The Best of the Web - Resources for Teachers

A to Z Teacher Stuff 
This one-stop resource provides a variety of teaching resources for the online educator. Created by a teacher, it features quick and easy access to thousands of online resources. 

About.com 
About.com is a vast collection of topic specific sites divided into 28 categories. These categories house over 700 sites. Each site at About.com is consistent in design and function, and led by an About.com Guide. This guide is a dedicated individual who has been hand-picked to provide the best, well-rounded Internet experience in each area of interest. 

Digital Education Network (DEN) 
The ACTDEN site is made up of seven DENs or subject categories. Each offers information and interactive features that encourage students to learn and to think: 
MathDEN - presents challenging math problems. 
WritingDEN - teaches students how to write effectively. 
NewsDEN - presents current events in exciting new ways. 
GraphicsDEN - introduces students to cool digital art. 
SkyDEN- offers a visually stunning introduction to basic astronomy. 
InternetDEN - shows teachers how to use Internet Explorer 4.0. 
TestDEN - creates personalized study guides for TOEFL (Teaching of English as a Foreign Language) students. 

There are a number of features in this site that will appeal to students and teachers. One of the most important is the focus on content by combining traditional methods with interactive ones. Content is presented with both the teacher and student in mind. Student lessons are presented in a very appealing format with graphics used sparingly yet very effectively. 

AskEric (Educational Resources Information Center) 
The AskEric website belongs to the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) and run by ACCESS ERIC which is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement and administered by the National Library of Education. The ACCESS ERIC site contains the largest education database in the world, with over one million abstracts of documents and journal articles. The place for educational research. 

The AskEric site was the first registered education site on the World Wide Web. The Virtual Library link contains more than 1,100 lesson plans, more than 20 listserv archives, 250 AskERIC InfoGuides and the AskERIC Toolbox. 


Classroom Connect 
Classroom Today and the Connected Teacher are two of the main areas of this site. Classroom Today provides Internet links to the curriculum through student activities such as Daily and Weekly Questions, Kids’ Quiz, Mystery Media,  Survey Says, Connections and other activities. A Topics section provides topics to match curriculum. An Email Newsletter lets you find out more about Classroom Today topics each month. There is also a Teachers’ Lounge with planning tools, a teaching guide and tips and ideas on measuring student progress. 


Community Learning Network 
The main menu of the Community Learning Network is a well organized source of educational resources for the K-12 teacher. The following links: Educational WWW Resources for K-12 Students and Teachers, Integrate the Internet into the Classroom, Learn More about the Internet, Professional Development in  Information Technology and Province of British Columbia's K-12 Educational Community are followed by detailed descriptions and key words. True to its description “CLN provides direct links to exemplary educational WWW resources from our intuitive menus. By finding, previewing, describing, and linking to exemplary sites, CLN's staff save teachers an enormous amount of time that they would have wasted otherwise in fruitless browsing.” 

The Copernicus Education Gateway 
Click on the handy drop down Education Resources menu and quickly go to Current Events, Teachers’ Place, Parents’ Place, School Notes, Research Center, Discovery Adventures, Creative Zone, Collaboration Station, Curriculum  Matrix, e-Class or the Athletics Center. If you need to look up a keyword or subject not found in the Education Resources menu, use the handy search engine. The search engine allows you to search the Copernicus site, the Encyclopedia Britannica and the Internet. 

DiscoverySchool.com
As web companion to the very popular television show Discovery Channel, this website lives up to its slogan “The Thrill of Discovery in Your Classroom!” Resources for grades K-12 are easily available through a search engine which covers major subjects in the curriculum. Eight categories of links offer resources to make classroom teaching easier and fun. 

Education World 
The site “where educators go to learn” boasts a searchable database of over 120,000+ sites! A comprehensive source for Education Links on the Internet. Search by keyword, or by the Topic List, or browse the Awards for extensive reviews of the hottest education sites of the month. 

Eduscapes 
A great starting point for any teacher beginning their unit and lesson planning is the 42explore link on this website. This is a marvelous collection of topics for K- 12 students. Each week new topics are posted and previous topics are listed alphabetically and according to the date it was posted. 

This site also offers the Lamb's Technology Integration section. This invaluable section provides resources for parents, teachers, library/media specialists, administrators, and technology coordinators. Here can be found materials for workshops or for teacher’s own professional development. 

Highly recommended are the following two links: Lamb’s Cool Starting Points for Teachers, Parents and Children and Seven Simple Starters: Realistic Internet Integration. The following seven questions are asked and answered: “What can I do daily or weekly? How can I connect to each subject area? What project would help me reach outside my classroom? How can I promote learning through technology? How can technology help students solve problems? How can my students share their projects with others? How can we use technology to create smiles?” 


ePALS Classroom Exchange 
This remarkable, resource filled site is designed with the goal of making the Internet a positive and safe experience for busy classroom teachers and their students. ePALS Classroom Exchange is the world's largest online K-12 classroom network, connecting more than 27,000 self registered classrooms with more than 1.7 million students in 130 countries around the world. Online since 1996, ePALS is currently available in English, French, Spanish, and German. 

