SELVA means Spanish and English Language Virtual Assistance. The author of this website is Jessica Ojeda and she is a native English speaker from the United States. She argues that a non-native speaker of Spanish like her is best suited to help people learn the language, because they had to go through the same process. On her website, she is offering her services as a tutor. This website usually presents free resources, so why do I include a tutoring site? Because in addition to her tutoring services, she also includes some free Spanish lessons on her website. You can learn about Spanish verbs, adjectives, articles, nouns, pronouns and others. If after going through the free lessons, you need extra help, and then you can pay for some tutoring with her.
Archive for ◊ 2009 ◊
If you are teaching poetry, “Poets.org” will be an amazing resource for you. It includes many popular poems that could be used in the classroom with the text and sometimes the audio version. There are also list of poems to Memorize, Perform, or Recite, poems to teach imagery, poems to teach forms and traditions, poems to teach the lyrics, poems to teach narrative, poems to teach irony and poems to teach Social, Historical & Cultural Context. The site also includes Curriculum Units & Lesson Plans, Essays on Teaching, Tips for Teaching and a Resource Center. If you want to discuss best practices with fellow teachers, there is also a discussion forum.
Grammar Gorillas is a fun activity for students to learn parts of speech. The student is presented with a sentence and two words are clickable. The student has to click one of the word bas on the part of speech. If the student clicks on the right word, a banana is given to the gorilla. The activity is available for beginners and for advance students.
If you are looking for easy to understand tutorials to teach applications that students K-12 are most likely to use, “Technology Tutorials” is a great site offered by Internet4classrooms. The tutorials include applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Dreamweaver, Internet Explorer, Inspiration, Kidspiration and also the Mac and Windows operating systems. These tutorials are not video tutorials, but include text and screenshots.
“I know that” is a great site to access fun learning activities about math, the arts, social learning, science, language arts and social studies. It is also possible to access the learning activities by grade (for pre-kindergarten to grade 6). The activities are very visually attractive and user-friendly. To experience the activity, you need to open an account. You can get a free guest limited account that includes advertisement. The advertisements do not seem to target children. By subscribing to a paid account, you can eliminate the ads and have access to many premium member features. With the teacher’s paid account, you can even track the progress of your students. The site also promotes “social learning” by encouraging users to create an avatar and posting about their successes.
This is an excellent tool to let your students challenge their knowledge of Canadian Geography. Before taking a quiz, the user has to choose a subject such as economy, ecology, pre-confederation history, post-confederation history, shapes of Canada, land or people. The user can also choose the level of difficulty (easy or difficult), the number of questions and the time limit to complete the quiz. This could also be used with a projector or Smartboard to host a game with the entire classroom.
The Atlas of Canada presents Facts About Canada. This website includes information about lakes, islands, rivers, parks, weather, waterfalls, glaciers, mountains and coastlines. There is also a list of Frequently Asked Questions About Canada. It is a great site to explore Canadian geography or to prepare a trivia game for your classroom.
Edufire is a great platform for tutors, teachers and students to meet. If you are a teacher with special skills (e.g. you speak a foreign language, you know how to cook, you know how to program iPhone apps, you have special interests) and you want to teach them on Edufire, you can get paid for doing so. If you have in interest in learning, you can find a tutor on Edufire or you can sign up for the various classes offered on the site. Some of them are totally free, some of them you have to pay a very small amount (usually around $5-10). If you want to have access to many of the classes in an “all you can eat” format, you can also register for the Superpass. They even have channels with classes in various categories such as Languages, Business, Tech, etc.
I know this resource may be cliché, but I think there is something really great about Google Wave for education. If you haven’t entered the wave so far, I recommend you watch this YouTube video explaining how it works. In short, Google Wave is like e-mail, chat and collaboration on steroids. It will let your students discuss remotely in a better way than actual chat platform. With Google Wave, they can share a document and all work on editing it at the same time. It is the perfect tool for a brainstorming session. At the end, it is very easy to summarize all the ideas from all the participants in one document. One of the plugin even let students speaking different languages collaborate together with instantaneous automatic translation. It is important to understand that Google Wave is still a preview not open to the public in general. There are still bugs and there are not many plugins available so far. If you need an invite because you want to use it after watching the video, please feel free to contact me on my Facebook fan page.
“Sheep Brain Dissection“, the Anatomy of Memory, is a virtual dissection of the sheep brain, including photos and explanations. The student just has to click next and back to move from one step to another. The site also include a Real Player version of the dissection. The video requires the real player program to be installed on the computer or an alternative such as VLC. Unfortunately, since the video was encoded in 1998, the resolution is very low.
“Inquiry in Action” is a project of the American Chemical Society and in composed of a Guide to Inquiry Investigations in Physical Science. It includes and entirely free PDF book about investigation in elementary school science. It is a resource of guided, inquiry-based activities that covers basic chemistry concepts along with the process of scientific investigation. It includes activities about the physical properties and physical change in solids and liquids, dissolving solids, liquids, and gases, chemical changes, states of matter and density. The document is made for the US curriculum and it includes links with teaching standards in all the 50 states. You can download each part separately or you can download the entire document as a PDF.
This virtual dissection is a good alternative or a good pre-lab for a clam dissection. It is produced by Cornell University and includes four views of the clam: the intact clam, the inner surface of valve, the left valve removed and the left mantle removed. The site was developed in 2003, so the interactivity is not in line with today’s possibilities. Yet, each part is labeled with a number. By clicking on the number, the student can get a description of each organ.
This site is ideal for the French language as it has plenty of activities for primary school French. Once you enter the site, it displays an English menu with different themes to choose from. Once an item from the menu is chosen, it is translated into French, and examples are given. At the top of the screen, very interesting teacher’s notes appear, because it gives guidelines for the chosen activity: Online activities, exercises to print, language training, teaching, videos containing different examples of teaching activities. It also has audio activities which students can see applied in a very dynamic and fun-songs, games, karaoke-learning. From the Home menu, there are also options of working accessing other languages like German, Indonesian and Italian. You can also download songs in these languages.
Educational Videos dot com is a site devoted to finding you the best educational videos on the web. It includes a collection of videos about arts, science, environment, geology, health, history, language, mathematics, music, psychology, sports and technology. They are only few videos available in each category right now, but the number is growing. Even though the videos are already available on YouTube and they are simply embedded on this website, they are better organized on this website for use by educators. The videos are intended for students of all ages.
This site present many interactive maps and it lets the student explore various regions of the world where people speak Spanish and other languages. There are many maps available for various communities, cities and countries, all in Flash. The maps are entirely interactive and ideal for working at the computer. In these maps, the students have to identify countries, landmarks, rivers, oceans, lakes and regions. There are also some puzzle to solve .
