A Grab Bag of Great Educator Sites

MSHSAA - The Missouri High School Activities Association website, a great place to find out about the various extra- and co-curricular activities our students are involved in.

DESE - Missouri's Department of Elementary and Secondary Education website. The first stop for answers about certification, curriculum, instruction, assessment, school reform, etc.

USED - The US Department of Education site, where grant information and all the No Child Left Behind documents can be found.

Interested in professional development online? Check out the sites for the National Staff Development Council and the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. And here's a link to a great site about learning styles.

SchoolNotes - A site where teachers can post homework notes and students and parents can view them. Pretty easy to use. You can take a look at how one teacher uses her site and see if it might work for you.

Bror Saxberg's Blog - Bror is the Chief Education Officer of K12.com, the Internet-based curriculum and instruction company used by homeschoolers and state education departments, alike.

The Fischbowl - Karl Fisch is the Technology Director at Arapahoe HS in Littleton, Colorado. He is responsible for some very motivational slide shows for educators that can be accessed from his site.

The Apple - A news and networking site for teachers. Pretty job-search heavy, but lots of other good info, too.

Education Week Online - Want to stay current with news in our business? Also, watch for periodic trial subscription offers that really give lots of content.

Teachley's Amazing Talking Brain - Great source for current brain research info. Ten minutes here taking the quizzes for teachers will drop your jaw. Also includes a free e-book about how we all learn.

Curriki - A curriculum wiki. How cool. Go here to get lesson plans and other good curriculum tools and materials.

Brain Rules - If teachers could only have one book to improve their understanding of how our students SHOULD be learning... This is the website for that book. Wow! Life changing! And if you want to see if all the neuroscience it exposes is true, check out the Society for Neuroscience site.

Wikipedia - Ever thought of making contributing to Wikipedia a class project? Wow...research and projects would actually have immediate meaning and impact!

Committed Sardines - Ian Jukes is truly an educational visionary. His blog site is full of informative handouts and presentation descriptions of interest to all educators.

TED - The website for Technology Entertainment Design, a community of the world's greatest thinkers who present short speeches to each other at an annual convention. Powerful ideas on video! We have a front row seat to the best thinking of our times.

MySpace and Facebook are two social networking sites that, used judiciously and properly, can give you incredible communication access to parents and students.

Teachers.net - Lesson plans, new software, great site ideas... Great resource for teachers.

Some good classroom grant sites are: TeachersCount, TeachersNetwork, KidsInNeed, SchoolGrants.

Need help from Theresa Greene, our Technology Director? Visit her website at Weebly.

Open Source Software Resources and Free Stuff!

Open source software is designed by highly capable programmers and developers with one idea in mind - making access to high-quality software available to everyone. That means that the usually free, open source programs rival their expensive, commercial counterparts in power and quality. Many visionaries hav esaid that open source is the wave of the future for strapped schools. Try these out and let your students know about them. The fact that they can produce papers, presentations, web pages and sites, etc. for almost no cost truly evens the academic playing field. It's not a bad deal for us teachers, either!

OpenOffice.Org - The open source answer to office suites like Microsoft Office and Works. The suite includes a word processor, a spreadsheet program, and a presentation creator, among other apps.

KompoZer - While not quite as powerful as other WYSIWYG HTML editors like Dreamweaver or FrontPage, KompoZer is free. And there is lots of help and support both within the program and online.

Connexions - An open source site that provides online textbooks that you can edit to fit your course, print out, or use as is. And you can even create your own textbook for others to use and join the open source movement.

Freewebs - Great web hosting site that many of us at PH already use. You can choose to either use their site building tools or upload your own site files.