Toolbox for Teachers:

This site is a collection of resources useful to teachers for planning and organizing their curriculum. There are links to lesson planning sites, but also to sites that will provide ideas on how to integrate art, music, primary source material into any lesson.

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Smith College

Dept. of Ed. & Child Study

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Compendium sites: Teacher central sites. Each site is a universe.
Creative Mines: Enhance your planning by thinking about connections to art, music and primary source materials.
Model Curriculum Units: Impressive curriculum units done by teachers. Models to strive towards.
English
Math
Science
History/Social Studies
Teachers on Teaching: Articles written by teachers about their methods and practice. Inspiring and informative! Including WebLogs by teachers.
Because Students are Different: Links that provide support for differentiating instruction and providing challenge for all our student

 

Compendium Sites: Collections of general tools, curriculum guides, and other resources across disciplines and grades 

Study Web: Vast labrynth of resources for teaching. Great search engine to help do a broad-reaching search. You never know what's out there until you troll around on this site.

Skewl Site: Collection of resources that have been reviewed by the Skewl Newsletter

NY Times Learning Center: Daily lesson plans, units on controversial current issues and a raft of other resources. The lesson plans are top notch: thoughtful, engaging and should be used as models for thinking through how we want to set up learning situations in our classes.

The National Archives: Provides both primary sources and a series of lesson plans, guidelines, and helpful suggestions on how to use primary source documents. They offer a series of handouts that you can adopt

Library of Congress: A helpful resource for developing primary source documents and experiences for students

NEA Works4Me: A terrific set of resources on all facets of teaching. Tips on getting organized, working with parents, using technology, and more

LessonStop: A compendium page with all sorts of hints, tips, tricks and other resources. You can also subscribe to a weekly e-mail magazine

Harvard Learning Web Project Zero: Harvard's Project Zero has long been a leader in the research and development of constructivist learning environments and practices. The organization's web site provides a full-range of resources including tips for planning, articles (for example, techniques on maximizing transfer), and other hands-on resources.

Creative Mines: resources to help expand and enrich your planning.

Cartoon Data Base: This is the Teachers' Guide for using the Professional Cartoonists Index web site in your classes. Our site is a unique resource with the largest collection of newspaper editorial cartoons on the web

All Movie Site: Site that allows you to search movies by theme and other valuable keywords.

World Wide Art Resources: Gateway sites to artist, museums, educational resources and other materials that will support your planning. Here's another one: Artsource & one more: Artlinx

Music Resources: Gateway sites to music resources: Indiana University Music Site. Here's Duke University's Classical Musical Site. History of Rock Music syllabus with hyperlinked web sites that could be of interest.

Model Curriculum Units:

Harvard Project Zero Units:

Stanford Teacher Education Program:

Yale-New Haven/Pittsburgh/Albaquerque/Houston Teacher's Institute: Each teacher participating as a Fellow in an Institute seminar prepares a curriculum unit to be taught the following year, and to be shared with other teachers. Since the inception of the New Haven Institute in 1978, Fellows have written 1,536 curriculum units in the humanities and the sciences. These units contain four elements: objectives, teaching strategies, sample lessons and classroom activities, and lists of resources for teachers and students.

English

National Council of Teachers of English: Information on standards, research, lesson planning, and research.

English Teachers Companion: Jim Burke's thoughtful and well-crafted web site on teaching and learning resources for English teachers.

Web English Teacher: "Web English Teacher presents the best of online teaching resources: lesson plans and activities, biography, e-texts, online criticism, Webquests, professional resources, jokes, puzzles, classroom-friendly sites, and videos. Pages are updated regularly. Bookmark this site and visit often!" (Description taken from the site)

CyberEnglish: Created by English teacher Ted Nellen, this site offers helpful examples of a classroom that incorporates technology effectively and a teacher who has learned to use the Web to support his teaching (and his students).

Traci's Lists of Ten: teaching tips, pedagogical guidelines, administrative pointers, and the like, showing up in batches of ten, approximately every 10 days for the rest of the year.

Math

National Council of Teachers of Mathematics: NCTM has information on standards, research, lesson planning, and research.

The Math Forum: A network of sources. Lesson plans, teacher tips, discussion groups, book reviews. All about Math and sponsored by Swathmore. 

Science

Guided Tour of Science Teaching Resources on the Web: An organized tour through the maze of resources available.

National Science Teachers Association: Umbrella organization for science teachers.

NASA Spacelink:  NASA Spacelink is an electronic resource developed for the education community.  Educators can access teacher's guides with hands-on activities

Yes! I Can Science: Database of science lessons and other activities.

