Teachers First - Thinking Teachers Teaching Thinkers

Imagine being able to give students (or parents) an exact link to a specific quote within a web page. Why would you want to? Perhaps you want to send students to a certain paragraph for an activity: for reading comprehension, for reading a specific portion of text, or even for highlighting a literary device within a text or poem. Students will no longer waste time, announcing, "I can't find it!" or return to school saying they couldn't do the homework! Use for FireFox, Safari, and Internet Explorer browsers.

Create photo trading cards using images you upload or store on Flickr, Instagram, or Dropbox. Imagine having your students create study aides about famous people using images they draw and scan or photos of themselves impersonating the famous people, such as presidents, explorers, authors, and more. If you celebrate reading by having an "author's tea," why not follow up by asking students to make trading cards for the authors they "met"? Use a similar approach for famous historical figures or even for geometric shapes you photograph with the digital camera. If students write their own "biographies" of the shapes to study from, they will learn for sure! They can even trade each other for favorites.

This creative page allows you to add captions to photographs you have uploaded or found on an online site such as Flickr. A collection of your own photos uploaded to Flickr can be used easily.

Google Maps gives you live visuals of any location, ideal for planning a trip, picturing the relationship between places, and viewing physical characteristics of almost anywhere in the world. Type or paste in an address and click "search maps." If you click Satellite or hybrid versions of the map, you will see actual satellite images of the terrain. Zoom in and out, use the street view "orange man" to walk among the buildings and trees, or plan and share a route easily with Google Maps. Using your (free) Google membership allows you to save favorite places and more. Find businesses and other features near a specific map location: hotels, restaurants, schools, parks, and more. Google Maps has become more and more sophisticated, now offering many features previously only available in Google Earth, such as opening and/or saving placemarker files. Unlike Google Earth, Google Maps does not require software installation and does not use as much bandwidth for constant reloading. You can even play a tour of places you mark in Google Maps. They just keep adding more features! Google Maps is available as a free app for Android and iOS, too. The handy embed codes let you put any Google Map in a web page, blog, or wiki. Of course you do not need a membership or any special skills to simply SEE, share, or navigate a map. Membership gives you more ways to save.

Web Whiteboard is a free, collaborative, online whiteboard that doesn't require registration. All collaboration takes place in real-time, so there is no need to save work as you use the whiteboard. Just click the link to begin using the whiteboard tools. Share the URL with collaborators. Web Whiteboard also includes a direct link to create a whiteboard using Google Hangouts. Boards remain available for 21 days when using the free account. For more information, be sure to watch the one-minute demo for an overview of how to use this tool.

Purpose Games is an exceptional resource for educationally specific activities. Practice learning anything from the bones of the human skeleton to the countries of Europe. Want something even more tailored to your needs? Register with your email and create your own game with learning goals that are designed by you. Some of the activities have comments. You may want to preview the comments, if sharing with the class. This site has many advertisements.
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