When school starts in August, my high school will be pushing out the 1:1 Initiative. For you folks out there that don’t know what that is, it’s basically where our school got a grant to give every student in the junior high and high school their very own MacBook Air laptops. Last year was our junior high’s first year with the MacBooks, and this year, it’s our turn. Some of us are looking forward to the change, some are iffy, but the majority of us are pretty darn nervous.
Anywho, I’ve been going through trainings throughout the school year and the summer, and my colleagues have provided us with some amazing resources for use in our classroom. Now, mind you, some of these sources are in no way a replacement for any true classroom instruction, but they can certainly be utilized as tools to better engage our students in our lessons. It’s a proven fact that when students are actively engaged in a lesson, they learn much more than students who spend an hour (or 47 minutes in my case) at their desk listening to lectures. Below are some resources I’ve collected and saved for everyone to find. The headers are clickable links so you can view the sites. I have collected so many resources that I will probably have to make more than one entry here to show them all. Here are ones I’ve collected so far.
This is the site we will be using during the upcoming school year to implement our classes. For the record, the word is pronounced just as it is spelled, not ‘School-OL-ogy.’ The thing that I love about this so far is that it combines the aspects of Facebook with platforms like Moodle and Blackboard. It’s user friendly so that even veteran teachers can manipulate it pretty easily. You can set up groups for your separate classes, and you give those classes a special code to join. On my Schoology, I also created a group for my advisory as a place to post announcements and a group for my Anime Club so that if I have students miss due to other obligations, they can view our discussions and get information on what anime to view or manga to read for the next meeting. What’s even better is that absent students can look up assignments posted for that day and stay caught up. You can make your own tests and quizzes, and the students have instant feedback with the exception of essay/short answer, which you will have to grade yourself. It still cuts down the grading, and with 120-130 students per teacher, that can be a real time-saver. And what makes this even better? Schoology offers a free app that you can download for your smartphone, so if you’re like me and you forget to tell your class something important, you can post it via the app or you can grade your homework turn ins while waiting for your turn at the doctor’s office.
We had a training on this last week, and honestly, there was so much to it that I am not sure I remember hardly anything, to be honest. I can say, however, that there’s a good number of resources on here that teachers can use in conjunction with lessons. As an English teacher, Romeo and Juliet is a big unit for me, so the students have to learn about Shakespeare himself as well as Elizabethan theater and the Elizabethan era as a whole. Right now, this site is probably better for science and social studies, but the trainer said they were working on sources for math and ELA, so I’m hopeful that once I use this source, I’ll be able to gather some good videos and other sources to use with my units. You can create folders in which you can save any useful sources you find, and you can post your sources on Schoology for your classes, and you can create boards (or have students create them). Honestly, I have yet to play around more with this, but I thought I would throw this in.
Here’s a site we English teachers discovered where students can log in and do grammar lessons. I would probably recommend students do Grammar Bytes as a supplement to a teacher-led grammar lesson as either independent practice or bell work. I haven’t played much with this site, but it is free to join!
This is a site that I stumbled upon while looking for free online grammar lessons, so I haven’t had a chance to share with my department. There’s all sorts of advanced grammar lessons in here under the free modules that even include tests at the end of each module. In Module 1, for example, students can take lessons that dabble in the eight parts of speech such as noun identification, verb identification, etc. There’s even lessons that show prepositions acting out as verbs and adverbs modifying adjectives. The other modules contain subjects and predicates, appositives, clauses, participle phrases…I mean this site has an entire grammar textbook right here! Now you do have to pay for your printables, which come in the form of an e-mailable PDF, but we teachers are resourceful enough that we can find plenty of free worksheets.
Do your students need help with brainstorming a paper? Or maybe they want to present a mind map to the class? Spider Scribe is a good site just for that. It’s free to join, and even companies use it for presentations. I haven’t messed with this one too much, but as far as I can tell, it’s quite easy to use, and I am not yet sure whether I like this better or Padlet. It’s also free to join.
This site is very similar to Spider Scribe, and again, I am not sure which one I like better. I do know that Padlet has a feature where you can have students in your classroom collaborate in groups on an assigned topic for presentation where I am unsure whether Spider Scribe has a similar feature. It’s fairly easy to use, in my opinion, and the bubbles are colorful, which is a bonus for me since I enjoy color. Like Spider Scribe, it’s free to join.
Everyone probably remembers the classic game show hosted by Alec Trebek, and everyone enjoys playing a good round of Jeopardy. My first experience with Jeopardy in a classroom was when my band teacher taught a music appreciation class and he would play Jeopardy with us as review for tests over music time periods and their composers. Of course that was back before the World Wide Web and handy dandy sites like these. At Jeopardy labs, you can build your own Jeopardy game and have up to six teams (beneficial if you have a big class), and it is G-R-E-A-T for reviews. I built a Julius Caesar game for my sophomores last year, and it was a bloodbath of epic proportions — but in a good and extremely comical way. This can be displayed on a Smartboard or Promethean board and with the students playing in teams (computer free), it’s a great way to get them out of their seats and collaborating with one another for correct answers, or you can have each person in a team line up and take turns answering.
These are only a few of the resources I’ve saved and collected. I’ll be putting up another post of more resources soon, so stay tuned! If anyone has any resources they would like to share, please leave it in the comment section and I will do my best to check it out. If I think it can be useful, I’ll feature it in one of my entries!