websites

I wanted to share with you a work-in-progress, but exciting website: BardBytes. BardBytes, aptly summarized by its title, is an effort to bridge the gap between the Elizabethan Era and the 21st century classroom by providing educators with modern Shakespearean resources. Resources are categorized into history, tragedy, comedy and poetry, and then by individual plays.

The Bouncy Balls classroom noise level monitor remains to this day one of the most popular posts on TeachBytes. So, when I came across CalmCounter, I knew I had to share immediately. Although it doesn’t have any exciting bouncing balls, it is still a solid way to measure classroom noise:

Sounds a little farfetched, I know, but it is true! At Free Rice, every question you answer correctly donates 10 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program. This website is a wonderful way for students to practice important subject skills and simultaneously learn about charity and world hunger.

A while ago, when I was searching the web for creative ideas for writing prompts, I came Writing Prompts. This is Tumblr weblog run by educator Luke Neff, who posts a new, visually appealing writing prompt each day (or almost each day). These are fantastic and creative, and often encourage higher level thinking from students.

The documentary selection in our library is decent, but I often find myself looking online for educational videos and feature-films to show my students. Unfortunately, most online documentaries require you to download the full film and have some sort of torrenting software.

I recently learned that March is National Women’s History Month.  I encourage all of you to take this month as an opportunity to educate your students on the struggles and successes of women throughout history.

In this day and age, where anyone with access to the internet can create a website, it is critical that we as educators teach our students how to evaluate web content. There are some great resources available for educating students on this matter, such as Kathy Schrock’s Five W’s of Website Evaluation or the University of Southern Maine’s Checklist for Evaluating Websites.

Everyone is talking about it. Whether they are calling it Sandy, Perfect Storm, Superstorm or Frankenstorm, it is the biggest thing on the news right now. Looking for a way to bring in this current event into your classroom? Check … Continue reading ?