Twitter in Education

100 Ways to Use Twitter in Education, By Degree of Difficulty from Edudemic: The Basics, Etiquette, Connecting, Classroom, Professional Life, Pro Tools, Who to Follow, Applications to Emulate

Educational Technology & Mobile Learning Resources from Educational Technology and Mobile Learning:

• Teachers' Roadmap to the use of Twitter in Education
• Should you Twitter? Decide from this interesting flowchart on Twitter.
• 60+ Educational Tweeters to Follow 
• How to Twitter in 60 Seconds
• Twitter Tools, Twitter Tools & More Twitter Tools for Teachers
• 5 Twitter Tools you Must Use as a Teacher
• 12 Twitter Tools all Teachers Must Know About
• What Teachers Need to Know About Hashtags
• 10 Ways Teachers can use Twitter for Professional Development
• Twitter for K-12 Classes Simplified
• Teachers' Guide to the Use of Twitter in the Classroom
• Twitter Tips Every Teacher Should Know About
• Top 10 Educational Hashtags for Educators
• The Best 15 Hashtags for Teachers
• Teachers' Comprehensive Guide to the Use of Social Networking in Education: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
• How to Cite Tweets in Academic Papers
• URGENT: Secure your Twitter Account
• TWITTV - Watch Twitter Trending Videos
• Some of the Best Twitter Tools & Apps
• Twinslator: Free Tool to Translate Your Tweets

Professor Word - FREE Bookmarklet

ProfessorWord is a free bookmarklet that can be used on any website to:

1. Get the definition of any word with the click of your mouse
2. Identify more than 5,000 SAT, ACT, and GRE vocabulary words

Create a free account to save words and create personalized study lists.

Toasted Cheese

Encourage creative writing! Toasted Cheese is a literary journal that publishes daily writing prompts on a monthly calendar on its website. The whole month is laid out for teachers with a different prompt for each day. You can click through the previous months to find old prompts. The site also hosts a Weekly Writing Chat, a 24/7 Writing Forum, as well as Monthly Articles on Writing and Quarterly Writing Contests based on one or more of the prompts from the calendar.

Children & Youth in History

This site is designed to help teachers and students learn about the roles of young people throughout history by providing access to information about living experiences of children and youth from many perspectives as swell as changing ideas about childhood and adolescence in past cultures and civilizations. Questions such as these are addressed: What was it like to be a child or adolescent throughout history? How is childhood defined? How has it changed and how has it remained the same? What factors have shaped childhood and how did children shape history, society, and culture?

These resources are FREE for educational use:

• a Primary Source Database with 350 resources along with guidance on how to use those sources critically and tools for annotating and organizing the sources;
• 60 Website Reviews that focus on valuable online resources for studying and teaching the history of childhood and youth in world history, including those covering Africa, Wast Asia, Europe, Latin America, Middle East/North Africa, North America, Pacific Basin, South/Southeast Asia;
• 11 Teaching Modules that provide historical context, teaching tools, and strategies for teaching with sets of primary sources drawn from the Primary Source Database; and
• 25 Teaching Case Studies by experienced scholars and teachers that model strategies for using primary sources to teach the history of childhood and youth.

BackStory with the American History Guys

BackStory is a public radio program & podcast that brings historical perspective to the events happening around us today. On each show, renowned U.S. historians Ed Ayers, Peter Onuf, and Brian Balogh tear a topic from the headlines and plumb its historical depths. Over the course of the hour, they are joined by fellow historians, people in the news, and callers interested in exploring the roots of what’s going on today. Together, they drill down to colonial times and earlier, revealing the connections (and disconnections) between past and present. With its passionate, intelligent, and irreverent approach, BackStory is fun and essential listening no matter who you are. Segments may be streamed online or downloaded and used in your classroom as desired.

