Teachers First - Thinking Teachers Teaching Thinkers

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 (146), directions (11), maps (224)

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 (66), professional development (393)

Although rather dated, this site boasts a collection of visually impressive math and logic brain-busters to challenge your class puzzle masters. The forums do not appear to be active, but the puzzles are still worth exploring.

tag(s): puzzles (149)

You would never guess by the name of this site that The Exquisite Corpse Adventure opens doors to an engaging way to explore the world of reading and writing a class or group story, book, or even a poem. This project from the Center for the Book and the National Children's Book and Literacy Alliance invites students to read, discover, and create fascinating characters, places, and events in a manner that might be as captivating as one of the many trends, popular reality shows. The story takes on unexpected twists and turns because it is actually pieced together out of many parts created, put together, and expanded upon by the contributors. Anyone and everyone interested in helping kids read more, write better, and reach deeper into their own experiences, imaginations, and resources to create stories and art will become hooked. The actual original online book, Exquisite Corpse Adventure, is a recently completed, year-long project with episodes, (chapters), written by remarkable authors such as Jon Scieszka and Katherine Paterson, illustrated and posted with companion games, discussion questions, and activities every two weeks.

tag(s): stories and storytelling (63), writing (323)

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 (49), polls and surveys (49), professional development (393), social networking (61)

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 (178), images (263), photography (131)