Making Teachers Nerdy

Today’s topic again focuses on another valuable teacher freebie, and free is in my price range.  How about you? Today’s post gives each of us a rare professional development opportunity – learning from other teachers who teach the same curriculum as you.  Think about it.  Wouldn’t the idea of having just a first grade teacher conference be phenomenal?  How about a drama teacher conference?  Or one for middle school English teachers?  What sort of conversations would you have?  What resources would you share?

Now think about the possibility of peering inside another teacher’s classroom to see what wonderful projects and activities were happening.  Could you take an idea or two back to your room?  Absolutely!  That’s the power of following educational blogs.

What I’ve pulled for you today are blogs divided by subject and grade level for you to quickly reference, but I do encourage you to explore blogs outside of your curriculum, as well.  Some are classroom blogs.  Others are teacher reflections.  A few are teaching strategies with classroom resources, and there are even some from outside education, but relate to your curriculum. 

I cannot guarantee you will be able to reference all of these blogs while at school, as I am aware many school filters limit access to blogs.  Please, do not let that discourage you from investigating, however.  Take the time to check these out.  Hopefully you will find inspiration and wonderful ideas.

If you own a blog or know of another one that would fall under this list, please consider adding it to the comments. The better the list, the better we all will benefit.

Click Here to View the Links

Today I’m offering some great free online photo editors.  Though there are a heap of editors online that do very advanced Photoshop like enhancements, today I’m sharing for of the easiest and most intuitive tools available.  Even if you are a novice to photo editing, these are great tools for you too.  The images used with these tools come from a travel buddy project I helped manage a couple of years ago.  I’ll be writing on travel buddy projects next week.

If you want to use your digital photos on classroom wikis or blogs, you will need to know a bit about image sizing and pixels. For websites, I recommend 320x240.  It’s a nice 4 inch image that won’t take too much space yet it is easy to view.  This image size conversion calculator will give you a good visual on image sizes in a web space.  If you click the preview button, you will see how large the image will be on a website.

If you are simply wanting to resize an image to send as an email attachment, I suggest 640x480.  That prevents folks from having to scroll to the right and down three times in order to see the image.  Am I the only one who gets frustrated with those?  :)

Click Here to View the Links with Photo Examples

With the educational budget crunches that we are all facing, I thought it would be best to share some of the best freebies on the web for teachers.  Today’s topic is worksheet generators.  If you need to create a puzzle, test, graphic organizer, or math problems, you do have some great tools available.  I have provided links that offer printable sheets and interactive sites that help you promote a paperless classroom and give students with disabilities more options over paper and pencil activities.

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1.  Crayola Educators –  Believe it or not some amazing art linked lesson plans to many of the K-12 core curriculum units can be found here, and most of them require simple art supplies.  Lesson plans for sculpture, painting, drawings, and more are available with unit topics. 
2. Delicious – This is a free service where thousands of people keep their web favorites, enabling you to view and save the bookmarks to your own account.  To utilize, you will need to think in one word tags (topics) such as “underground_railroad”, “angles”, or “romeoandjuliet”.  Click on Explore Tags which is located on the middle of the screen and type in your topic.  The results will be other people who have bookmarked items with that topic that you can now save.  For more information on Delicious, here is a video.
3. Intel Assessing Projects – This is an amazing resource that provides you with assessment ideas for everything from blogs to drama skits.  The assessment strategies and assessment plans are fantastic, but definitely check out the “Try It” section for a demo of the tool.  If you have a login for the Intel Thinking Tools, it will work here, as well.
4. Microsoft Templates and Google Document Templates – Believe it or not, there is an amazing amount of resources for teachers at Microsoft.  You will find bookmarks, labels, behavior contracts, calendars, brochures, parent letters, and more.  The Google templates are also vast, but they do require you to create an account to utilize.
5. PBS Teachers – Wonderful for PreK-5^th grade on the elementary level and targeted for science and history on the 6-12 level, PBS Teachers is a great resource.  Here you can find videos from NOVA and the American Experience and interactive sites for elementary reading and math.
6. PDF Search Engine – This is a brilliant tool that allows you to locate premade handouts and worksheets in no time.  Simply type in the topic and a list of .pdf printable documents will be available.
7. Quia – Highly recommended for Foreign Language and Language Arts Teachers.  Though it is a subscription based site for you to create interactive games, quizzes, and more, you can take advantage of the thousands of activities without joining.  Simply paste site:www.quia.com into Google along with your search query.  For example: underground railroad site:www.quia.com.  The results will be a list of interactive games and quizzes.
8. Teachers.tv – An educational video site from the United Kingdom that offers wonderful case study classroom videos and more.  Simply click your curriculum area on the left to browse what is available.  You will not be able to download videos from here, but they will play from the website. I do believe teachers do need YouTube and TeacherTube, as well, but this site's focus is on improving teacher instruction.
9. The Library of Congress – We all know that teaching with primary resources is a wonderful tool.  Here you can access over 10 million digitized artifacts to use within your classroom.  Photos, manuscripts, sheet music, and audio recordings are at your fingertips.  
10. Thinkfinity – Hands down one of my favorite websites for teachers.  Thinkfinity is sponsored by the Verizon Foundation and it is actually an impressive partnership with major groups such as the National Geographic Society, The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, and more.   Here you will find some of the best project based learning units, classroom interactives, premade worksheets, and standards-based activities.

My favorite telecollaborative projects are those where students get to write, video, draw, or design unique products and share them with the world.  Perhaps it’s because I’m still a Language Arts teacher at heart, and I get excited about students being creative, but I believe students do have the most buy in when they are able to help contribute not simply their ideas, but a bit of themselves.

The basic idea is having students create original artwork, poetry, short stories, or video productions and publish them on the web.  They become collaborative when your classroom connects with another to share these creations or collaboratively develop them.  The published web space can be a virtual art gallery, a blog, or your own channel on www.schooltube.com.  The possibilities are only limited by your imagination.

Let me share some examples to give you a visual:

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