Sunday, January 30, 2011

Make it Interactive

Scholastic offers a wealth of activities and resources powered by SMART’s Notebook collaborative learning software to help you improve your students’ writing. For example: Interactive Whiteboard Activities: 5-Minute Proofreading Practice provides daily exercises for practice in proofreading for spelling, punctuation, capitalization, grammar and more. All it takes is five minutes a day! Each book comes with a CD of Notebook files to use with your SMART Board. Writing Lessons for the Interactive Whiteboard shows teachers, step by step, how to use the interactive whiteboard to engage students in learning excellent writing craft techniques with models of strong writing. The book covers includes tips for both Promethean and SMART Board users, plus a CD with models to use on screen. 50 Graphic Organizers for the Interactive Whiteboard contains 50 classroom-tested reproducible templates of graphic organizers along with easy directions and student samples. Full-color, interactive PDFs of the graphic organizers on CD are useful for modeling. Check out these and other interactive whiteboard products on the Scholastic site.
Click Here to Visit Web Site

Sunday, January 23, 2011

Websites I found interesting (weekly)

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Promote Reading on a Daily Basis


Scholastic is celebrating its 90th anniversary with a global literacy campaign that underscores the importance of reading as the pathway for young people to succeed in the 21st century. Through its “Read Every Day. Lead a Better Life.” campaign, Scholastic is asking everyone committed to the support of young people—partners, educators, business leaders, publishers, booksellers, librarians, nonprofits, parents, caregivers and students—to work together to expand and support children’s reading throughout the world. The goal of the campaign is to provide information and ideas to parents and teachers for making reading easier, more fun and more accessible to children while promoting the importance and value of reading for success in school and in life.
Click Here to Visit Web Site

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Free Ebook on Web Tools for Educators

One of my Discovery friends, Lee Kolbert, posted on her blog the link for a free ebook that she coauthored with Richard Byrnes. Enjoy this resource. It is excellent!

http://www.slideshare.net/kolbert/super-book-of-web-tools-for-educators

Friday, January 14, 2011

Google's Tech Support for Parents

Google's Tech Support for Parents (or staff?)

Send them this way for clear explanations of how to do simple things on their computer
http://www.teachparentstech.org/

This would be great for staff, also!

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Question the Author

NPR’s Backseat Book Club is a monthly feature inviting children to read a book with NPR and send in questions. At month’s end, some of the questions will be put to the book’s author during NPR’s afternoon radio program, All Things Considered. This month the website presents theTop 5 Books For Backseat Readers (aged 9 and up) recommended in 2011.
Click Here to Visit Website

Monday, January 10, 2011

Hook Inner-City Youth on Reading

Author of young adult books, Alan Sitomer has teamed with Recorded Books to bring his award-winning teaching skills to schools across the country through the BookJam. Sitomer, a three-time Teacher of the Year award winner, shares results from his own inner-city Los Angeles classroom. Each Jam includes 30 copies of three popular young adult novels and a standards-based study guide for each novel with reproducible differentiated learning activities and both formative and summative assessments. In addition, the Composition JamBox is an easy-to-use resource for assigning podcasts, slideshows, short movies and other engaging multimedia projects. Sample the audio and lesson plans from The Secret Story of Sonia Rodriguez (characterization activity), Monster (setting activity) and The Hoopster (symbolism activity). Also find Sitomer’s 6 Steps for Teaching Imagery in The Secret Story of Sonia Rodriguez.
Click Here for More Information About BookJam
Click Here to Access Sample Audio and Lesson Plans

Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Raise Awareness of Cyberbullying Behaviors


Slimy, creepy crawlies are the ugly image of cyberbullying in a new interactive Web site aimed at children between eight and 12 years of age. Created by the nonprofit organization SchoolAid, CureTheBullies targets children who may witness bullying behavior or even act as accomplices to bullies through their use of email, social networking or text messaging. An online self-discovery test helps children identify passive bystander behavior in themselves and offers them tools and advice on how to rid themselves of “Bullies Viruses.” Six cyberbullying behaviors have been turned into slimy viruses in the interactive program. If infected, students use a “cure,” such as “Understanding” or “Courage,” to defeat their virus. For instance, a “Gang Green” infection has the symptom of ganging up on someone on Facebook, blogs or forums. Its cure is “Friendship.” Youth infected with “Forwarditis” exhibit symptoms of forwarding emails, pictures or messages that could make someone feel bad. The cure is “Understanding.”
Click Here to Visit Web Site

Find Library Materials About Worldwide Locations

With mapFAST, you can use Google Maps to find texts about places all over the world. Visit mapFAST, type in a location and get a list of texts about that location. By setting a radius parameter, you can specify how close to the actual location you want your texts to be. Thebooklists generated by mapFAST come from Google Books and WorldCat. Through Google Books you may be able to read and print some titles for free.
Click Here to Access Free Tool