Wednesday Websites: Five Favorites

Following up on last week's blog post, here are five more websites I like to use...

The first one is a website that helps you create Jeopardy and other games using Power Point.

Grammar Bytes is a website with tons of free grammar lessons.

Wordle is a fun website to use.  You copy and paste in a text and it generates word clouds.  The words are sized according to their frequency in the text, so it is a fun way to pull out important vocabulary words and ideas. Students can do this with a text they are studying or writing.  It also makes fun cover pages.

The English Companion is a site with a lot of great resources for teaching novels.  The materials are free and easy to use with a variety of texts.

Animoto is a website that allows you to sign up for a free basic account.  You upload pictures and it automatically makes a digital movie for you.  Very easy to use.


For more ideas, follow my board of websites useful to teachers on Pinterest.

Wednesday Websites: Top Three

Websites Useful To Teachers is a pinterest board of mine with five dozen cool websites to check out. I am always adding new pins with new web 2.0 tools, activity generators, videos, online games and apps, etc. It is worth checking out.  To give you a taste of what's popular, though, here are my top three re-pinned websites....

1) Tagxedo is a website that allows you to copy and paste text into an application that uses it to create pictures and word clouds.

2) Handwriting Worksheet Generator allows you to do just that.  You can type in letters and words you want your students to practice writing and it will automatically generate handwriting worksheets that have students practicing their penmanship.  Have young ones still learning to write their name?  This website is perfect.

3) Bingo Card Generator allows you to take a set of spelling or vocabulary words you've been working on and create customized bingo cards to use as a review game with your students.

Check them out now or bookmark them for later when you're ready to start thinking about school again!

Wednesday Website: A Site Every Teacher Should Check Out

The Florida Center for Reading Research  has put together a site with a plethora of activities, all available for free.  There is no login required.  You can go on and find literacy research, activities and assessments.

Teachers who are using the site to plan lessons can search by grade and skill for the materials they want.  It breaks down phonological awareness components for younger students and comprehension for older students with everything in between.  It also has materials on differentiating instruction.

For principals, there are simple overviews of literacy instruction and learning.  There are also materials for conducting walk throughs of classrooms.

Finally, there is a link to What Works Clearinghouse, a site that shares the latest research on instructional approaches.

Take a few minutes to click around and you'll find a treasure chest of quality materials.

Weekly Webtool: Awesome Site for Teacher Resumes

Throughout my teaching career I've changed jobs several times. I as well as anyone who has looked for a teaching job knows it can be tough even to get your resume noticed and marked for an interview. During my most recent job hunt I wanted to update my resume and make it more noticeable so it could stand out from the others. I looked at many examples and websites with templates, etc but to me nothing compared to the A+ Resumes for Teachers site.

Although the site is based on a paid service to redo your resume, I found the examples there helpful and a great starting point. I loved that they had examples for each teaching area so I could see something more similar to what my own resume experiences entailed.

While I didn't sign up for the service since I was conserving funds, I found the website a wonderful starting point at recreating my own resume. Within a short time I had redone my resume in a completely new style and reworded all of my experiences to match the new format. After I did this and sent my resume out with more applications I did notice a distinctly higher amount of interviews scheduled which helped my land my most recent teaching position!

I highly recommend this site if just for the examples which are a great starting point. Good luck to those on the search for a teaching job!

Wednesday Websites: Free Online Exemplars

Exemplars are incredibly important for showing students what you want them to do--what a high quality piece of work looks like.  I have found time and again that they set the bar for my students.  The first time I give an assignment is always the hardest, but after that it gets easier.  I file away the best ones to use as exemplars when I give the assignment again.

If you are giving an assignment for the first time, though, or are not happy with what students submit, you have a few options.  The first option is to take the time to make your own.  The second option is to use it as an opportunity to revise.  Revisiting assignments and revising them to make them better teaches them to learn from their mistakes and always strive to do better.  The third option is to surf the net for online examples.  Here are a few sites with exemplars...

#1-Online high school exemplars  and elementary exemplars across the core content areas.

#2- The Annenberg Media website has examples of what rigorous foreign language classrooms look like. This website may not have many exemplars to share with students, but there are examples of students engaging in learning to give teachers an idea of what students in a foreign language classroom are capable of.