Teachers tell the History Guys that BackStory segments are well suited for use in the classroom, adding depth to discussions of the historical roots of contemporary issues. Shows like “Body Politics: A History of Health Care” give context to pressing social issues in today’s news. Seasonal specials like “American Pie: A History of Thanksgiving” reveal little-known facts about our holiday traditions, and are accompanied on our website by a wide range of resources for further exploration, including primary source documents and audio slide shows.

Production support for “BackStory with the American History Guys” is provided by the David A. Harrison Fund for the President’s Initiatives at the University of Virginia; the National Endowment for the Humanities*; the University of Richmond; the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation; James Madison’s Montpelier; the Perry Foundation, Incorporated; Cary Brown-Epstein and the W. L. Lyons Brown, Jr. Charitable Foundation; UVA’s Miller Center of Public Affairs; Caroleen Feeney; Marcus and Carole Weinstein; Jay M. Weinberg; Trish and David Crowe; Claire Gargalli and David Carley; JoAnn Hofheimer; and an anonymous donor.

Google Street View

Google Maps with Street View lets you explore places around the world through 360-degree street-level imagery. You can explore world landmarks, view natural wonders, navigate a trip, go inside restaurants and small businesses - and now even visit the Amazon! Browse the gallery to see collections from around the world.

Google’s World Wonders Project brings to life the wonders of the modern and ancient world. It allows users to virtually explore and navigate a neighborhood through panoramic street-level images. With videos, photos and in-depth information, you can now explore the world wonders as if you were there.

Classroom materials for primary and secondary school history and geography are available for teachers to download free of charge. These include suggestions of lesson plans, student work sheets, and presentations. The material is designed to be flexible, allowing teachers all over the world to use it in various forms and levels of curriculum.

Themes included are Archeological sites, Architecture, Cities and Towns, Historic Sites, Monuments and Memorials, Palaces & Castles, Parks & Gardens, Places of Worship, Regions & Landscapes, Wonders of Nature. You may browse by theme or by continent. Teachers guides are available for all units, both primary and secondary levels.

FREE Resources from Strategies for Writers

Zaner Bloser offers many FREE resources for all types of graphic organizers, pre-writing, writing, differentiated instruction, mini-lessons, revising lessons, and mode-specific rubrics. There are also student and parent resources available.

You will also find these reference documents on his site:

• Correlation: Common Core State Standards
• Strategies for Writers Foundational Research
• Strategies for Writers Scope and Sequence
• Text Exemplars
• Websites for 21st Century Literacies
• Writer's Handbook

Tennessee’s Watchable Wildlife

Tennessee's Watchable Wildlife has extensive information on the birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians of Tennessee. Students will find life history and additional information on each species that is specific to Tennessee, a variety of photos of each species, and songs or calls for many of birds and frogs and toads.  Students will also discover detailed information for nearly 200 places to watch wildlife in the state.
From their website:
"We developed the web site and information so it is a valuable educational tool for students of all levels from K-12 and beyond.  Students of all levels can sort the birds by color or taxonomic group in order to identify birds seen at a classroom feeder or on a field trip and then read about their nesting biology and population status.  In addition to the pages presenting all the birds and mammals of Tennessee, we have created a page that shows all the non-native birds and mammals in Tennessee, which addresses Ecology Standard 3, Check for Understanding 3255.3.3 about identifying native and non-native species in Tennessee."

Enriching Literacy with Cell Phones

"September is National Literacy Month, and what better way to celebrate and promote literacy than focusing on the tools that students own and love: their cellphones! Using cellphones to enhance learning does not require that they be used in class. If you are in a school where cellphones are banned, the ideas shared here are also applicable outside of class." Read more...
Thanks to Richelle Shelton for sharing this resource...

Common Core Resources

Do you need help incorporating the Common Core Standards into your classroom activities?

Start with Thinkfinity’s State Standards Search Engine.  Choose Tennessee from the state list in the pull-down menu. This filters for the specific alignments that will match Tennessee's version of the Common Core Standards.

