Thinkfinity - Great Site for Education Professionals

This week, I explored Thinkfinity (www.thinkfinity.org) which is a Verizon sponsored website.  It is a free online community for education professionals, providing access to over 60,000 educators and experts in curriculum enhancement.  The site is an invaluable resource for teachers of all disciplines.  There are discussion boards, blogs, and even an area where you can look up lesson plans that are categorized according to state standards (probably my favorite part so far).

The part of the website where you can look up lessons by state standard is called Thinkfinity Resources and it is located about halfway down the home page on the right side.  There is a box underneath the heading and you can click on the tab that says "State Standards".  Input your state, grade level and subject and all of the standards will pop up with links to lesson plans that can be used to teach the specific standards.  This is a great tool for teachers, especially new teachers.  I wonder if you can upload any cool lesson plans that you develop or find.

I am definitely bookmarking this site!  It is going to really help me with the rest of the lesson plans that I have to develop this semester and after I am hired as a teacher.

Checking out ReadWriteThink.org!

This week, I had the opportunity to take a look at www.ReadWriteThink.org.  This website has a lot to offer to teachers and students.  I noticed that there were some fun activities for younger children, so I recruited my 5 year old daughter to help me out with my evaluation of the site.  She played three interactive games on the site and enjoyed two of them.  She is just learning to read, so I think that the third game was probably too advanced for her at this point in time.  However, the matching game (ABC Match) that she played kept her occupied for a good half hour.  It gave positive feedback when she got an answer correct and she really liked that.  Another game called Construct-A-Word was fun for her too - but she needed a lot of help from me to play.  The game that she was not fond of was called Word Family Sort and some of the words were long - she didn't have the patience to sound them out and she is not familiar with blended sounds yet so it was just too hard.  I bet she will enjoy that game in the future.

I also looked at the Lesson Plan section and saw some really neat lessons.  But, there were not many lessons that were geared towards high school biology, so I am not sure that this site is going to be a great resource for me in the future.  I will definitely keep it bookmarked for my daughter though.  There were some great things on there, like a Letter Generator (for business and personal letters) and a cool looking activity to conclude reading Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut.  Fun stuff.

Puzzlemaker: Imagine the Possibilities

I recently checked out Puzzlemaker (found at http://puzzlemaker.discoveryeducation.com/) which is a free puzzle generation tool for teachers, students, and parents.  It is really easy to use and you can make all different kinds of puzzles, including word searches, crosswords, and cryptograms.  There are also options to make mazes, number blocks, and something called fallen phrases.  I think that the majority of what can be created on here would be classified as "busy work" or "fillers".  However, it is a good idea to have this tool up the proverbial sleeve, since there are times in class when students have down time.  The puzzles that a teacher can create with this puzzlemaker could be a semi-constructive use of that downtime.  Alternatively, a teacher can have students use the puzzlemaker to create puzzles for their classmates.  I think that it might be fun to see what types of crossword clues the students would come up with or creative uses for some of the other types of puzzles that are available. 

The website is really easy to use...very user friendly.  I think that math teachers could really benefit from this site, especially at the lower grade levels where students are just beginning to work with multiple functions in math problems.  I also think that it would be a fun way to test students' knowledge after an introductory lesson - maybe used as an entrance or exit ticket?  Either way, if students are having fun with learning, they are going to achieve more and it will encourage them to learn new things.  Since I plan to teach high school, I would probably not use this particular site too much.  I will share this resource with my students though.