Teachers First - Thinking Teachers Teaching Thinkers

Create a custom, yearly calendar quickly with the PDF Calendar creator. Choose from several sizes or insert your own size in inches. Choose from many different languages. Create your calendar for any year from 1901 - 2038 and select Sunday or Monday as the starting day each week. Click "GET PDF" to instantly view your calendar ready to print or download.
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tag(s): calendars (37), parents (60)

Mini-Court offers a free mock trial teacher's guide containing a five day lesson plan for grades 3-6. Click the PDF link to view and download all lessons. Resources include mock trials, definitions of legal terms, puppets, word searches, and more, all suited for early elementary learning. Lessons incorporate nursery rhyme characters and stuffed animals to teach students simple legal concepts about as trials and laws. Although this site is rather "plain vanilla" as a PDF, there are some great lesson ideas.

tag(s): civil rights (201), courts (20)

Use Literably to assess students' oral reading and comprehension. Literably will display a text, administer the reading assessment, score it, generate an audio recording, and keep a running record. It will also report words correct per minute, percentage accuracy, and a leveling recommendation. Literably also provides readers' Lexile measures, grade levels, and guided reading levels. Test comprehension levels using open response or multiple choice questions. Register with an email, and set up a class easily. Keep your username short for ease of registration by primary students. The free account allows for testing 10 students per calendar month. Student sign in is extremely easy, even for a first grader. Print results or email to parents for easy sharing. IMPORTANT Note: Results (accuracy and WPM) are not available instantly and take up to 18-24 hours to arrive via email or be posted on the site. Literably is compatible with most browsers, and there is a free iPad app.
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tag(s): assessment (150), fluency (25), literacy (116), reading comprehension (148)

Discover the controversial legacy of the Indian School. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the US Government encouraged the establishment of so-called Industrial Schools designed to "civilize" Native American children and prepare them for careers outside the reservations and within white society. Today the legacy of these schools remains controversial: did they provide children with useful skills, or were they a form of ethnic cleansing that robbed them of their culture, self identity, and heritage? The Carlisle Indian Industrial School is probably best known for being the home of internationally renowned athlete Jim Thorpe, but it is also part of the family history of many Native Americans today whose ancestors attended the Pennsylvania school. Dickinson College maintains this digital archive of student records, images and special collections for use by relatives of former students and by scholars doing research on the legacy of the Indian Industrial Schools. Search by student name, by nation, or within collections of school publications and other documents. The archive is an ongoing project and will continue to grow.

tag(s): colonial america (94), cross cultural understanding (168), difficult conversations (61), diversity (37), history day (39), identity (28), native americans (95), westward expansion (39)

Combine an intangible product like a college education, an overload of data, and anxiety about choice, and you have the perfect niche for a website which claims to simplify it all for you. Noodle is one of the newest websites of this kind. But Noodle's difference is that it is a hybrid: part search engine and part college curating platform. Rather than creating its own content about each of the more than 3000 post secondary institutions in the US, Noodle pulls its content from a collection of existing sources: the colleges' own websites, general education sites, and other college search sites. It's no coincidence that Noodle's CEO is also the founder of The Princeton Review. The beauty of Noodle's platform is that it collects information from the student who has set up a personal profile, and then tailors the search based on the student profile. Profiles can be established using Facebook login information, which is often problematic for in-school use. It can also be established using an email address. Once the student has entered his or her personal information, (including test scores, GPA, and family income information), Noodle suggests the student's chances of admission to a given college and has tailored information about college costs taking into consideration the likelihood of receiving available financial aid.
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tag(s): college (46)

Create a printed or PDF timeline using this handy tool. There is no registration required. This tool allows you to easily add, drag, and rearrange items as work progresses. Timelines can be organized by day, date, or event. Add an image for each event to make a timeline visually appealing. The event label can include an annotation for the image with short or long descriptive text. Save as a draft to make revisions later or finalize and share the timeline via email (as a pdf). You can also download and save the file. Click Get Started and begin your timeline by simply entering your name and the name of the project. Teachers will want to explore lessons that use this timeline tool. Lessons are divided up by grade level. For more explanation about saving work in progress, go to the Videos menu and click "Using RWT" to find a video about Saving Work With the Student Interactives.

tag(s): timelines (54)

The Nazi and East German Propaganda Guide Page offers a massive collection of resources demonstrating the use of propaganda leading up to and throughout World War Two. Explore categories such as posters, essays, and other reading materials. Each resource includes a short explanation of the source and how the material was used to promote the Nazis. For a full explanation on the background of the site and options for using materials included make sure you read the FAQ section. Although the presentation of this material is plain vanilla, the actual artifacts are powerful.

tag(s): germany (25), history day (39), holocaust (42), nazis (8), primary sources (119), propaganda (8), world war 2 (161)

Make revising your writing easy and enjoyable using Hemingway. Simply copy/paste your text into this website, and receive instant feedback. The visual aspect of this program helps one to see exactly where the errors are and where to make improvements. There are color coded suggestions for wordiness, weak adverb use, passive voice, and complicated words and phrases. Did you know that the most effective writing is at or under grade level ten? The goal of the program is to help writers make their missives concise and clear.

tag(s): editing (92), proofreading (21), writing (323)

This tool is a neuroscience journal that includes articles reviewed by kids! Approved student scientists, ages 8-16, review the articles, and neuroscientists serve as their mentors. The scientific process is followed with young scientists writing their submission specifically for the Frontiers Journal. The article is then peer reviewed. Students and scientists serve as peer reviewers. The process shows how articles are reviewed in major publications and show the scientific process.

tag(s): brain (56), child development (24), human body (94), senses (20)

Ask meaningful questions and see responses in real-time while creating an exciting, game-like environment. Build instant polls, quizzes, or responses through a simple drag and drop interface. Once you create your account, be sure to take the Intro Quiz to learn how to use this tool. When you start the quiz, you will be prompted to open a new tab, create a nickname, and enter the game pin. Now you will be able to take the quiz to learn how Kahoot! works AND be able to see what a teacher sees in your original tab. You will have to go to the Main tab to launch the next question in the Quiz. Find ready-made quizzes on the public Kahoot! menu by entering search terms. Create questions, quizzes, and polls with an optional uploaded image. Kahoot! also has a team option. Groups can use one computer to answer questions. The best part about the team option is it allows groups wait time to discuss their answer before submitting it. The teacher gets the data back instantly, and it is stored on the site or can be downloaded. This is superb for checking the knowledge of your audience/students or to see if they are still paying attention and understand concepts. Scroll past the 3 plans that cost money to find the basic plan that allows for upto 40 participants, multiple choice quiz questions, 5 teams, and more.

tag(s): assessment (150), DAT device agnostic tool (147), Formative Assessment (75), game based learning (180), gamification (78), polls and surveys (48), quizzes (89)