Digital Resources for the Classroom
by Tim Cushman
We live at a time where all of the world’s knowledge is accessible through a singular and ubiquitous platform. This is the unimaginable reality of the day in which we live thanks to the evolution of the Internet. One would think that educators would be on the cusp of the knowledge revolution. The fact is, many classroom teachers do not leverage the potential of the Internet.
A major barrier for the busy teacher is finding appropriate resources in a timely manner. It is easy to spend several hours at several different websites looking for resources for a single lesson. The incessant “needle in the haystack” searching for meaningful content gets old quickly and is abandoned in due course. There is hope for bringing the best of the Internet into your classroom thanks to some great collections of digital resources.
I will not attempt to enumerate the “Top 10” most useful teacher websites. I would, however, like to share a handful of sites for finding some really great resources.
- Thinkfinity (free) – a very well organized, easy to use portal for instructional resources
- Discovery Education Network (free) – register yourself and start collaborating with 25,000 other educators; browse by category
- Nettrekker (by subscription) – available for all GCSD teachers; a search engine customized for schools that returns educationally relevant results to keyword searches; well worth the money
What other repositories of good educational resources have you found?
Technology Thoughts for Teachers 
OnePlaceSC.com is ETV’s newest K-12 educational portal. When teachers login to the website they will be able to search Knowitall.org, StreamlineSC, PBS Teachers and Kids, Annenberg and Teachers Domain. Also available are ITV resources and the State Library’s DISCUS content sites. Teachers and staff can login using their existing StreamlineSC username and password. It is nice to have all these resources with only one login.
Ann
September 15, 2008
I’m at a SMARTBoard equipped school so of course I’d have to say smarttech.com and the Marketplace is a one-stop-shop for lesson planning for me.
I also like internet linked books of usborne-quicklinks.com (specifically the Science and World Geography Books) because they find the content relevant links for me. Every page has at least 3 to 4 websites I can choose from.
Avis
September 20, 2008