After digging deep and exploring a plethora of resources, here were the top 10 sites I found the most useful:
1) Surf The Net With Kids is a wonderful website that has tons of educational activities for students of all ages. It has many interactive lessons and projects available for teachers to use, which I found extremely beneficial! As well as offering numerous lesson plans and activities, this website also helps educators integrate technology into their curriculum. Overall, I can definitely see myself using ideas off this web page in my future classroom!
2) Web 2.0 – 21st Century Tools also provides teachers with many great tools including: audio, blogging, bookmarking, charts/graphs, digital art and storytelling, survey/polls and many more! For each of these categories, there are multiple resources that you can click on that provided even more resources. After viewing this site, I was almost overwhelmed with all the various websites and teaching tools provided!
3) Cool Tools for Schools is a website dedicated to providing all kinds of tools for teachers. On this site, there are presentation tools, collaborative tools, research tools, video tools, slideshow tools, and a whole lot more! Just like the Web 2.0 – 21st Century Tools website, you just simply click on the link you want more resources on and it provides you with a plethora of teaching tools and resources.
4) One resource on the Cool Tools for Schools website I found particularly beneficial was under the Image Tools link. This resource is called Flickr, and it allows people to organize, share, and upload photos and videos. Flickr allows people to make their photos available to the people who matter to them, and it also enables new ways of organizing photos and videos. This would be a great resource to use in the classroom when assigning students a project that requires the use of photos and videos. Who doesn’t love taking pictures and using them for a project?!
5) Prezi is also a great presentation tool to use in your classroom. I believe is becoming more popular than the typical Microsoft Office PowerPoint. Prezi is a web-based presentation application and storytelling tool that uses a single canvas instead of traditional slides like PowerPoint. I would definitely recommend giving this presentation tool a try if you haven’t before. It is more interactive and engaging than PowerPoint, which I believe students will love!
6) I believe the use of music in your classroom is extremely important! A simple tune or jingle to remember a concept, such as multiples of 2′s, will be alot more beneficial than just constant drill and practice strategy. The music tool, Jitterbug, seems to be a great option to allow teachers to incorporate music into their daily curriculum. Jitterbug provides instant access to the best children’s music artists today as well as helpful musical transitions from one activity to the next.
7) Another great resource I found helps teachers put together quizzes and tests. Hot Potatoes is a tool that contains six applications; enabling teachers to create interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises. Also, Hot Potatoes is a FREE software that teachers can use for any purpose or project they would like. I definitely think this resource will be beneficial in my future classroom when it comes time for students to take an assessment!
8) VoiceThread allows people to talk about what they wrote as well as the pictures and videos they used. This tool could definitely be used in the classroom, and I believe and would be a great way of implementing technology in a fun way! Teachers could easily assign a creative project that incorporates the VoiceThread resource.
9) One resource I found extremely beneficial is called Chart Gizmo. My dream job is to be a math teacher, and this site had all kinds of useful tools for creating charts and graphs. Chart Gizmo allows students to create stunning charts online. It also allows teachers to create charts for their website, blog and social network profiles. In addition, it is extremely useful for visualizing financial, scientific or other type of data. In my future classroom, students could use this interactive website to represent their graphs and data in a creative way!
10) Scoop. It is another awesome resource tool teachers can use! Scoop. It is a blog site used by many teachers everywhere who post alot of useful articles and ideas that you can use in the classroom. This site allows you to search ideas in your content area as well as post your own ideas. One thing I really liked about Scoop. It is that it is extremely easy to use! I just typed “Middle School Math” into the search bar and found a plethora of beneficial resources!
Overall, I found a ton of beneficial resources that I probably wouldn’t have ran across if I didn’t dig deep into the websites. All these sites gave me some great ideas on how I can use technology in my classroom, and I can’t wait to put them into practice in my future classroom!
