Tech Tips & Resources

50states.com is a great resource for the social studies class. If your kids need to do research on any state, they will find all the basic info on this site. Each state listing will include historical information, size, state bird, state flower, city guides, geographical info, colleges and universities, etc, etc. And if you are teaching about a state, you’ll get all the info you need plus some nice photos to print of the state flag, maps, and more.

That is their motto at Inkless Tales. A great little site with games, coloring pages, stories, downloads and more. Check them out! I especially like the Animated Alphabet!! 

Need a quick set of worksheets customized to the exact type of problem your students are practicing? Visit SuperKids and check out the Math Worksheet Creator. Very quick creation of addition, subtraction, greater than or less than, odd or even, and more.

Many of the web sites I’ve shared with teachers contain holiday resources. But here are a couple more that I’ve not shared and they have some great Halloween goodies.

The games and jigsaw puzzles on Teachers Love SMART Boards work great for all teachers and are lots of fun for kids during their free time or as a reward for a job well done.

Also, The Teachers Corner has enough Halloween activities and lesson plans to keep a classroom busy all the way to Halloween, 2010!

Check out both sites for lots of fun stuff.

Back at work after attending the statewide conference for educational technology folks. A very good day yesterday. And a few impressions…

First of all, I can’t believe how many good resources and tips a guy can pick up in a day! And I can’t imagine how everyone finds so many good things. I spend a lot of time online seeking out resources and I’m constantly amazed at how many good things are out there that I would never find.

Second, Google continues to amaze me. I’ve taught professional development workshops on Google. I’ve researched Google. And Google still comes up with new ideas almost daily. At least it seems that way. Some of the cool tools I saw yesterday already have me thinking about ways to change a lot of the work I do.

Finally, kudos to Kathy Schrock. Just like the rest of us, she was overwhelmed with the range of information coming into her life on a daily basis. E-mail, RSS feeds, blogs, tweets, social networks. How does a person keep up with it all? She told us! She actually took the time to analyze different methods for streamlining all the information and built an entire workshop around the hardware, software and strategies for making all this rush of information more manageable. Thanks!

This is just a simple online tool that allows you to create a practice page for students. Much like our “abc” fonts, these practice pages use large letters with all the guidelines on the page. The limitation is that you can only include one word/phrase per page…all the practice is a repetition of that word or phrase. But you can choose whether to have your page in traditional or modern print styles.

I don’t have stock in Apple – perhaps a mistake on my part. But I felt like it needed to be said so you wouldn’t think my good feelings were all about the cash. Nope. But as an Apple user from the days of the Apple SE, I’m always happy to see them being successful and to see their product line improving. And Apple just updated several product lines yesterday with hardware that looks very impressive. However, this article really demonstrates just how successful they have been – even at a time when the economy just sucks. I mean, Apple sales have grown faster than the rest of the PC market in 19 of the last 20 quarters! That’s pretty impressive.

Books and audiobooks can get expensive. Fortunately, there are numerous web sites compiling hundreds of books that can be read and/or downloaded and listened to for free! These are mostly older books in the public domain, but that doesn’t stop them from being valuable resources for the classroom.

Here are a few to check out…

Free Classic Audio Books offers more than 50 audio books that are free to download. Most of the books have human narration, but some are high quality text-to-speech narration. Titles include Swiss Family Robinson, Legend of Sleep Hollow, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and A Christmas Carol. The site also has a great offer of 200 classic books on one DVD for just $9.95. All 200 are human narration. And all are mp3 format that can be listened to on the DVD, copied to your computer for listening, or moved to an iPod.

Children’s Storybooks Online currently has 35 illustrated storybooks that can be read online. The books are divided into Books for Young Children, Books for Older Children, and Books for Young adults.

Biblomania offers more than 2000 classic texts including books, poems, short stories and plays. All of these are available for reading online along with support options for research and discussion.

Our final resource today is LibriVox. The goal of LibriVox is to make all public domain books available as free audiobooks. At this point, their catalog has more than 2300 audio books available. You can listen online or download the mp3 to your computer for listening, burning to CD, or moving to your iPod.

Just over two weeks ago, I pointed you in the direction of 101 Historical Moments You Can Relive On YouTube. Today I want to share another great list of YouTube videos for teachers. This list – 100 Best YouTube Videos for Teachers – originated on the SmartTeaching.org website, but has been re-posted in numerous locations.

This list of 100 videos is divided into history, science, language, arts, inspiration, classroom management, how-to guides, technology and humor. Some of these are more geared for higher education than the first list, but many are still excellent videos.

So for schools that have not blocked YouTube, this brings us to more than 200 outstanding videos for teachers to enjoy.

Two weeks ago, I encouraged you to go visit Teaching Learners with Multiple Special Needs. It is a fantastic site with so many great resources and ideas.

Well, today I’ve got two more sites for you. check out Building A Program That Works, a blog by a teacher in Alberta, Canada. This teacher works in a k-12 classroom for students with multiple complex needs and she knows her stuff. She has a lot of great ideas. But perhaps most interesting for some of the teachers in our school, she is using News-2-You for the first time this year. And she is publishing a ton of ideas and activities that she uses to enrich that curriculum.

To go along with that, check out Alicia’s blog, SMD Teacher. Alicia has been working with kids with severe and profound disabilities for 14 years out in the great state of Kansas. Alicia has also worked with News-2-You and is adding the Unique curriculum to her classroom this year. So her ideas and resources are very helpful to others working with those tools. Plus this blog has a lot of other great ideas.

So go…check them out!