Teachers First - Thinking Teachers Teaching Thinkers

Publish ebooks in any language with Ourboox. Keep track of how many readers you have and read their comments. Sign up with email to get a free account, and get started right away. Click Create, add a title, choose the style of your book (Square Book - a picture book with up to 15 lines of text, or a text-oriented book, more like a long story or novel). Choosing a Square Book enables the ability to have an image (JPEG, PNG). You can also upload animated GIFs or embed a YouTube Video. Ourboox will step you through the process of getting your book online and publishing it. The pages of the book will flip, and the tool has an accommodation for languages that read from right to left. It can take up to 24 hours for new books to process. Before starting on your own book, you may want to look at others' books to get ideas about the format.

Create and share beautiful digital content with Marq (formerly Lucidpress). After registering for a free account, follow the prompts to add a document type from the available templates. Short tutorials along the way help guide you on using available features. The easy drag and drop features allow you to personalize flyers, posters, presentations, and more. The free features allow you to include three documents.
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Alice will have your students in wonderland as they use this innovative 3D programming environment targeted to middle and high school students. Be the director of a movie or the creator of a video game. 3D objects appear in an on-screen virtual world imagined by the creator and move around according to the directions you give by dragging and dropping tiles. The drag and drop technique provides a more engaging programming experience for first-time programmers. Alice provides exposure to object-oriented programming. Alice has practical value for students to learn how computers think. The instructions correspond to standard statements in a production oriented programming language, such as Java, C++, and C#. While using Alice, programmers can immediately see how their animation program runs and the behavior of the objects in their animation. Manipulate camera angles and lighting to make further enhancements. Alice is a revolutionary method to teach programming, especially to first-time learners. It allows students to understand programming concepts, a 21st-century skill.

Diamonds are forever, and so are diamante poems created on this free site. Find a great tool to shape up your poets through the structure of a seven lined diamante poem. Learn about the diamond-shaped poems that use specific types of words for each line. Rhyming isn't needed, but needn't be impeded. Describe a central topic or two opposing topics like night and day. View the examples before creating your poem. Each screen provides an organizer for any poet to complete. Click on the parts of speech for definitions while composing poems. Edit your poem, if needed, before printing, downloading it as a PDF, or sharing through email. Save your draft to continue at a later date. This site is a must during poetry month in April.

As a companion piece to the Shmoop literature site, reviewed here, this is a wonderful addition if you teach poetry. Shmoop provides students (and teachers) with so much more than summaries. This is a great site with a unique voice. It is written by Ph.D. and Masters students at top universities (such as Harvard, Yale, Stanford, etc.). While the list of poems is always growing, it includes many of the poems and/or poets commonly studied in high school. These include some of Shakespeare's sonnets, Whitman, Coleridge, Shelley, Dickinson, Browning, Rich, Yeats, and others. Especially appealing are the "Intro" sections, which tell the background of the poem. These should interest students as it places a very human "face" on the poem and sets it in context for them. From the menu on the left find summaries, techniques, quotes, and study questions, this site also gives a "did you know?" page. It includes random trivia about the poet, poem, or topic, as well as a "sex rating" ("Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" is rated "G"). This in itself will amuse students-- and amused students are likely to stay focused!

In addition to the literary content, some poems also have a photo slideshow that accompanies the poem and their authors. The slideshows would be great for readers who may need some assistance in comprehension or may just need something to sell the content and heighten their interest. While actually signing up (which is free) gives you the ability to "clip" files and keep them in a folder, you can access the majority of the information without signing up. Registration does require an email address. If you plan to have students register individually, you may want to create your own Gmail account with up to 20 subaccounts for each group of students (by code name or number) within your classes. Here is a blog post that tells how to set up GMail subaccounts to use for any online membership service.
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If you want to get students involved in listening to poetry, try this site featuring real life SOUNDS of poetry in both ballads and the blues. Ballads are traditionally taught as story poems and, while this site does that too, it makes ballads more relevant to the music that kids listen to today. Use this site to teach about meters (iambic triameter and iambic tetrameter) in ways that students can HEAR. The images of the short films are great, too. The site includes readings and singing of great, classic examples of ballads as well as some rarer film footage of great blues singers (ex: John Jackson singing "Steamboat Whistle" at Wolf Trap in 1997). There is a wide variety of tracks to choose from and the site includes lesson plans.