There is a new paradigm shift occurring in classrooms.  Many of the most innovative teachers are turning the traditional K-12 classrooms upside down in an effort to individualize the learning experience for students. They are “Flipping” the classroom in order to make classroom instructional time more valuable to students. “Flipping” the classroom refers to...
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The website Read Write Think has a fantastic tool available to help teach letter writing. They have provided an interactive letter writer. Here is a description taken directly from their website: “The Letter Generator tool is designed to help students learn to identify all the essential parts of a business or friendly letter, and...
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If you are looking to work on digital stories with your students or would like to engage your students in the writing process the following will be helpful. In our district we incorporate the writer’s workshop framework. We are also looking for innovative ways to implement writing across the curriculum. The RAFT STRATEGY is...
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I have been working in instructional technology for the past 10 years. During that time I have experienced the development of some amazing instructional tools. The Google Art Project goes directly to my “best of” list of innovative web-based tools! The Google Art Project uses Google Earth street view technology to allow visitors to...
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Google has developed a powerful new search feature that students and teachers will benefit from. You now have the ability to search by reading level. Google classifies search results by basic, intermediate and advanced reading level. You can choose to only view one of the levels in your result or view all of them...
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Our district subscribes to Study Island for its grades 2-8 students. The software started out primarily as a NJ Ask test prep tool. It has evolved into much more. Although there are many features that i could highlight I would like to talk about the Custom Assessment tool in this posting. The custom assessment...
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I came across these two websites recently while working on an interactive curriculum portal for our Language Arts Department. Both sites contain interactive activities and games for teaching Grammar.  Learn English was developed by the British Council. It is designed for ESL students, but the activities can be used in any elementary language arts...
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SMART and Scholastic have worked together to create a series of Smartboard lessons that teach students the process of story writing and analysis. There are a series of four lessons that cover: 1. Planning Stories 2.  Story Styles 3. Creating Characters 4. Re-inventing Stories The lessons are designed for students in grades 2 or...
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My Story Maker was developed by the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. It can be found at http://www.carnegielibrary.org/kids/storymaker/.  Students will create their own online book that can be viewed online or printed out as a PDF file. The process is simple. Students will start by naming their story. They will then select characters, settings and...
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Sweet Search For Me (http://www.sweetsearch4me.com) is a new search engine specifically designed for k-8 students. While there have been many other search engines specifically geared for elementary school students  Sweetsearch4me is taking a more focused approach. Here is an explanation taken directly from their site: “SweetSearch4Me searches only Web sites that our staff of...
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