Technology in Your Classroom : Hot Websites :
Hot Websites November/December 2003
By Linda Lindroth
Whether you're working with holidays, geography skills or emergent readers, the web has something for everyone
Resources for learning are plentiful on the Internet, as evidenced by this month's exciting selections. Spice up your holiday research, improve your home-school connection with colorful books for parent-child reading and build your geography celebration with these websites.
Holidays and Festivals Around the World
www.internet-at-work.com/hos_mcgrane/holidays/festivals_menu.html
Here's a wonderful site for studying the holidays of different cultures. Just click on a country's flag and then link to celebrations for every month of the year. Each holiday includes several related links and activity suggestions. Research the history of a holiday, study the symbols or just have fun with the interactive games.
This is a great resource to help you set up a Calendar Corner so your students can research holidays.
Learn to Read at Starfall
www.starfall.com
I'm so excited about this wonderful website and its interactive resources for emergent readers. There's even a bonus: free print materials to help reinforce your reading program.
The site offers a reading booklet filled with activity pages for practice with short vowels, a Writing Journal with 15 great story starters and a matching word bank and a full-color "Cut-Up/Take-Home-Book" with the 15 stories as well as five art-biography books from the website. This incredible offer is available free (even the shipping is free!) to all classroom educators.
My students love this colorful, fast-paced website and the reinforcement for emergent readers is truly rewarding. Kids love the surprises and animations they get when they click on the illustrations. As a teacher, I love the audio – it's clear and fast, even over a school network. Students can click on any word to get its pronunciation using the phonemic sounds before blending the word together. Each of the stories has an online game that reinforces the phonics in the story – short vowels, beginning, middle and ending sounds and word family practice are all represented.
U.S. Geological Survey
www.usgs.gov/education/
November 16-22 is National Geography Awareness Week. A great resource for your class celebration is the U.S. Geological Survey website, which has dozens of educational resources for teachers and students, to promote better geography skills.
Map Wizard is a collection of research and interactive web resources that you'll be able to fit into any area of your curriculum. Students can plot latitude and longitude with the Map It feature. They'll also learn how and why geological and topographical maps are made.
The site's categories include Teachers, Students and Explorers. The Teacher link features lessons based on national standards for maps, life science and earth science. The Map Adventures packet for K-3 and the Exploring Caves packet are two of my favorites for fall themes.
NASA Explores
nasaexplores.com
This is an excellent resource for celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Wright brothers' flight and the history of flight from their plane to space exploration. The weekly articles are correlated to the national education standards in science, math, technology and geography.
Teachers can search by standard for detailed lessons to implement the standard in instruction. Each lesson plan provides details for preparation time and class length, materials, web resources, procedure with discussion questions, and extensions. Printable Teacher and Student Sheets give background information, directions for all procedures, and questions to test student understanding.
Teachers will love the Calendar with lots of relevant educational opportunities from the history of flight. Print this Calendar to put in your lesson plan book for the rest of the school year!
National Geography Awareness Week
www.nationalgeographic.com/geographyaction/habitats/gaw.html
National Geographic honors Geography Awareness Week, November 16-22, 2003 with a plethora of exciting activities. Be sure to try some of the site's interactive games that cover topics from maps to habitats.
Help your students be a part of the "Kids Take Action!" project to become a "Habitat Hero." Students can do their part to save our environment by pledging to complete a habitat project. At the website, they can learn how to create a school or backyard habitat, plant a butterfly garden or organize a clean-up or recycling project.
Teachers can click on "Professional Development" to learn more about the Geography Teaching Alliances in their area. These Alliances are committed to improving geography instruction, and can notify you of additional resources for teaching geography.
The Writer -- Tech Spotlight
The Writer by Keyboard Instructor is an innovative product for promoting keyboarding instruction in the elementary grades. More than just keyboarding practice, The Writer includes strong word processing tools such as a thesaurus and spell check. Personal, password-protected work folders make it easy to keep track of student writing and reinforce writing skills.
Keyboarding skills are easier to master with the built-in individualized keyboarding instructor. There are 116 pre-programmed lessons with a progress report. The keyboard has touch sensors in the home row keys, which reinforces good keyboarding position by randomly awarding points for pressing the home row keys when asked. "Technique Builder" is a motivational tool that helps keep fingers in position to build speed and accuracy. There is even an infrared file transfer to a pc or Mac with a "Good Writing Checklist" attached to the bottom of the file.
For more information, visit www.keyboardinstructor.com or call 800-797-7121. $189 per unit; call for bundle pricing.
Linda K. Lindroth is Technology Editor and Web Coordinator for Teaching Pre K-8. She is also a Technology Resource Teacher in a K-5 computer lab in Lexington, KY.
November/December 2003, Vol.34, No.3
