Teacher Tips: Integrating the Internet into the K-6 Classroom
There are many excellent web sites for teachers to use with their K-6 classes, with more appearing every day. It is a dizzying task to sort out the good, the bad, and the ugly!
Start with a unit that needs more basic content, more interactive opportunities for students, or more motivational aspects, and look for a web site that fits your needs.
Here are some possibilities!
1. Internet-based Projects and Units
Be part of a continent-wide project tracking spring's journey through North America through the study of birds, butterflies, tulips, and more through Journey North: http://www.learner.org/jnorth
Involve your class in the "Last Great Race" by making musher trading cards, writing math problems, emailing Zuma, and Iditarod: http://www.iditarod.com
Make your own teacher and/or class web page to showcase your students' work:
http://www.westirondequoit.org/southlawn/SLgr2.html
http://www.westirondequoit.org/technology/k-6/Iroquois_Nation/index.htm
http://www.westirondequoit.org/iroquois/Curriculum/boomer/paperclipchallenge_files/frame.htm
http://www.westirondequoit.org/southlawn/Brookins/index.htm
2. Take your class on a Virtual Field Trip
Oswego City School District's Virtual Field Trip site is designed to showcase the best of the trips on the Internet and to instruct teachers on how to make the best use of virtual trips as well as how to create original trips: http://www.oswego.org/staff/cchamber/webdesign/virtual_fieldtrips.htm
The Saskatoon East School Division Teacher Resource site has links to museums, exhibits, and live web cam sites organized by destination:
http://sesd.sk.ca/teacherresource/virtualtour/virtualtours.htm
This Virtual Field Trip site from the Utah Education Network has dozens of trips organized by topic, but with no grade level designations: http://www.uen.org/utahlink/tours/
The Nine Planets is a multimedia trip to through our solar system: http://www.seds.org/nineplanets/nineplanets/
Take a tour of the White House guided by the president's dog: http://www.whitehouse.gov/kids/tour/
3. Teacher/Student resources
Yahooligans is a kids' portal/search engine hosted by Yahoo and is used as the Internet Home Page at Iroquois and Rogers schools: http://www.yahooligans.com/
Enchanted Learning is a site with both on- and off- computer activities organized by topic and age: http://www.enchantedlearning.com/
Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators has it all: http://school.discovery.com/schrockguide/
Scholastic Network was one of the first sites designed for use in schools and it is still one of the best: http://www.scholastic.com/
Houghton Mifflin's Education Place provides K-8 resources for teachers, students, and parents. Includes Reading/Language Arts, Math, Science, Social Studies, Intervention, Professional Development, activities, games, and textbook support: http://www.eduplace.com
4. Interactive games, tutorials, and quizzes
The FunBrain site is divided into sections for kids, teachers, and parents and has a wide variety of activities for students from kindergarten through grade 8. The kid section is all free, but the parent and teacher sections link to sites which are available by subscription. Most offer 30 free trial periods: http://www.funbrain.com/
The Primary Games site includes a curriculum guide to help match the games to curriculum needs. The game choices include ancient games, subject area games, printable games and on computer games: http://www.primarygames.com/
Three examples of the many tutorials available on line for children and/or adults are these three very different Power Point tutorials: http://www.actden.com/pp/ http://www.fgcu.edu/support/office2000/ppt/ and http://homepage.cs.uri.edu/tutorials/csc101/powerpoint/ppt.html
5. A sampler of sites from the West Irondequoit Inservice web page: http://www.westirondequoit.org/inservice/INET4EDU.htm