Choose your grade level and content area, then submit your request. The next screen shows exactly what standards set you have chosen at the top and lists that standard’s subsets with clickable links at the right, indicating how many Thinkfinity resources are aligned to that standard set.

Edutopia presents a thorough collection of resources to enhance the understanding of "Common Core". Browse by grade level, view strategies, explore the video collection, visit blogs and community forums, schools that work, and classroom guides. 

The Complete Facebook Guide for Educators

Educational Uses for Educators from Tech the Plunge: 100 Ways You Should be Using Facebook in your Classroom; 50 Useful Facebook Tips for Teachers; 8 Real Ways Facebook Enriched Ms. Schoening's First Grade Class; Using Facebook to Connect With Students & Parents; Facebook Apps for eLearning; Facebook Top 20 Facebook Apps; A Guide to Facebook Security for Adults, Parents, and Educators

FREE from Teacher Created Materials

More than 400 lesson plan400 lesson plans; FREE monthly calendars complete with events that can be incorporated into the curriculum; FREE monthly activities; FREE writing prompts

Top 25 Reading & Language Arts Lessons & Interactives

Voted as the top 25 reading and language arts lesson plans from Thinkfinity (ReadWriteThink partner), these focus on persuasion, plot structure, comparison-contrast, cause and effect, poetry, essays, newspapers, fairy tales, and more. These are only 25 of the hundreds of lessons available.

Here you will find the top 25 reading and language arts interactives from Thinkfinity (ReadWriteThink partner). Interactives are web-based tools that students use to learn about language, to organize, summarize, and analyze, or to write and print poetry or prose. These tools span all grade levels—from word play games for kindergartners to graphic organizers for high school students.

Video Games & the Brain: 14 Facts We Now Know

91% of kids now play video games. What are the effects? All good? All bad? What role do these games play in society? Here are 14 facts based on research completed during the past 10 years.

Search Engine Goodies

Boolify - a graphical search tool powered by Google; creates a visual representation of a Boolean search; focused on the logical relationship between words (chocolate and ice cream not frozen yogurt); uses images of puzzle pieces to show how these words fit together; shows the result of changing the words in the search with the modifiers
 
Google:
12 Ways to be More Search Savvy from Google - Teach students how to be more search-savvy, how to efficiently find and research information, how to judge its authenticity, and when to ask for an adult's assistance.
Is Google Making Us Stupid? - great read by Nicholas Carr

Quintura for Kids - visual find engine; search term yields the Quintura Cloud; visually navigate and easily refine in order to find relevant information faster and more efficiently

Qwiki - Visual Search Engine - MUST-SEE - Look up places, people, anything, and get a whole multimedia definition. This is a cool way to watch a multimedia definition. You may explore topics by searching or browse a worldwide map highlighting landmarks, monuments, cities, towns, and more.
"Qwiki (Alpha Version) is working to deliver information in a format that's quintessentially human – via storytelling instead of search. We are the first to turn information into an experience. Our goal at Qwiki – to advance information technology to the point it acts human. Currently, Qwiki's technology has been applied to describe millions of popular topics - but soon we'll do much more. Our team needs your help in reaching our goal: join our alpha now to help test Qwiki and shape the future."

Search-Cube - a visual search engine that presents web search results in a 3-dimensional cube interface; view up to 96 websites, videos, and images; Javascript and Flash Player version 9 or higher required; note directions for flipping cube, dragging & rotating cube, and opening a site

spacetime3D - allows you to see your searches; enter your search term for pictures of web page results from your search; works in any browser; no download; Mac and PC

Tag Galaxy - type search term; drag to rotate; mousewheel to zoom; click earth for photos

Lexipedia - Where Words Have Meaning

With  Lexipedia,  simply type in a word, select a language (English, German, French, Italian, Dutch, Spanish), then Submit. You may narrow the results by Noun, Verb, Adjective, Adverb, Fuzzynyms, Antonyms, or Synonyms for a web of results, all color-coded.

