Teachers First - Thinking Teachers Teaching Thinkers

This site invites visitors to explore and enjoy a wide variety of puzzles and brain teasers. For students who enjoy word, math, and pictorial puzzles, this site is a must! Also included are quizzes and proverbs as well as links to other brainteasers.

tag(s): puzzles (142), quiz (66), quizzes (90)

Google Maps gives you live visuals of any location, ideal for planning a trip, picturing the relationship between places, and viewing physical characteristics of almost anywhere in the world. Type or paste in an address and click "search maps." If you click Satellite or hybrid versions of the map, you will see actual satellite images of the terrain. Zoom in and out, use the street view "orange man" to walk among the buildings and trees, or plan and share a route easily with Google Maps. Using your (free) Google membership allows you to save favorite places and more. Find businesses and other features near a specific map location: hotels, restaurants, schools, parks, and more. Google Maps has become more and more sophisticated, now offering many features previously only available in Google Earth, such as opening and/or saving placemarker files. Unlike Google Earth, Google Maps does not require software installation and does not use as much bandwidth for constant reloading. You can even play a tour of places you mark in Google Maps. They just keep adding more features! Google Maps is available as a free app for Android and iOS, too. The handy embed codes let you put any Google Map in a web page, blog, or wiki. Of course you do not need a membership or any special skills to simply SEE, share, or navigate a map. Membership gives you more ways to save.

tag(s): DAT device agnostic tool (147), directions (12), maps (207)

Support the needs of high potential learners through information and resources available at the National Association for Gifted Children. Explore the Educators part of the site to find Gifted Programming Standards, Content Connection resources by subject area, and Teacher's Corner articles (including archives dating back to 2008). The Parents section of the site offers tools for parents, articles, and information on summer camps and programs. Although labeled for Administrators, this section of the site has important information for anyone working with gifted students. Here you will find many videos, fact sheets, and other important information and statistics that relate to gifted education.

tag(s): gifted (65), professional development (409)

Internet4classrooms is a free web portal designed to assist anyone who wants to find high quality, free Internet resources to use in classroom instruction, developing project ideas, reinforcing specific subject matter areas both in the class and at home. Information is organized by grade level, or subject area. Web 2.0 tutorials include links for information on: apps for iPod, iTouch, blogs, audio/pod casting, collaboration, graphic organizers, file converters, html editors, open source, organization tools, PLN tools, presentation tools, social bookmarking, survey makers, web browsers, video/photo, Wiki, and Word Cloud Generators. Links for Assessment Assistance give extra ways to assess in a fun technological twist. A daily dose section offers quotes, brain teasers, question of the day, and intersecting trivia. Join an RSS feed to get the latest updated information. Up to date, active links are reviewed continually. At the time of this review the Interactive Test Resource for 7th grade assessment had several broken links.
This site includes advertising.

tag(s): graphic organizers (50), polls and surveys (48), professional development (409), social networking (64)

Explore cutting-edge technology and video from the photo editors of Time with a daily blog from Lightbox. Time Lightbox features photos and videos of current events, behind the scenes, new exhibits, books, and technology. Take another critical view of current events with photos never released or ways never portrayed. This daily, behind the scenes look, lets you know what is happening on the front lines, through photojournalism with portraits, faces, and events that are changing our history. The images give you a mix into the artistic world of photojournalism with a closer look at our world.

tag(s): cross cultural understanding (167), images (260), photography (118)

News Flash Five Get the Scoop (part of PBS Kids), presents students with situations in need of a news story. Star reporters, ready, get set, and you are off to an investigation for your latest breaking news article. This interactive site offers graphics as well as written and spoken words to highlight all the information. While you navigate through the site, you visit several sources, and listen to the investigations. You can navigate to choose the sources and to take the information into a draft. After visiting various sources, you submit your news article to rate and get an assessment. To end your assignment, your editor rates your story and adds helpful hints to improve your writing.

At the time of this review, the "Be a Correspondent" link was not working.

tag(s): writing (323)