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Teacher tips and tools to get the new school year off to a great beginning.
For these and more literacy links, visit NetWatch online at www.oct.ca.
For past editions of NetWatch and additional sites for most topics can be found online at Archives.
by Lynda Scarrow |
Teacher’s toolbox
Virtual Museum
 What a wonderful way to access lesson plans and content from museums across the country. Sign up to view more than 700,000 images and learning materials organized by theme, grade and province. Then customize your own section of the site, adding materials and multimedia resources from individual lessons. The Help tour is the best Flash explanation of how a site works that I have seen.
PBS Teacher Resources
This site has easy-to-access information. Choose a category, select a grade and topic and immediately see the number and type of resources and whether there are on/offline materials or multimedia options. Links include lots of supplementary information.
Learning in Hand
Grade 5 teacher Tony Vincent, from the US, is a leader in integrating hand-held technology into the classroom. His site offers software collections, the best Web links for handhelds, complete lesson plans and an informative blog. Lesson plans include ones for mobile devices.
Learner
High-quality online teacher videos are the best part of this well-designed Washington-based site. Sign up once, and then skip right to Workshops and Courses for free materials – other links lead to paid items. Easy-to-use front-page navigation expands to access multidisciplinary grade-specific workshops. The Teaching Foreign Languages Workshop (Grades K-12), for example, includes reflection-and-action research materials, supportive articles and an assignment that you view before the videos.
Home-Grown Favourites
Many teachers are aware of standard provincial and national teacher-resource web sites, including three that are frequently cited: Curriculum Services Canada, TVO and e-Learning Ontario. And, of course, the Ministry of Education as well as your local board and affiliates offer many curriculum-related resources online.
And more
www.learningreviews.com
www.sitesforteachers.com
www.teacherprintables.net
These three sites include hundreds of links to education-specific web pages and/or other resources for teachers.
Site Warning
While reviewing sites for this column, I visited one that downloaded a virus onto my computer. That particular site is now clean and this problem is rare – I have visited hundreds of educational sites and this is the first such incident – but it’s a good idea to exercise caution when accessing any web site.
To protect yourself you may want to search for and access sites via known search engines. Google adds: “This site may harm your computer” to sites it identifies as unsafe to access.
Lynda Scarrow is the College's web
editor. She can be reached at lscarrow@oct.ca.
For French sites visit www.oeeo.ca.
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