Teacher Printables

Well, the title says it all. This is a site where someone has spent hours upon hours creating awesome printables for teachers, from booklets to calendars t0 research organizers. The research organizers are my favorites! Even if these are not exactly what you need for your curriculum, you'll be able to get some ideas so you can design your own. If these spur on your imagination, open up Pages in your iWork 08 folder and get started. These are all in pdf (see earlier post: Pretty Darn Funny) so you will download them to your laptop and print them.
http://www.teacherprintables.net/index.html

Make sure you check out Rosemary's Blog: http://outoftheordinarywithrosemary.blogspot.com/

Constitution Day

Our United States Constitution was signed September 17, 1787. Since 2004, September 17th has been set aside as Constitution Day and schools all across the country must teach about the history of the constitution.
Here are some resources to help you:
Constitution Day Wiki - this has resources divided according to grade level. Be sure and look at the Barney Fife video. Students would love seeing that video in a Keynote presentation as an introduction to Constitution Day!
Constitution Day - Celebrate the Birthday of Our Government - scroll down to the section for Educators. You'll be able to search for activities, lesson plans, events, books and more for your grade level. Great resources here!
Signers of the Constitution - this is a mural of the signers of the constitution and their names. Wouldn't it be fun to create a mural of your students with those poses? Could your students write a constitution for your classroom?
Teaching with Documents: Observing Constitution Day - this has many activities for Constitution Day!
National Constitution Center - 4 interactive games that students will enjoy!
Congress for Kids - As you might imagine, this one is very kid friendly!
Interactive Constitution - This is pretty amazing! Students can choose the amendments to the constitution and see the original text along with an explanation. They can choose various court cases or search for topics. This site is more for grades 5 and higher.
Happy Constitution Day!

PicLits

See the full PicLit at PicLits.com
Now this is lots of fun! PicLits is a wonderful visual literacy site.
First of all sign in as a new user. Then choose a picture from the scrolling pictures. Now you have two choices of how you will add text. The drag-n-drop method is a little limiting but I think it would be great for students to choose from different parts of speech to form a complete sentence. The other method is freestyle. By clicking on freestyle you'll be able to type your own message.
Wouldn't this be great with a poetry unit? Have students choose three photos and write a haiku on each one. Then choose another style of poem and add it to photos.
You could also add your own quotes. What about quotes, thoughts, or ideas that center around any one of the six pillars of CHARACTER COUNTSsm?
Make sure you click on Learn It and you'll find lesson plans to use with PicLits.
Have fun with this one!

Research Recipe

There are so many phenomenal tools available on the web for use with research. This wiki, called Research Recipe, was created to showcase some of those tools.

Google Tools have led the way in creating an environment of collaboration among students and teachers. Bibme is a collaborative citation creator so when students are working as a group on a project they can each access their group's bibliography and add to it as they go. Lexipedia and Visual Thesaurus help students select more accurate, descriptive words. Many more tools like these are found in the Research Recipe wiki. Enjoy!

Wordle

Now this is downright fun! Create your own wordle. Put in any words that you can think of related to a topic. I chose technology for my example. But wouldn't this be great to use for your students at the beginning of the school year? Have them type the words that tell who they are. What do they like to do? What adjectives describe them? What places did they visit this summer? Who did they spend time with? And the list could go on and on. I'm even thinking about making one for each of my own children, printing it, and framing it. You can change the fonts, the colors, and the word arrangements. Explore the site. It is very user friendly.
Go to wordle.net
Bob Sprankle created an awesome video on wordle on his blog which includes a little tutorial and several great ideas for using wordle.

Infonation

I am totally fascinated by Infonation. Compare up to 7 countries according to these five categories: Health, Technology, Environment, Population, and Economy. Within each category are several statistics. Compare their population according to 0-14 year olds, projected population in 2050, population density, and more. Population density is sometimes difficult for students to understand. By clicking on the words 'population density' on the newly created bar graph, an explanation will pop up.
Economy is another tough concept for students to grasp. Have them choose what they think is a wealthy country and compare it to a third world country. Choose the category 'economy' then choose from several choices: gpd, poverty rate, educational expenditures, etc.
One of the features that I particularly like about this is that you can have six bar graphs showing at one time. Students can compare countries and then draw some conclusions from the statistics. A little research might be necessary to understand why certain countries have so many refugees, or why the birth mortality rate is so high in some countries, or why some countries have very little Internet access.
If your class is partnering with a class in another country through ePals you'll want to have them compare the two countries. Hopefully Infonation will help students understand many differences or similarities between the countries. Use Infonation for current events also. When a country is in the news check out Infonation, specifically on one of the five categories that pertains to why it is in the news.

Teaching Copyright

What is fair use? What is attribution? How much of a video or song can I use in my presentation? These questions can all be answered on this student-friendly Cyberbee page.