A new school year is about to get started. For school people everywhere, the start of school is our other New Year's Day, a day that marks the beginning of another annual cycle of a school year. At all schools, there's much to do as teachers ready their classrooms and curricula for students. At GSB, this school year is a bit busier; there's also a new KnightSite to learn. But somehow, someway, all of the plans and tasks fall into place as the students arrive, and everyone begins the process of another year of learning.
I thought as an initial blog entry this year I'd offer to teachers a few web sites that I find useful and/or interesting. Each comes with a brief annotation. I hope in your spare minutes you'll take a look at sites that look promising to you.
http://geoguessr.com/ - This site is actually an interactive geography quiz that utilizes Google Earth maps. Players are offered a scene. The scene can be manipulated; views can be changed, images enlarged. On a world map, the viewer places the scene. Answers are given, and the closer you are to the location (in miles), the better your score. It is guaranteed to test your knowledge of geography and sharpen deductive reasoning skills.
http://www.smallmeans.com/new-york-times-infographics/ - Infographics marry artistic design with data-driven information. I believe infographics can make great project assignments for students of virtually any age. They can be fun to do and can help students learn about a topic. The NY Times is one of the only news agencies with a department devoted to infographics. See their work archived at this site.
http://www.hbogo.com/ - Do you get HBO at home? If you do, you have access to a wide variety of their content at this website. Here, content is organized for your convenience. Of special interest to many teachers is the wide array of documentary films available. This content can be accessed on your computer; there is also an HBOGO app for mobile devices.
http://www.gutenberg.org/ - The Gutenberg Project is taking non-copyrighted written material and making it available as digital content. A great many books, especially literary classics, are available free here. The site is user friendly when it comes to downloading content to your device of choice.
http://www.pbslearningmedia.org/ - I believe I have mentioned this site in a past post. PBS has built a site for educators that brings together thousands of instructional materials for teachers of all disciplines and ages. The site navigates easily and it's virtually guaranteed any teacher can find useful resource material here.
https://www.dropbox.com/ - Dropbox (and similar sites like box.net) utilize Cloud technology to offer remote storage to users. Dropbox users get several gigabytes of free storage. More is available with subscription charges. The end result? You can store files in your dropbox account and access these same files anywhere there is internet service. There is a mobile app as well with full syncing capabilities. It's convenient, safe and efficient. No need to email yourself documents again.
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/ - National Geographic Magazine has been around for a long time because it has offered consistently interesting articles and stunning images. The web site continues the journalistic tradition.
http://www.online-convert.com/ - This site, and others like it, won't be used every day, but when you need the service, it's priceless. Here, you can take a file in one format and convert it to another format. Have an MP3 audio file that you want to convert to WAV? Have a MPEG-1 video file that you want to convert to a video file format for an iPad? Have a TIFF image file you want to convert to a JPEG? This site does the work free and seamlessly.
http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/ The Mindshift blog is hosted by KQED, a public media outlet that comes from San Francisco. The KQED site is interesting and there is plenty of education-oriented content, but the Mindshift blog in particular regularly offers much for any educator to consider.
http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/flash/ - The Newseum site is also loaded with plenty of fascinating content. This linked page is particularly timely. Here, you can see the front page of hundreds of today's newspapers. We might be familiar with what The Star-Ledger and the NY Times have on the front page, but what about The Bismarck Tribune (North Dakota) or The Lima News (Ohio)?
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