KAPPA DELTA PI
http://www.kdp.org
Kappa Delta Pi, an international honor society in education, includes professional growth via programs, services, and products as part of its 2006-2007 goals. As part of that goal, the organization has recommended some web sites for teachers. I am sharing four of their recommendations.
TEACHERVISION
http://www.teachervision.fen.com/
TeacherVision provides more than 12,000 pages of lesson plans, printables, newsletters, and other resources for PreK to grade 12 that can help teachers save time. There is a yearly subscription cost for most items, but a short free trial is available. Subjects include reading, language arts, literature, mathematics, science, social studies, history, art, music, drama, health, and safety. TeacherVision is a teacher site for resources that save time and make learning fun. (As I describe what's available at this site, please remember that in most cases I have listed just a few of the items in each category.)
Ideas are available by grade level, subject area, or theme. There are ready-to-use items (graphic organizers, class management forms, …), assessment resources (rubrics library, quiz library, assessment strategies, …), resources for diverse student needs (assessment accommodations, ADD/ADHD, …), and ready-to-print books (Baseball Math (Gr. 4-8), Daily Writing Prompts (Gr. 1-4), …).
Classroom management resources cover a wide variety of professional development topics… multiple intelligences, Bloom's Taxonomy, elementary teacher survival guide, differentiated curriculum, and professional portfolios.
Ideas for increasing high-stakes achievement test results and other assessment strategies can be found… assessment forms, portfolios, rubrics, report cards, and journal assessment.
Resources for behavior management, classroom organization, and teacher/parent collaboration are also available.
The amount of content on this site is impressive. As an example, check out the new content added in January 2007. The topic is Twentieth Century History for grades 5 to 8. Here’s a partial list of what’s included…
Twentieth Century Fact Sheets: Overviews of the decades of the 1900s, Facts and Figures, Famous Firsts, Important Births and Deaths, Election Facts and Figures, World History, Writing Prompts and Literature Ideas... each available for almost every decade in the 1900s.
Twentieth Century Topics: About the Great Depression, An Extraordinary Bus Tide: Rosa Parks, Berlin's Wall, The Civil Rights Movement, End of Apartheid, Events in Vietnam, First Lady of the World: Eleanor Roosevelt, Gandhi, The Great Contralto: Marian Anderson, …
Twentieth Century People and Events: Japanese Internment, Just So: Rudyard Kipling, Labor Reform: 1910s, Lyndon Baines Johnson, The Nobel Prize, Richard Milhouse Nixon, The Tomb of Tutankhamen, William McKinley, A Woman's Place: Margaret Chase Smith, …
This site truly has a wide variety of resources... and many of them!
CEP: Character Education Partnership: Leading a National Call to Character
http://www.character.org
The Character Education Partnership’s aim is to help young people of good character become citizens who are responsible and caring. CEP serves as the leading resource for integrating character education into schools and communities. It emphasizes effective practices and provides a forum for exchanging ideas. Character education helps children understand, care about, and act upon core values in school and beyond.
CEP has developed eleven principles that help a program in character education work well. Some of these standards are “provides students with opportunities for moral action,” “engages families and community members as partners in the character-building effort,” and “evaluates the character of the school, the school staff's functioning as character educators, and the extent to which students manifest good character.”
Resources provided by CEP include implementation strategies, web sites, published materials, seminars, a blog, recommended books, and a database of articles and other documents concerned with Character Education initiatives.
This is a good site to gather ideas about character education... and to discuss those ideas with others.
CHADD: Children and Adults with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder
http://www.chadd.org
CHADD’s goal is to “improve… the lives of people affected by AD/HD." CHADD is a national organization for education, advocacy, and support of individuals with AD/HD. CHADD maintains an informative web site. They also publish a magazine, a resource guide, a newsletter, and other publications. Volunteers work with parents, educators, and professionals through the 235 local CHADD chapters. Currently, CHADD is operating a multi-year campaign to educate policymakers, the media, and the public about AD/HD. This is a good place to gather ideas and find support for those involved with AD/HD.
FUNBRAIN
http://www.funbrain.com/
This web site certainly invited me to participate immediately. I couldn't resist playing a game of Sudoku before I checked out the rest of the site!
The FunBrain web site has an area for children. This section of the web site has a mathematics arcade (25 arcade-style mathematics games), a reading area (web books and mad libs), a general arcade (games for free times), a playground (activities for moms and kids), and an area just for games (Funbrain’s Kids’ Center).
Another area of the site is just for parents. Available in this area is the Game Finder. Parents can find “the perfect game for your child to play.” They can search for this game by age, subject, or game name and they can identify the skills used in each game. Games are available for mathematics, language arts, science, history, music, geography, and art. Some of the other parenting resources include information on child development, help with homework and school, and gifted and LD tips.
The teacher resources at the web site include a game finder for the classroom, tools to help you choose games appropriate for the curriculum and standards, and flash cards. This site is helpful... and fun... at the same time.
ASSOCIATION FOR SUPERVISION AND CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT (ASCD)
http://www.ascd.org
The Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) is an organization of educators interested in using research-based strategies to improve learning in their schools. They recently recommended a web site designed for professional learning communities. These communities can be a major factor in the effort to help our students learn more.
ALLTHINGSPLC: All Information, No Commerce
http://www.allthingsplc.info/
Professional learning communities (PLCs) have helped to create education reform in schools and districts in the United States and Canada. This web site is a place for educators who want to use PLCs to enhance student achievement to collaborate with each other.
Educators involved in PLCs usually agree on three ideas...
* We must ensure that all students learn. So, we need to develop a strategy to provide timely intervention for struggling students.
* No longer can educators go into their classrooms and shut their doors. Rather than collaborate only for operational policies (tardiness, recess supervision), we need to share best practices, work together to solve problems, and determine together how to improve individual students’ achievement and the performance of the whole school.
* Educators need to identify current student achievement levels, establish goals, work together to accomplish those goals, and provide the data to illustrate that the students have succeeded and the goals have been met.
This web site provides research, articles, data, and tools about Professional Learning Communities. You will find timely and useful information about PLC concepts and practices. A blog provides insights from leading practitioners. Research and articles about PLC concepts and information about schools that have used PLC ideas are available.
This site could prove very helpful as educators work to improve individual students' achievement and the performance of the whole school or district.
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