#3-Online exemplars of work in the arts (drama, visual arts, and music).  When you get on the site type the word art in the search.

Wednesday's Web Tools

These are all websites I've enjoyed using with my students.  If the description sounds interesting, click on the image to be taken to the website and investigate more!

1) This is a website that generates bingo cards.  You can choose from their list of themed cards or use your own word lists to make your own printable cards.

2) Animoto is a website where you can create short digital movies.  Just upload pictures of your class and let them generate a mini movie of a trip you took, a special project, etc.  Then you can share it with the class and their families in school or via email.

3) Use the website ToonDoo to allow your students to create their own comic strips.  They can create one based on a story they read in class or make up their own.  They really enjoy working with this website.

4) This is the newest one to me.  It is a coloring page generator.  I recently used it to create a one-of-a-kind coloring book of memories.  Use it to make a momento from a fun class trip.

5) This is a site that I've used to have students create fun plot summaries of stories.  They can go online and create their own cartoons with captions, characters, settings, etc.

6) This one is a fabulous online archive of pictures from Life magazine.  This is a great way to introduce famous people and events from history.  Create a gallery walk that allows students to see and develop a context for the content before studying it.

7) The seventh one is a list of really cool virtual tours.  I was able to show my students a spectacular 360 degree view of Machu Picchu.  I found a site with a live feed from a nature preserve in the Sahara.  This page is definitely worth checking out and using with your students.

8) Finally, the Smithsonian website has a rich bank of

lessons that can be used to bring history to life!

To see a list of many more free online resources, check out my pinterest page of Websites Useful to Teachers.  

Wednesday Websites: Readers Theater Resources

One great way to encourage your students in the upper primary grades to read fluently and closely for more in depth comprehension is to have them participate in a readers theater.  If you do the Daily 5 in your classroom, you probably have students reading with someone.  A fun way to encourage that and hold them accountable is to have them practice reading scripts together that they can then perform in front of the class.  There are a lot of great resources online to choose from.  Here are a few of my favorites...

TeachingHeart is a website with links to well over 50 scripts for transitional readers.  There are some well known classics such as "Casey at Bat" and Rumplestiltskin.  But, there are also many, many more to explore that relate to a range of topic and themes.  There are scripts for Christmas, Earth day, animals and more.  This site is definitely worth checking out!

Readers Theater All Year has scripts for just about every holiday.  Most of the scripts come with approximate grade levels so you can quickly search based on theme and readability.  

Finally, don't forget about TeachersPayTeachers.  If you do a search for free plays and scripts, you will find a number of quality resources to download.  

The play's the thing to catch the interest of your students!!  Check these sites out today.

Wednesday Websites: Brain Breaks

GoNoOdle is a must-check-out-because-your-students-will-love-it website.  It is ideal for the primary grades where students' stamina is limited to small burst of time.  You can create an account for free and then access any number of brain break videos/exercises.  Olympians will take your students through short training sessions before leading them in a virtual athletic competition.  It is a great way to give your students a short break to get out the wiggles in the classroom before transitioning into a lesson.

For other virtual tools, check out my pinterest board of "websites useful to teachers."

Weekly Web Tool: Pixlr

This week's highlight is about a great website for online photo editing, Phixr. I like this site and have used it in the past with a class. It's easy since it does not require registration or require you to go through a bunch of questions. You just go to the site and use it! This was great for my school since students weren't allowed to have any personal log ons to any site.

There are a lot of tools you can use to edit your photos and I found that it's also very easy even for students who don't have a lot of experience using the computer.

I used this site to edit photos we did for a cross curricular project involving writing and then creating an image that represented their words. Photos would also be great for documenting or recording history like historical buildings or even the history of the school's neighborhood. My students loved doing this project as well!

To take the photos I brought in my own simple digital camera and allowed students to take photos with it and then I uploaded all the photos to the server so they could pick their own to edit so I didn't need any fancy equipment. To make sure they took good care of my camera and it didn't get dropped I put some yarn on it and each student that used it hung it around their neck as a strap as a precaution in case it got dropped. I printed the photos at Walgreens for about 20 cents each.

It's definitely a project I plan to do again in the future!