Blogs for Educators

The educator’s blog that I visited was http://www.ncs-tech.org. Here, I found multiple websites that can be very useful.

www.Chatzy.com and www.TodaysMeet.com are free internet services similar to IRC and AIM. Teachers use these sites in class by showing a movie and then allowing students to use their laptops to send instant messages to each other in order to facilitate discussion about the video. It takes the ultimate passive activity, watching videos in school, and turns it into a powerful learning opportunity. The article states, “It is a sad reality that kids say things ‘online’ they never would face-to-face; this turns that phenomenon into an advantage by focusing the conversation on a school topic.”

http://www.hippocampus.org is a website providing free multimedia math lessons for grades six and above.

www.hsionline.org is an AWESOME website for history and social studies teachers inspired by the show CSI (instead, this site is called “Historical Scene Investigation”). It is a creative way to bring primary sources into the classroom—by sending students on a webquest.

http://www.vocabulary.com is the last website I visited from the educator’s blog. Here I found word puzzles, lesson plans, word lists, and interactive activities all based on words, roots, and vocabulary.