Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

I will see you in the New Year!

Image Hotspot Generator

From our friends at Classtools.net.  If you would like to annotate a picture so that you can click on a discription this is the place to go.  You might want to annotate a diagram for science class or a picture for history class with names etc.  If you click on the red dots on the  picture of my kids taken on their Santa visit in 2012 you will see a picture that I annotated.  To see the website click here.  An alternative to this is Thinglink and Pic-Collage.  I posted about this in 2016 and you can see this by clicking here.

Freckle - A Differentiated Platform for Learning

According to their website, "Freckle empowers teachers to differentiate instruction across Math, ELA, Social Studies and Science.  Students automatically work on the Math, ELA, Social Studies and Science lessons that are perfect for them. That way, they are always engaged and challenged, never facing material that is too difficult or easy for them."  To see the website, click here.

Roll Some Dice

If you would like to randomly roll say 3 20 sided dice for some reason there are many websites that will do this for you but I just found out you can do this on Google very easily.  I wanted 3 d 20s so see below:

If you want just one then type in d20 in the search box.  As you see you can add, for example, a 4 sided die also.  If you click on any of the die on the screen that die will disappear.  I am not going to give you a link to google as that would be like giving you the phone number for 911.

Evaluating Online Resources

According to their website, "Students are confused about how to evaluate online information. We all are. The COR curriculum provides free lessons and assessments that help you teach students to evaluate online information that affects them, their communities, and the world."  To see the website click here.

Quality Rubrics

This is a link to Jennifer Binis's wiki on rubrics.  Take a look by clicking here.

Salmon Cannon

Migration patterns for these salmon have been altered by an impassable dam.  Here is a video of the solution.  I am sure this could be used in a class that involves current events.

Open Middle - Math

Challenging Math problems worth solving.  These might be great to do as group work.  Each come with hints and answers.  Here is an example from high school.  To see the website click here.

Here is another example

World Aids Day December 1st

This website is designed for English Language Learners and could be used for World Aids Day on December 1st.  To see the website click here.

Indigenous Speakers

According to Google Earth "A shared language is one of the most important connections among groups of people. Not only does it create a sense of kinship, but it promotes a shared worldview through unique vocabulary and traditional sayings and songs. Yet many of the world’s 7,000 languages are in danger of disappearing; according to the United Nations 2,680 Indigenous languages are at risk."

To learn more watch the video and click here.

Most Dangerous Writing App

I posted about this in June but I thought I should put it out again as it is a site you should look at.  This website might be great to get your students writing.  You can ask it to give you a prompt or not.  You can set it to a preset time or preset number of words you must write for or it stops and you are finished.  When completed you can save your work in many different formats.  To see the website click here.

Pauses in Macbeth

Here is another resource if you are teaching Macbeth.  They are from GCSE Macbeth.  To see them click here.  I also posted some other resources a couple weeks back that can be seen by clicking here.

Surging Seas Risk Finder

If you believe in Global Warming (and you should) then you might want to see what your coastal area you live in or are studying will look like down the road just type in the name of the city in USA   To try this click here.  

Big Scrabble

If you want to play scrabble in class with your students this might be the way to do it with your class.  Just need a laminator and away you go.

Twelfth Night Resources by the Royal Shakespeare Company

I was looking for some resources for a colleague that wanted some for her English class.  I found this site that had some teachers resources.  According to their website, "Discover teaching ideas and lesson planning inspiration through our range of resources, activities and other supporting materials on Shakespeare's Twelfth Night."  To see the website by clicking here.

My Life Elsewhere

According to their website, "MyLifeElsewhere is a collaborative community that allows you to compare the country you live in with other countries around the world. We'll show you various statistics that differentiate your country from others, including cost of living, geographic size, and more. If you moved to another country, what would your life be like?"

To see the website click here.

Learn With News

If you teach English or Current Events, you may want to check out Learn With News.  This site has 3 different lexile levels for each article it posts.  After each article, it has a list of "Difficult Words" with definitions.  It also has "Match the Synonym" and a true and false quiz.  To see the website click here.

Mapping Inequality

According to their website, "The Digital Scholarship Lab develops innovative digital humanities projects that contribute to research and teaching at and beyond the University of Richmond. It seeks to reach a wide audience by developing projects that integrate thoughtful interpretation in the humanities and social sciences with innovations in new media."

To see the website click here.

Macbeth Resources

The following resources are provided by Matt Lynch.  To see them click here.

An Indigenous Way of Life Threatened by Oil Sands in Canada

This article in the NY Times was written in 2013 but I just read it recently and I thought it was worthy of reading if you are teaching Current Events or an Indigenous Peoples course. Included with the article is an 18 picture slide show.  To see the article click here.

