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."