T&L Journal #1 - Online Technology Resources for Teachers

There is a wealth of teacher resources on the internet. The difficult part is not finding resources, it's finding quality resources. To start my process of finding resources to review, I visited my first site.

Resource #1 - "All My Faves - Education" - http://edu.allmyfaves.com/ - This site was recommended to me by my mother--a 1st through 5th grade Computer Technology Teacher. As with most things that are recommended to me, the site went directly to my mental back burner, as I had other things to tend to at the time. I finally looked back to this site now, more than a month later, as the basis for this journal assignment. This is the Education portion of the "All My Faves" website, whose motto is "Why Search?" The site is designed to be a collection of categorized links to popular web pages. The education page contains categories including Academics, Art, Blogs, Books, Computer and more, including the primary content areas. Each category contains upwards of a half dozen links to different websites within that category. This site could be useful to any teacher as a starting point to finding good resources for instructional uses. While it is not all-inclusive and the provided links aren't necessarily for the best sites on the world-wide web, it certainly is a useful site for finding potentially useful resources quickly.

Resource #2 - "Teacher Vision" - http://www.teachervision.fen.com/ - This site was one of the links in All My Faves' Teachers category. The page is dedicated to providing a variety of resources to teachers of all disciplines, as their motto "lesson plans, printables, and more" suggests. The home page has a few different sections such as a "What's New" to the site section, an "Also on TeacherVision" section that covers contemporarily relevant resources (currently it provides links to resources for the Haiti earthquake, Black History Month, Valentine's Day and the Chinese New Year), a section to sign up for their newsletter and the most useful section--one which allows teachers to search for resources and/or lesson plans by grade or subject. Tabs along the top of the page provide links to certain categories of resources, such as grades, subjects, themes, graphic organizers, classroom management and bulletin boards. When using the section of the page that allows for searching within the grades or subjects for resources, 827 resources were found within the area of 8th Grade Mathematics--my current position--while a total of 9529 resources were found within the 8th grade altogether! Clearly this site's value is in it's ability to make a plethora of resources available at a teacher's fingertips. As the homepage says, "TeacherVision is dedicated to helping teachers save time. Find 20,000 pages of classroom-ready lesson plans, printables and resources." Unfortunately, the site requires a subscription, which costs $49.95 per year. This subscription does give you access to a "library of over 180 printable books, 1,000+ downloadale DK Clip Art Images, Funbrain to Go downloadable games . . . " and 50% off the use of "MyGradebook," but it seems a little silly to pay for these resources when the internet has such a wide array of things available. I will say that I may try out their free 7-day trial when I have the time to look through the resources. Will it be worth the price to simplify the search for easily accessible quality teaching resources?

Resource #3 - BrainPOP - http://www.brainpop.com/ - This site, which I also discovered from the All My Faves site, is a subscription based service that contains resources for teaching all of the main curriculum areas in grades K-12 (While 3-12 is the main focus of BrainPOP, they have K-2 resources available through their service called BrainPOP Jr.). The three main components of the site are instructional cartoons, a "Q&A" feature for students to use and opportunities for students to self-assess through quizzes. Most of the resources involve the likeable, somewhat comedic and informative cartoon characters Tim and Moby, a young man and robot, who take part in most of the videos and are the answer-providers in the "Q&A" videos. Within each curricular area--Science, Social Studies, English, Math, Arts & Music, Health and Technology--the resources are further divided into sub-categories, such as algebra or data analysis in math. While it is a subscription based service, many of the sites resources are free, as I was able to access multiple resources without even using their free trial membership. Some of their other resources include do-it-yourself experiments (with Bob the ex-lab rat!) and a section dedicated to helping teachers use the site's resources which includes a state standards search tool. All of the videos are closed-captioned enabled (a nice assistive technology add-in), play through flash player plug-ins (which makes it easy to use on most any computer) and are matched up with the aforementioned multiple-choice quizzes. These quizzes can be taken before or after the movie and can be taken as practice, where your answers are checked as you go, or as an assessment, where you find out your score & see what you did wrong afterwards (either on the webpage, through your email or as a printable score). The printable quiz results could be useful if a teacher asked his or her students to view a particular video and then take the associated quiz; the students could then print their quiz results in order to earn a grade in the class. Also, the quizzes can be printed out, so that teachers could use them after a class watched a video together. Overall, this is a great resource which could be very useful if used appropriately as an addition to a teacher's lesson plan. It's best characteristic is the fact that students would almost certainly find the sites videos and activities to be engaging and fun.

Resource #4 - MathMovesU - http://www.mathmovesu.com/ - When first visiting this website, I was greeted with a welcoming message that invited me to "explore . . . have fun and pick up some cool math skills" as well as an applet that directed me to choose my character (I selected a guy in a hot dog costume) as well as put in some information about myself. After getting settled in, I found that I (when I say I, I mean my hot dog costume-wearing avatar guy) was able to move about through this site learning math facts, solving problems and, well, exploring. I found that the site was interesting, very user-friendly in a near-video-game-like manner and would be pretty engaging for middle schoolers, especially younger middle schoolers. This website was designed by the Raytheon company--a sponsor of my things involving middle school math--in an effort to create experiences that will engage middle school students in mathematics learning. As their information page explains, "Raytheon's MathMovesU is an innovative program designed to engage middle school students with math whe their interest in the subject typically declines. Algebra, geometry, decimals, fractions & word problems combine with topics kids are passionate about; sports, music & fashion." The site is designed to be used by students or as instructional tools by parents or teachers. It features resources for the parents and teachers to use, such as printable practice worksheets and a classroom guide. I think that this site could be useful for a math teacher like myself, though I would not use it on a daily basis. It could be used occasionally to supplement lessons, but it's best use may be for allowing the students to do self-directed explorations during free time or enrichment times. It could definitely be a great thing to throw in to a lesson plan in a "All students who have their assignment done get to go explore on MathMovesU" kind of way or as something to keep part of a class busy and engaged (therefore, not busy work!) while the rest of the class participates in a remedial lesson, intervention, review or make-up work time.

Resource #5 - Google Docs (Forms) - http://docs.google.com - A surprisingly low number of people--teachers in specific--are familiar with the great tools available through Google Docs. Even fewer are familiar with the most teacher-friendly of those tools--Google Doc forms. Using these was recently recommended to me. While the other resources are neat for sharing files (and the editing of those files) between teachers or members of student groups, Google Doc forms provide a wonderful opportunity for simple auto-collected and auto-organized online homework assignments or information forms. A teacher can make a form with a collection of questions in a collection of formats--text, paragraph text (longer than regular text), multiple choice, checkboxes, choose from a list, scale or grid. The designer can then share the link to the form as a web address with his or her students. After the students complete the form, the teacher can then view their responses in a summary format or in an automatically organized spreadsheet. A teacher could find many classroom management uses for this, such as collecting and organizing all students' schedules and parents' contact information. They could even use these forms for themselves only. For example, if a teacher wanted to organize parent contact records better, that teacher could make a form that asks some simple questions--what parent did you contact, who is the student, what was the date, what was the topic of the contact--and fill out the form each time they contact a parent, thus creating a spreadsheet that would show their history of parent contacts! It could also be used for simple homework assignments: not only would the students not need to remember to hand in a paper, but the teachers wouldn't need to collect or grade a stack of papers, they could just look through the spreadsheet! I am certain that i will utilize this resource in the future.

While searching for my 5 resources, I found that there were thousands of teacher resources out there on the world wide web. Unfortunately, more often than not, they are not exemplary resources. However, some of the good ones can make up for wasted search time! The internet provides us with resources that would never be available to us otherwise - and it's worth the searching!