The main purpose of ePALS is to encourage teacher and student participation with other teachers and students anywhere in the world. Here’s a fantastic and easy way to integrate the technology into the classroom and help students learn world history, geography, culture, another language and other facts about their global neighbors or neighbors from their own country or continent. Best of all the tools to make all this easy and possible are here at this website. In just a couple of minutes teachers can register their classrooms. A free ePALS membership comes with access to features such as e-mail, chat rooms, electronic greeting cards, instant messaging, newsletters, class websites and discussion boards. 

There is an option here of providing students with a Teacher/Parent Monitored E-mail account. With Monitored E-mail, an adult creates an e-mail account for the child or student, and then can preview and approve every message sent to or from the child before it reaches its recipient. Aided by sophisticated filtering tools, the Monitor can quickly preview messages for inappropriate content before they are delivered to their recipient. If a message is questionable, it can be held or deleted instantly. The person who is monitoring the account has total discretion over how tightly to control the account. This is one option for parents and teachers to ensure a safe Internet experience for their children and students. 

Check out other tools such as Instant Translation, World Maps and International Weather and teacher resources such as Interactive Projects, Online Resources, Manage Classroom Profiles, and 20th Century Retrospective. 


Pacific Bell Knowledge Network Explorer
The people at Pacific Bell started The Knowledge Network as a response to the needs of California’s teachers, librarians, and students. Faced with a daunting array of technologies and the overwhelming need to train students and staff in the use of technology, the Knowledge Network developed new services for schools, libraries, and community colleges. Although The Knowledge Network was first conceived as a response to the needs of California, its many resources are available to everyone around the world via the Internet. 


PBS TeacherSource 
PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) is a private, non-profit media enterprise owned and operated by 348 public television stations in the United States. The PBS TeacherSource website is the web extension of PBS designed for Pre-K-12 educators. Here can be found extensive curricular materials correlated to national and state standards, in-depth professional development services like Mathline and Scienceline and local community outreach services provided by public television stations across America. 


Quia  
Create your own worldwide classroom using sophisitcated yet easy-to-use technology. Quia, (pronounced key-uh) lets teachers do all this and more. Use Quia’s free tools to create your own Internet-based educational activities like online flashcards, quizzes, matching games, word search puzzles, hangman games, and TV-game-show-style trivia games. Best of all, these activities can all be customized with the teacher’s own content. So far, teachers have created over 250,000 activities on Quia, in subjects ranging from English, Spanish, Science, and Math, to Economics, Medicine, and World History. 


SCR*TEC  
The South Central Regional Technology Education Consortium (SCR*TEC) representing Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas, was formed to help teachers and other educators create, share, or find solutions to problems they encounter when integrating technology into education. With a region covering 6 million students and 400,000 teachers, SCR*TEC offers a tremendous network of experts. 

By far one of the most innovative and useful features of this website which makes it stand out from all the rest is the TracksStar feature. TrackStar is a program that allows teachers to organize a collection of websites into an interactive online presentation. It’s an Internet web-based lesson plan maker. All lessons are searchable by keyword, subject and grade, themes and standards. You’ll find some great ideas here, plus a lot of opportunities to create and share some great lesson plans for other teachers in the Internet community. 


Tapped In 
TAPPED IN is a Teacher Professional Development Institute which goes a long way in helping teachers find the time to participate in high-quality professional development activities. It’s also a way of maintaining support for teachers after an institute or workshop and encouraging sustained interaction among participating teachers. This is a teacher community where teachers with diverse interests, skills, and backgrounds can meet and learn from one another; where teachers can be exposed to not one but many education reform concepts and approaches; where teachers from across the country and world can find high-quality resources in minutes rather than hours. 

TeachersFirst 
TeachersFirst is a website designed to meet the needs of K-12 “teachers in the trenches.” It accomplishes this goal by focusing on practical resources that teachers need in the classroom. Each resource is selected and reviewed by one of TeachersFirst’s reviewers, all of whom have classroom teaching experience.These reviewed resources are then grouped by subject and grade level, so that teachers can find what they need quickly. 

A Learning the Web section offers simple tutorials and explanations of Internet services and terminology. A Toolbox section provides links to free downloads of browser enhancements that let you view and print documents, play sound or video files, or view 3D animations on your browser. 

Teachers.Net 
Teachers.Net is a diverse family of Internet resources committed to providing free mentoring support to every segment of the education profession worldwide. “Family” is a particularly appropriate descriptor to apply in the case of this attractive and bustling niche on the World Wide Web. The Teachers.Net family includes Administrators.Net; Retired Teachers.Net; Australian Teachers.Net; Canadian Teachers.Net; California Teachers.Net and Texas Teachers.Net, with plans for continued growth into additional geographic and topical areas. 

Educators needing assistance with any topic, from web page building to classroom management, from literacy education to science fair projects, will find free and enthusiastic support at Teachers.Net.

Additional Resources

Acknowledgments: Many of the descriptions of the sites given above are taken or abstracted from information provided by the sites. If you have reached this page out of frames, use this link to get back to our Homepage