History/Social Sciences

Blue Web'n Library The gem of gems in the "keeping-up with new social studies sites on the Net" battle. The Blue Web'n Library contains a cataloged section on lesson plans--many of them using instructional technology! The best part of the site is its ability to notify you via e-mail every time it becomes aware of a new educational-oriented site on the Internet. A definite "must" for the busy teacher in all of us.

The National Council for the Social Studies is the primary organization of K-12 social studies teachers and college-level teacher educators. Every social studies teacher should consider joining NCSS. They have an excellent Internet Links and Resources page that is a gold mine for classroom teachers who want to use the Internet in their instruction.

Dan Graf's Page for History Teacher's Students: Professor Graf is true to his word aobu his site which is he describes as, "My primary purpose is to help students doing history research find electronic resources as quickly and easily as possible. As you use these pages, you should keep in mind a couple of rules of thumb.

American Memory Site: Sponsored by the Library Congress. It's a site of resources, primary source documents, and teacher activities.

Teacher Stories on Teaching: Stories of innovation, curriculum and methods written by or about teachers in the classroom

Socratic Discussion in the Math Class

Integrating Math and Science in the Classroom:

    Webloggers:
Blog of a Math Teacher
Teaching High School: Chronicling the move from junior h.s. to high school teaching.
Joanne Jacobs: A former San Jose Mercury columnist engaged in thinking about educational issues.
Entry Year Teaching:

Resources on Individual Differences

Learning Disabilities
Perhaps the most obvious learning differences are learning disabilities. Students can have any of a vast array of learning disabilities, each with its own implications for the classroom. To learn more about these disabilities, you might start at the National Center for Learning Disabilities (
http://www.ld.org/index.html). Visit the "Tips for Teachers" section (http://www.ld.org/info/tips/teacher_index.cfm) for ideas on forming parent-teacher partnerships, working with non-English-speaking families, and using technology to assist students with learning disabilities.

Another overview of learning disabilities is LDOnline (http://www.ldonline.org). This site's resources include identification and assessment tools, teaching strategies, and recommended reading. Teachers can participate in several online bulletin boards that focus on such topics as reading, mathematics, technology, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

LD Resources, http://www.ldresources.com,  is an extensive online compendium of books, videos, conferences, tools, and other resources about learning disabilities. The Education section has articles on homework, transition plans, taking the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT), legal issues, and getting ready for college.

Gifted Students
As Educational Leadership author Carolyn Callahan notes, students with learning disabilities aren't the only ones who have learning differences; gifted students also have special needs. KidSource's directory of articles about gifted and talented students (http://www.kidsource.com/kidsource/pages/ed.gifted.html) provides lots of information and rates the articles, as well. Among the topics addressed are ADHD and giftedness, developing math skills, technology, social-emotional development, and underachieving gifted students.

Education Week also has an online archive of articles about gifted education (http://www.edweek.org/context/topics/issuespage.cfm?id=33), with information on how educators can identify and serve gifted children and such alternative education programs as blending high school and college.

Some students may have both giftedness and a learning disability, which can be even more challenging for teachers. With information on gifted students, students with disabilities, and other exceptional students, the Council for Exceptional Children (http://www.cec.sped.org/) educates teachers about a spectrum of learning differences, provides discussion forums on curriculum and classroom management, and features articles from the Council's journal, Teaching Exceptional Children.

Multiple Intelligences
Learning differences aren't limited to the extremes of disabilities and giftedness. Howard Gardner identified eight common learning differences, or intelligences. EdWeb offers an introduction to Gardner's theory (http://www.edwebproject.org/edref.mi.intro.html) and gives an overview of multiple intelligences and the theory's implications for teaching.

To hear from Gardner himself, check out his interview in Educational Leadership (http://www.ascd.org/readingroom/edlead/9709/checkley.html). Gardner argues against "the notion that there's only one way to learn how to read, only one way to learn how to compute, only one way to learn about biology." He gives his definition of intelligence, discusses how multiple intelligences can be used in the classroom, and offers advice for designing assessments based on multiple intelligences. ASCD offers many other resources on how teachers can bring out their students' multiple intelligences. Go to the ASCD Web site (http://www.ascd.org), click on Reading Room, and search for "multiple intelligences" to find excerpts from many publications, such as the second edition of Thomas Armstrong's book, Multiple Intelligences in the Classroom, and the recent ASCD book by Harvey F. Silver, Richard W. Strong, and Matthew J. Perini, So Each May Learn: Integrating Learning Styles and Multiple Intelligences.

Technology:

The Teacher List is a wonderful resource. Every day during the school year you receive a link to a model site that is doing cutting edge work at the intersection of Technology and Learning.