Greatest Hits!

Greatest Hits: Website Edition

TEACHER RESOURCE:

1. Read Works

This website houses a wealth of reading selections. Reading passages are categorized by reading strategies, grade level, and lexile level. It is also novel units of study by genre. Some passages have follow-up questions for students to complete. This website is well designed for teachers and parents to increase their students reading comprehension.

2. Khan Academy

This resource for teachers and adult learners allows you to add a classroom set of learners to your private page, mark their progress, grid assignment scores, and offers tutorials in 5 topic areas with different subtopics. Khan Academy is a free website that is funded through Google and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; both highly support education.

3. TED Ed

Searching for educational videos on YouTube can be a hassle, but this website makes it happen! Incorporating technology and videos into the classroom is a great teaching tool to open a lesson, discuss a new topic, and easily engage students. There is an available “Flip this video” option, which allows a teacher to alter parts of the video and insert questions for students to answer.

CLASSROOM USE: (Teacher and Student benefit)

4. Smithsonian Education

This is an incredible website for virtual field trips! Along with being kid-friendly, this website organizes by subject areas with games, interactive activities, and bits of information scattered throughout each webpage. There are separate sections for parent, teacher, and student use.

5. Google Earth

Google earth offers many viewpoints for classroom exploration and virtual field trips. Space, 3D buildings, Oceanic perspectives are a few of the places you can visit. There is even an option travel back in time to see the world at different points in history. This would be great for centers time at the computers with specific locations or buildings to learn about or a walk-through with the entire class on a social studies unit.

6. Popplet

This website offers free membership and is a resource tool for teachers and students. Popplet is a design website for concept maps! It can also be downloaded on iPads from the app store; there is a free version and a $4.99 version. This website is fun to use on the computer or iPad and allows student to create their own concept maps during Daily 5 time, for a project, or as a class study guide. A study guide use of this program could be a concept map made by the teacher and printed off or made with students and saved to be printed or emailed home.

STUDENT PRACTICE
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7. iCivics

Offering an interactive look into governmental procedures, this website gives students the chance to live out America’s government system. Students can work on budgeting, citizenships and participation, the constitution, and 16 other units of study. Under each unit topic are several blurbs about what they could learn about in the topic. They are then listed by being a lesson plan, web quest, or game.

8. Wonderopolis

Wonderopolis would be fantastic for a beginning activity, morning work time, or free time on Fridays. This website is incorporates fun facts with useable knowledge. It ranges through all grades. Kindergartens would be able to watch the videos and high schools could also read the informational text below the videos. There is a place to ask questions, find out the “wonder of the day”, and explore videos and passages about cancer, the judicial system, vocabulary, and more.

9. Digital Public Library of America

A source of pictures, videos, information, and exhibits, this website houses a collection of history where students can easily explore. This website can be used on all grade levels (I would gear this towards upper elementary). Each collection is divided into units. To start these units, students would read a brief description then enter an exhibition on a historical topic. This would be great research for a presentation, report, or for students with long-term illnesses/surgery at home.

10. Myths and Legends

This website would work well for centers. It has an audio function to read the stories to the student at a listening center or they can turn it off and read the story themselves. It includes many classics such as “The Sword in the Stone” and “Pandora’s Box”. It lists the myths by region and date of creation. There is a teacher page where it has worksheets and extra information about the myths and legends or how to sequence a particular story. This webpage shows up dark and eerie, like some of the stories with their moral lessons after an unfortunate event. This would appear to boys, which is typically a more difficult group to appeal to in literature.