The end of the first week of school and we can all breathe a sigh of relief! It is always amazing to see how quickly teachers and students alike to the routines and procedures that comprise sucessful classroom management. As a thought, you may want to think how you can use technology to reinforce your classroom rules and expectations.
As we look forward to our first weekend of the new school year, here’s a few more links and an opportunity to be a part of helping Socorro Consolidated Schools to integrate more technology into the classroom.
More Links
The hunt for exceptional teaching links is a never-ending mission! As teachers, we constantly look for new and better ways to engage our students in our lessons. If you are a practitioner of balanced literacy, teaching across the curriculum or the “do now” model for lesson intros, here are a couple of more sites that might add some diversity for your students.
The Official NASA Web Site … there is a wealth of articles, streaming video, streaming audio, podcasts and pictures that can be an inspiration for any writing assignment (journal, reflection, etc.). The content can be used in all grade levels.
Science Castle … a phenomenal site with great science activities, hundreds of free projects and live online lessons/experiments (including the Experiment of the Week). Again, if you think outside the box, you can use these tools in any class!
Crayola’s Web Site … sometimes it is easy to overlook the obvious. What student would not be engaged in a Crayola project? Some teachers have more fun than the students with this fabulous free content.
Mr. Smith’s Neighborhood … a goofy teacher from New York City built a very simple wiki with a Power Point created by his class. By right clicking this link Mars.ppt and then clicking “save as” (save it to your desktop or to your My Documents folder), you can see how second graders use technology across several disciplines (Science, Writing, Computers).
NCTE Inbox … you have to scroll down the page a ways but there is a fabulous article called Creating Community Through Writing. There are several lesson plans with this article that will help teachers establish community in their classroom. If you read down a little further, there are some good tidbits on addressing diversity in the classroom.
Popcorn for Our Brains … this is a brief but fabulously engaging video that should inspire some emotional debates and reflections. Frankly, you may never use a cell phone again!
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