Book Adventure

Book Adventure is a FREE reading motivation program for children in grades K-8. Children create their own book lists from over 7,000 recommended titles, take multiple choice quizzes on the books they've read, and earn points and prizes for their literary successes.

KidsRead.com

Kidsreads is the best place on the web for kids to find info about their favorite books, series and authors. Reviews of the newest titles, interviews with the coolest authors and special features on great books are our specialties. And for even more reading fun we have trivia games, word scrambles and awesome contests!

Diary of a Wimpy Kid

The mania continues. I have never seen such obsession with the series. Books fly off the shelf and students fight over who gets them next. Have you read them yet? Check out Jeff Kinney's site and share with your students. Book summaries, book trailers, movie links, games, and more. Link

Digitize!

ReadPrint

What is Read Print?

Free online books library for students, teachers, and the classic enthusiast.

• Absolutely FREE online books
• Thousands of novels, poems, stories
• Easy to read books online

Children's Storybooks Online

Children's Storybooks Online  offers numerous online digital stories for children of all ages.

Online Newspapers

Onlinenewspapers.com offers online newspapers from around the world. Are you studying Africa? Why not show your students what an African newspaper looks like?

Democracy

Might be a good time to read about democracy.

Virtual Museums

Ever wonder how to take your students on  field trips with all the budget cuts now? Traveling to world famous museums has never been easier and is FREE. Try a virtual trip with your students and discover the exhibits across the globe.

Teacher Tap offers this list of sites. Check them out.

Google LitTrips

Google Lit Trips

Bring your stories to life but taking settings from books and plotting them with Google Earth.  K-Higher Ed titles available.

Online Safety by Common Craft

Common Craft offers four good videos designed to educate viewers about safe online practices. 

A Thin Line

A Thin Line is a digital safety education resource produced by MTV in collaboration with other media partners. The purpose of the site is to educate teenagers and young adults about the possible repercussions of their digital activities. A Thin Line offers a series of fact sheets about topics like sexting, digital spying, and excessive text messaging and instant messaging. A Thin Line gives students advice on how to recognize those behaviors, the dangers of those behaviors, and how to protect your digital identity. Students can also take a short quiz to practice identifying risky digital behaviors.

Webonauts

PBS Kids offers the Webonauts Academy in which elementary school students can learn about safe online behaviors. When students have completed all of the Webonauts missions they will graduate from the Webonauts Academy. The educators tips page offers some practical suggestions for using Webonauts in the classroom or in a library.

Professor Garfield

The Virginia Department of Education has produced an engaging and useful site for teaching students web safety lessons. Internet Safety With Professor Garfield currently offers an animated lesson on cyberbullying and an animated lesson about online safety. As you might guess from the site's title, the lessons feature Garfield. Both lessons use the same model in which students watch a cartoon, take an informal quiz, then try to apply their new knowledge to a few different scenarios.

Your Own Space

Own Your Space is a free, sixteen chapter ebook designed to educate tweens and teens about protecting themselves and their stuff online. This ebook isn't a fluffy, general overview book. Each chapter goes into great detail explaining the technical threats that students' computers face online as well as the personal threats to data that students can face online. For example, in the first chapter students learn about different types of malware and the importance of installing security patches to prevent malware infections. The fourteenth chapter explains the differences between secured and unsecured wireless networks, the potential dangers of an unsecured network, and how to lock-down a network. Download the whole book or individual chapters here.

Google Family Safety Center

The Google Family Safety Center introduces parents to and shows them how to use Google's safety tools including safe search, safe search lock, and YouTube's safety mode. Google has partnered with a number of child safety organizations to develop educational materials for dealing with topics like cyberbullying, strangers online, protecting personal information, and avoiding malware online. Finally, Google's Family Safety Center contains a collection of videos featuring Google employees sharing the strategies they use with their own kids for teaching online behavior and keeping their kids safe online.

LMK Life Online

LMK Life Online is a website created for the purpose of educating girls about online safety. LMK Life Online is sponsored by the Girl Scouts and Microsoft. On the site girls can learn through articles and videos about protecting themselves from online predators. Girls will also find lessons about cyberbullying and online privacy. After reading the articles and watching the videos, girls can test their knowledge through interactive quizzes.

A Day in The Library

Creating Animoto Videos

Using Flip Cameras in the Classroom

Quicklyst

Quicklyst is a nice tool for taking notes and creating outlines. Quicklyst provides a simple outline template that you can use to take notes. There are two neat features of Quicklyst that really stand out. First, you can do basic web searches within the framework of taking notes. To do a search just type a question mark (?) before a word then press enter. Quicklyst will then fill-in that line with some basic information about that word. For example, when I typed ?egypt that line on my outline was filled with some basic information about Egypt. The other useful feature offered by Quicklyst is the option to search within your notes. If you've created a lot of outlines in your Quicklyst account you can use the search function to quickly locate your notes about a particular topic. For more information regarding how Quicklyst can be used by educators, visit the site.

Web 2.0 for Schools

David Kapuler offers various Web 2.0 tools for schools.

Web 2.0 for Schools

View more presentations from David Kapuler.

Pebble Go is Here!

Pebble Go Databases : Animals and Earth & Science has been purchased for student and teacher use. Links have been posted to the IMC website. Works perfect for individual, lab settings or SmartBoard use. Check out the promotional video above.

Teach a Child to Read

The sun did not shine. It was too wet to play.
So we sat in the house all that cold, cold, wet day.
I sat there with Sally. We sat there, we two.
And I said, "How I wish we had something to do!"
-from The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss -


Thirty-eight percent of all fourth graders in the United States can't read this simple poem.¹ Is your child one of them? Does your child drone, hesitate, and torture words while reading? He or she is one of 7 million elementary-aged children who is performing below his or her reading potential. Learn some great teaching strategies by visiting this site.

Classroom Strategies That Work!

Reading Rockets provides teachers with effective, research-based classroom strategies to help build and strengthen literacy skills in the following areas: print awareness, phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and writing.

To learn more about these strategies, take another look at the Reading Rockets site.

Reading Rockets

Reading Rockets is a national multimedia project offering information and resources on how young kids learn to read, why so many struggle, and how caring adults can help.

Video Contest!

Encourage your students to participate in the Learning 4 Life Video Contest. Contestants are asked to produce a video up to three minutes in length that shows how school libraries and technology empower them to become learners for life. All ages welcome. Must be student created. Each video should illustrate the four standards for student learning -- Think, Create, Share, and Grow.
If you know of a student interested, see me! Winners at each grade level receive a flip camera. Entries due March 18, 2011.

Lessons Plans from Wisconsin Historical Society

This site provides lessons developed by other teachers and are arranged by elementary and secondary level. All lessons can easily be adapted to various grade levels. If you have a success lesson about state and local history, the Office of School Services encourages you to submit them and share with other Wisconsin teachers. Click here.