Category: Websites
66 Writing Tools for the 21st Century Classroom
Here’re a wide variety of writing tools for students. Some practice good habits, others offer options for writing requirements. See what works for you (check here for updated links):
- Character Trading Cards
- Context Clues Millionaire
- Friendly Letter Maker
- Garfield teaches Writing Skills
- Identify the Main Idea
- Letter Generator
- Main Idea Battleship
- Make another story
- Monster Project
- Newspapers, posters, comics—learn to create
- Using a table of contents
- Videos—using Sock Puppets (iPads)
- Writing games
Blogs
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Playful Learning–What a Great Idea
Playful Learning (Parents’ Choice Gold Medal website) is a well-done, professional-looking website that offers advice, projects, and visual images touting the benefits of education through play. The reader is drawn into the child-centered imagery and strong basic colors, wanting everything on offer so their child’s play areas can look and work as described.
Let’s back up a moment. Play as the vehicle of education is not a revolutionary idea. Pedagogy has long recommended ‘play’ as a superior teacher for youngers–
Play is the great synthesizing, integrating, and developing force in childhood and adolescence. –PsycINFO Database Record 2012 APA,
The play of children is not recreation; it means earnest work. Play is the purest intellectual production of the human being, in this stage … for the whole man is visible in them, in his finest capacities, in his innermost being.~ Friedrich Froebel
In general, research shows strong links between creative play and language, physical, cognitive, and social development. Play is a healthy, essential part of childhood. —Department of Education, Newfoundland Labrador
Young children learn the most important things not by being told but by constructing knowledge for themselves in interaction with the physical world and with other children – and the way they do this is by playing.” –Jones, E., & Reynolds, G. “The play’s the thing: Teachers’ roles in children’s play”
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10 Top Click-throughs from 2014
I include lots of links for my readers to sites that will help them integrate technology into education. They cover websites on lesson plans, math, keyboarding, classroom management, cloud computer, digital books, teacher resources, free tech resources, and more. On any given day, a third of visitors to Ask a Tech Teacher click through to one of these resources. Which links my readers select tells me a lot about the type of information they’re looking for.
Here’s a list of the top ten sites visitors selected from my blog:
- Structuredlearning.net–lots of teachers are finding books/ebooks here for integrating tech into the classroom. This is where I make mine available.
- abcya.com–a popular site with classroom edutainment
- itunes.apple.com–last year the top click-through was a website. This year, teachers are looking for apps for iPads.
- libraryspot.com–there’s a big uptick in using the internet for research this year over last year
- kids.nationalgeographic.com–still more research. I’m seeing a trend
- bigbrownbear.co.uk/keyboard/–One of my favorite sites to teach K/1 how to type
- DanceMat Typing
- Fact Monster–for research
- Typing Web
- World Almanac for Kids
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21 Holiday Websites For Your Students
Need a few websites to fill in sponge time? Here are Holiday websites that will keep students busy while teaching them:
- 12 Days of Christmas
- Christmas—history—fun video
- Gift Hunt–updated version of 12 Days of Christmas–just as much fun
- Holiday collection
- Holiday Crossword
- Holiday Elf Games
- Holiday hangman
- Holiday Hangman II
- Holiday music
- Holiday music II–sing along with the music–the site provides the words
- Holiday—Design Gingerbread House
- Holiday—find the word
- Holiday—match game
- Holiday—Math Facts
- Holiday—North Pole Academy
- Holidays around the world
- Holidays–various
- NORAD Santa
- Penguin Show
- Reindeer Orchestra
- Santa Tracker
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Hour of Code: Minecraft
Every week, I share a website that inspired my students. This one is perfect for Hour of Code. Make yourself a hero for an hour:
Age:
Grades 3-8 (or younger, or older)
Topic:
Problem-solving, critical thinking, building
Address:
Review:
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22 Reading Websites
These cover elementary school through high school (sites like Open Library and Gutenberg Press where students can get free copies of books they need for class):
Read Stories
- Aesop Fables—no ads
- Aesop’s Fables
- Audio stories
- Childhood Stories
- Classic Fairy Tales
- Edutainment games and stories
- Fables—Aesop—nicely done
- Fairy Tales and Fables
- Project Gutenberg
- Listen/read–Free non-fic audio books
- Magic Keys–stories for youngers
- Mighty Book
- Open Library
- RAZ Kids–wide variety of reading levels, age groups, with teacher dashboards
- Starfall
- Stories read by actors
- Stories to read–II
- Stories to read—International Library
- Story time–visual
- Teach your monster to read (free)
- Tumblebooks (fee)
- Ziggity Zoom Stories
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16 Thanksgiving Sites For Your Students
Need a few websites to fill in sponge time? Here are Thanksgiving sites that will keep students busy and still teach them:
- Canadian Thanksgiving
- Online/Offline Thanksgiving activities
- Plimoth Plantation–a field trip of a Pilgrim’s life. Included on this real-life site is a video of the Pilgrim’s crossing to the New World.
- Starfall–Silly Turkey
- Thanksgiving edu-websites–CybraryMan
- Thanksgiving Games
- Thanksgiving games–Quia
- Thanksgiving information–history, more
- Thanksgiving Jigsaw
- Thanksgiving Jigsaw II
- Thanksgiving Lesson Plans
- Thanksgiving puzzle–by Digipuzzle
- Thanksgiving Tic-tac-toe
- Thanksgiving video–Brainpop
- Thanksgiving Wordsearch
Jacqui Murray has been teaching K-18 technology for 30 years. She is the editor/author of over a hundred tech ed resources including a K-8 technology curriculum, K-8 keyboard curriculum, K-8 Digital Citizenship curriculum. She is an adjunct professor in tech ed, Master Teacher, webmaster for four blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice reviewer, CAEP reviewer, CSTA presentation reviewer, freelance journalist on tech ed topics, contributor to NEA Today and TeachHUB, and author of the tech thrillers, To Hunt a Sub and Twenty-four Days. You can find her resources at Structured Learning.
updated 12-23-18
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47 Visual Learning Options for your PBL
Here’s a wide variety of visual learning options for your students, from graphs to infographics,
Charts
- AmCharts
- Barchart
- ChartGizmo
- ChartGo
- Chartle
- Creately
- Highcharts
- Hohli Online Chart Builder
- JS Charts
- LovelyCharts
- LucidCharts–for desktop and GAFE app
- Online Chart Generator
- OnlineChartTool
- Pie Color
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19 Halloween Sites for your Students
Here’s a short list of fun Halloween websites for your students. Enjoy!
Websites:
- Carving Pumpkins
- Enchanted Learning
Funschool- Halloween games, puzzles–clean, easy to understand website and few ads!
- Halloween ghost stories
- Meddybemps Spooky
- Pumpkin Toss
- Signing Halloween–a video
- Skelton Park
- The Kidz Page
Apps:
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5 Tools To Shake up the New Year
One thing we can all agree on is that there are tons of free tech tools available that enrich learning. I can’t keep up with them. I belong to several Tech Teacher forums, FB groups, G+ Communities, and every day I find more great tools I can’t wait to use in my classroom. Like many of you, this summer I attended several professional development conferences (ISTE, Teachers Pay Teachers, WordPress, Summer PD)–that bumped my total up to about a gazillion.
With school just around the corner, I needed to figure out which tools should be immediately integrated into my teaching. This was difficult, but I sorted, shook, noodled, experimented, sifted, and whittled my list down based on tools that differentiate for student needs, simplify the teacher’s job, and entice students to use technology in learning. Here are my top five: