Resources, Resources, Resources

I wanted to end the year by giving some ideas that teachers could use in their classes next year.  You could test some of these over the summer and utilize them next year.  I also wanted to break these ideas up into subject groups.  This week I want to look at resources for Science and English resources.

Science: 

A lot of the resources I have for science are YouTube channels.  YouTube is a great way to show real world examples of what you do in class every day.  Below is a list of channels that have science content on them.  I am sure that there are many more channels you can use, this is just a few.  To access the videos on these channels just type in the channel name in a search on YouTube.  As with any video watch the video first to make sure there is nothing inappropriate for class.

Head Squeeze

Vsauce

AsapScience

Sick Science

Sci Show

YouTube Crash Course

Videofromspace

Brightstorm

Other website:

PHET http://phet.colorado.edu/ If you haven’t used the simulations at PHET yet you are missing out on an opportunity to give your students hands on experiences with many topics that can’t easily be done in lab (or topics that can easily be done in lab).  There are simulations for almost every high school level science topic and they have many simulations written in HTML 5 which is necessary if you want to use the simulations on an iPad (Hey, that would be a great way to utilize the iPad cart next year)

http://Knoema.com This site has data sets and visual data sets, many of which could be used in a scientific capacity to do analysis with.

English:

I am sure that there are some YouTube channels out there but I am going to list some other resources.  I will say that one YouTube channel that does have an English section is YouTube Crash Course.

www.oneword.com This website gives a daily one word writing prompt and a 60 second time limit to write about that word.  This could be a great daily warm-up or end of class exercise to get those creative writing juices flowing.

http://newsela.com  This website has current non-fiction articles that students can read or that you could read together in class.  The best feature about the sight is the ability to change the lexile score of the reading material from anywhere between a 4^th and a 12^th grade reading level.  You can give students articles to read at the level of the class, you could use this to increase the reading level throughout the course of the year, or you could use it to differentiate instruction to students with different reading levels.

www.grammarly.com Grammarly is a proof reading with so much more.  It will check student spelling, it will check for grammar, wordiness, text that has been Thesauruserized (I fabricated this textual visualization of a concept)

www.haikudeck.com Haikudeck is an iPad presentation app.  Students can create presentations using Haikudeck and in the presentation they are limited to a small finite number of words.  This forces students to think about what they want to say and can also improve presentation skills because students can use their slides as launching points for what they want to say but can’t read from their slides during a presentation.