TEACHERS CORNER

Educational Products and Services

  • Hands-On Astrophysics — Describes a flexible set of hands-on educational materials, activities, and investigations, based on an electronic database of variable star measurements. These materials, which are available for purchase, allow students to “experience the excitement of doing real science with real data.”
  • Taking the Bully by the Horns — A book and web page dedicated to helping children and young teens deal with bullies and self-esteem issues.
  • Landfall Productions — Distributor of an award-winning documentary film (video) on eight public school teachers who use Waldorf education methods in their public school classrooms.
  • passports — A company that provides educational travel tours for high school and college students, their teachers and professors, and adults. Travel trips are scheduled year-round to Europe, Scandinavia, Africa, the Caribbean, Asia, and Australia.
  • The Hampstead Players —This children’s theatrical touring company visits schools around the country, bringing a taste of Shakespeare and other drama to kids in grades K through 8.
  • Bilingual Books for Kids — This site offers a large array of books with text in both English and Spanish, and allows you to order the books via mail, fax, or e-mail.
  • Silly Billy’s World — At this site, you can read online stories about Silly Billy or order books and videotapes. The page also provides information about author Bill Dallas Lewis’s visits to elementary schools, during which he gives a multimedia demonstration of how he creates the illustrations for his books.

General Resources

  • Federal Resources for Educational Excellence — The FREE website organizes hundreds of federally supported education resources so that they can be searched easily. Categories include arts, educational technology, foreign languages, health and safety, language arts, mathematics, physical education, science, social studies, and vocational education.
  • TeenLit.com — This is a site dedicated to promoting teen literacy and to helping teachers address the needs of adolescent writers. TeenLit provides a forum for teen writers to publish and discuss their writing and a place to review and discuss books they read.
  • LD OnLine: Learning Disabilities Information and Resources — An interactive guide for parents, teachers, and children that includes general information, articles, first-person accounts, artwork, bulletin boards and online chats, links to other resources, and a newsletter.
  • Thirteen Ed Online — Thirteen/WNET’s practical service for K-12 educators is designed by teachers for teachers. The site is updated frequently and offers original Web-based lesson plans, in-depth Website reviews, software samples, and additional resources designed to foster an online education-based community.
  • Basic Educational Materials, Publishers — “Materials Made For Teachers!” This company offers Basic Math Skills Workbooks in the areas of computational addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division skills, as well as Basic Language Arts Skills Workbooks in many areas of grammar and sentence writing skills. All skill workbooks are non-graded and can be used as review, remedial, and supplemental resources.
  • Xpeditions @ nationalgeographic.com — This outstanding site, provided by the National Geographic Society, includes an atlas with nearly 1800 detailed maps you can print out; a forum for sharing ideas on geographic topics; a description of the 18 U.S. National Geography Standards, with classroom ideas and family activities for each one; and a virtual-reality Xpedition Hall that’s open for exploring.
  • BandAides and Blackboards — A web project designed to sensitize people to what it’s like growing up with medical problems. The site includes many stories by children and teens who are dealing with chronic illnesses and other health problems. These young people describe the physical aspects of their medical conditions as well as the social rejection and teasing that they sometimes face.
  • History Alive! Teachers’ Curriculum Institute — An innovative, student-centered approach to history instruction designed to engage students with diverse learning styles. The site has information about curriculum materials for U.S. and world history, professional development seminars, sample activities, and more.
  • Footbag Peace Initiative — An interesting site that describes how a dedicated group of athletes and educators is using the game of footbag (or “hacky sack”) to promote personal health and cultural healing. Definitely worth checking out!
  • OneWorld Classrooms — An educational, child-friendly, and child-safe site that consists of language arts and curriculum-based “learning adventures” focusing on different regions/cultures of the world, such as East Africa and the Amazon rain forest.
  • Scripts for Schools — Devoted to Readers Theater for students of all ages, this site provides both free scripts for scripts for purchase for use in the classroom. There are also links to related sites on the web.
  • PedagoNet — A “learning material and resource center” that has a nice database of resources both offered to and requested by teachers.
  • Famous Speeches & Audio — A large and well-organized archive of speeches from throughout history. You can search by speaker, by title, by date, or by topic.
  • Space Educators’ Handbook Home Page — The content at this site is part of NASA’s Multimedia Space Educator’s Handbook. It includes materials for teaching space technology through science fiction (e.g., Star Trek), QuickTime space movies, space comics, and more.
  • The School Page — Online help for teachers and administrators.
  • From Now On — “The Educational Technology Journal”
  • Harnessing the Power of the Web for Classroom Use: A Tutorial — Part of The Global SchoolNet: engaging students and teachers around the world in learning exchanges.
  • Newton’s Apple — “Public TV’s family science show.” Get a preview of this season’s upcoming shows, download teacher’s guides and order other support materials, and send in science questions via e-mail that might be answered in next season’s shows.
  • AskERIC — The Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) is a federally funded national information system that provides a variety of services and products on a broad range of education-related issues. The site has several search engines to help you find the information you’re looking for.
  • Science Learning Network — An online community of educators, students, schools, science museums, and other institutions demonstrating a new model for inquiry science education. Member museums include the Exploratorium in San Francisco, the Miami Museum of Science, the Franklin Institute Science Museum in Philadelphia, the Museum of Science in Boston, the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, and the Science Museum of Minnesota.
  • The GLOBE Program — Students conduct an array of measurements and observations at their schools and share their data via the Internet with other students and scientists around the world to detail an environmental picture of the globe.
  • Carol Hurst’s Children’s Literature — This site offers “a collection of reviews of great books for kids, ideas of ways to use them in the classroom, and collections of books and activities about particular subjects, curriculum areas, themes, and professional topics.”
  • Teachnet.Com: Teacher’s Edition Online — This newsletter has loads of ideas for activities, management strategies, and more.
  • Teacher.org — This site provides information for individuals who are considering a career in teaching, including state certification and licensing requirements, teacher shortage statistics, and salary and job outlook. Individuals currently teaching will find lesson plans, as well as information about teaching scholarships, grants, and teacher discounts.
  • EdWeb — This site has interesting and well-written web pages about Internet technology and its affect on education. Specific topics include the Information Highway Debate, and WWWEDU: The Web and Education List.
  • WWW Virtual Library — This site lets you conduct far-reaching searches of the Web, with information conveniently arranged by subject.
  • Internet Public Library — This library has, among other things, Subject Collections that allow you to search the Web by subject and a Ready Reference section with hotlinks to Internet search engines such as Factbites, Lycos, and Yahoo!.

Educational Software

  • Baggetta_Ware English Language Arts Software — This site offers educational software that you can try for free before purchasing. Titles include the Interactive Raven (Edgar Allan Poe), and the Interactive Canterbury Tales (Prologue)(DOS).
  • Owl & Mouse Educational Software — educational software and maps. Includes a downloadable activity in which kids print, color, cut out, and assemble a barn, silo, farmhouse, and chicken coop to make a model farm.
  • SuperKids Educational Software Review — Provides substantial reviews (by parents, teachers, and kids) of children’s educational software. A very helpful site if you’re thinking about investing in some software for your classroom.
  • Hungry Frog — A small California publisher that offers software titles in math, chemistry, and modern and classical language vocabulary.
  • Lawrence Goetz’s Home Page — Offers children’s shareware programs for MS Windows.
  • Totware — Freeware and shareware for kids.