regularly add new themes and activities built upon the vast database. Look at these in-depth science topics and these in-depth math topics to see for yourself!
Also, while the main focus here is on math and science, you’ll find useful ideas about integrating those subjects with history, art, social studies, and more. We’ll just say it – this is one of the most awesome resources we know about, and it’s designed with middle school in mind.
GEM: The Gateway to 21st Century Skills
The "Gateway to 21st Century Skills" evolved from the GEM project,
an effort by the US Department of Education to create a central database
or "catalog" of resources from federal, state, university, nonprofit,
and commercial sites. The revitalized Catalog, now supported by the National Education Assocation, offers an easy way to explore more
than 50,000 educational resources, using a sophisticated search engine similar
to Google -- but with one big plus, detailed, coherent descriptions. Full text searches take a minute or two, so try a "Keywords" search first.
Teachers.Net Gazette
Teachers Net Gazette is the major feature of a vast website created by and for educators. Each monthly issue of the Gazette (laid out in colorful newspaper style) offers major features by teachers and by authors like Harry Wong, Alfie Kohn, brain expert Eric P. Jensen, principal leader Todd R. Nelson and many more. The Gazette has gained new energy under the leadership of editor Kathleen Carpenter. Subscribers (it's free) receive regular email reminders of new content. One of this site's strongest assets is it's focus on material of importance to new and novice teachers.
Apple Learning Interchange
http://edcommunity.apple.com/ali/
Microsoft
Lesson Plans
http://www.microsoft.com/education/lessonplans.mspx
Here are materials of interest to teachers, offered by both Apple and Microsoft.
Both sites include lesson plans and other resources, often technology-oriented
or web-based. We found the Microsoft materials to be more product-oriented,
but they often included more details (including handouts, etc.). Both Apple
and Microsoft include lesson plan search engines, and you can also search how-to articles at the Microsoft site. The Apple site includes a special section on the 21st Century High School. Apple site users can subscribe to RSS feeds that alert them when new material of
interest is added.
Oh, you counted? OK, make it 12 great sites!