A Teacher's Guide to Using Facebook

This guide is available on Scribd and is attributed to Bernadette Rego.  Her introduction to the guide:
"Welcome to the Teacher's    Guide to using Facebook! As educators, social networking can carry tremendous potential benefits in one's professional development as well as staying in touch with friends, family, and colleagues. Facebook is one of many social networking tools available which is considered popular due to its versatility in what can be shared-everything from installing and creating fun applications (e.g. movie quizzes) to posting photos of your recent family reunion. However, as educators we also have a professional image to uphold and how we conduct ourselves online holds no exceptions. As you may have already heard, there have been instances reported by media in the past of teachers demonstrating professional misconduct while engaging in inappropriate dialogue about their schools and their students, posting pictures and videos of themselves engaged in inappropriate activity, and the likes. Some feel that being online shields them from having their personal lives exposed. On the contrary, how we establish our online identity can carry far greater repercussions than we could ever have imagined.It is, nonetheless, reassuring to know that there are ways of protecting ourselves from being exposed while online. This guide is intended to help you set up a profile using Facebook which best suits your personal and professional lives. This guide was written to educate you on ways of establishing your profiles which uphold your professional image."

STEM Collaborative

STEM Collaborative.org offers four online adventures in math and help middle school students make real-world math connections. Each interactive project includes: teacher guides/educator resources, lesson plans and interactive activities, standards alignment chart, rich multimedia and video, and helpful tips and hints for classroom integration. Key math concepts within geometry, pre-algebra, Algebra I and II are covered. Interactives with measurement, proportional reasoning, balance, scale, weight,, volume, and others encourage active learning, strengthen students' core understanding of middle school math concepts and reinforce reasons to love math. (description from their site)

Hippo Campus for High Schools & Colleges

HippoCampus - FREE - Subjects: Arithmetic, Algebra & Geometry, Calculus & Advanced Math, Statistics & Probability, Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Earth Science, Economics, History & Government, Psychology, and Religion; multiple topics, links, simulations, and resources under each content area; browse by subject, standard, and/or textbook; no assessments, but you may add your own

"HippoCampus is a project of the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (MITE). The goal of HippoCampus is to provide high-quality, multimedia content on general education subjects to high school and college students free of charge.
HippoCampus was designed as part of Open Education Resources (OER), a worldwide effort to improve access to quality education for everyone. HippoCampus content has been developed by some of the finest colleges and universities in the world and contributed to the National Repository of Online Courses (NROC), another MITE project. NROC makes editorial and engineering investment in the content to prepare it for distribution by HippoCampus. Both HippoCampus and NROC are supported by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation."

Teachers Pay Teachers - An Open Marketplace for Educators

Founded by Paul Edelman, a former NYC public school teachers in 2006, TeachersPayTeachers is the world's first open marketplace where teachers buy and sell original teaching materials.
From their site:
"TpT's mission is to make teachers lives easier by bringing together those who create curricula with those who are seeking fresh new approaches in the classroom. Teachers work hard and deserve extra compensation for all those hours spent lesson planning. Newer teachers and those looking for ideas can save time and leap ahead in competency by learning from veterans. We strongly believe that the ensuing exchange lifts all boats and leads to the better sharing of best practices. In the end everyone wins, especially our students."
Expect more than 17,000 FREE items (just click on the FREE button), all categorized according to type, grade level, subject, or state. This is definitely worth Prices on other items start as low as 50 cents. Items do not have to be shipped, as they are digital downloads. You will find almost 10,000 lesson plans, 50,000 activities, 5,000 exams/quizzes, 19,000 worksheets, 5,500 whiteboard activities, 15,000 PowerPoints, 9,000 novel studies, and more than 90 additional types of resources. Grade levels go from Pre-K to Adult and staff in all content areas. You may browse by category, subject, grade level, price, or state. You will be surprised how many teachers from Tennessee participate!
You will also find great resources on the teachers' blogs.
Read excerpts of news stories relating to those using the site.