Robo-Compass

If you teach math and use compass, ruler and pencil to bisect angles or create equilateral triangles or other geometrical constructions you might want to try robo compass.  To see the website click here.

Dia de los Muertos

From VOA News, "Thousands of people took to the streets of Mexico City, Sunday, October 27, to dance beside giant skulls and skeletons, rolled out for the fourth edition of the Day of the Dead parade.
👉 Sunday's show featured enormous, brightly painted puppets in shapes like the Xoloitzcuintli, a hairless dog venerated by pre-Hispanic societies, and dancers decked out like skeletons moving to the sounds of marching bands.
Americans will celebrate Halloween on October 31, a tradition that dates back to an ancient Celtic festival in which it was believed the dead would return to haunt the living. Chances are, many of today’s trick-or-treaters will paint their faces like skulls, borrowing from an ancient Aztec tradition celebrated around the same time: Dia de los Muertos — the Day of the Dead. (VOA/AP)"

The Write Center

According to their website, "The WRITE Center, funded by ​the US Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, is a national center focused on researching and sharing best writing practices in secondary ELA and history classrooms.  The WRITE Center will pursue its goal of improving secondary students' source-based argument writing."

To see their website click here.

Actively Learn

According to Actively Learn "Texts (and videos!) for ELA, Science, and Social Studies with scaffolds and higher-order questions.  Find what you teach and great texts & videos to pair with it. Or add anything you like."

According to Edsurge.com, "Actively Learn is an online tool with a library of thousands of texts and Common Core-aligned lessons that both teachers and students can interact with in real-time. Teachers assign pre-existing Actively Learn materials to students or upload their own content, then track student responses and activity using the company’s data tools. Students can interact with a text by digitally highlighting and annotating, responding to embedded questions and content, and leaving feedback and comments for peers."

 To see the website click here.

Poetry Knowledge Organizer

If you are teaching poetry here is a nice handout (thanks Stuart Pryke) for your students or you can use as slide in class.  To see the organizer click here.

Is it down?

If you have students in the library commons computer lab and a student says that the webpage is not working you can easily check by copying the URL of the webpage by highlighting it and hit "Ctrl c" and then pasting it in ( use "Ctrl v") in the website "Down For Everyone or Just Me" by clicking here.  Hopefully the website is working.

200 Word Creative Writing Challenges

If you would like some creative writing challenges for your students then we have some for you.  There is a folder with 9 of them.  Thanks to Matt Lynch for pointing this out on twitter.  To see the folder click here.

Mr Barton Maths

Mr Barton Maths is a website that has many useful resources, podcasts, links and more.  If you are teaching math you might want to click here.

English-Spanish Vocabulary Quizzes

This site has quizzes to help you learn and review vocabulary in your Spanish class.  To see the website click here.

What causes an economic recession?

If you are teaching a course in economics, business or similar you might want to use this Ted Ed lesson on recession.  According to their website, "For millennia, the people of Britain had been using bronze to make tools and jewelry, and as a currency for trade. But around 800 BCE, that began to change: the value of bronze declined, causing social upheaval and an economic crisis— what we would call a recession today. So what causes recessions? Richard Coffin digs into the economic fluctuations that affect our modern markets."  To see the website click here.

Fishbowl

Fishbowl is a discussion forum that teachers can anonymously chat about educational issues.  Too see their website click here.

SmartHistory and Art

Smarthistory believes that:

art has the power to transform lives and build understanding across cultures. We believe that the brilliant histories of art belong to everyone, no matter their background.

Art connects us to the world; it allows us to imagine, to create, to build and to inspire, and it shouldn’t be locked up in a textbook. Smarthistory takes you inside museums and outside to ancient temples and brings you into conversations about how to interpret and understand the images you’re seeing.

Now more than ever we need understanding, rigorous analysis, and nuance, and art teaches the critical thinking needed to better comprehend current events and their cultural and historical context.

Smarthistory is the window through which to learn about today’s biggest clash points: we interrogate faith, class, race, gender, and power through a study of art and objects from ancient times until the present. We help learners navigate their world by teaching the skills of interpretation and judgement to help them make meaning of the world around them.

To see the website click here.

Inquiry-Based Teaching

According to Education Week, "Introducing math and science through inquiry and problem-based instruction can pay off throughout elementary school, according to a massive international series of studies."  To read the article click here.

8 Ways to Help ELL Read and Write

Larry Ferlazzo writes about the conditions needed  to promote reading and writing for ELL students.  To see the article click here.