http://www.box.net/shared/czf5qr9ete

audio

http://www.box.net/shared/czf5qr9ete

group work with ease

Often when group work is assigned, teachers and students alike have to deal with problems completely unrelated to the content of the assignment, such as group members not pulling their weight, lost documents, etc. When reading through www.freetech4teachers.blogspot.com, I found a great site: GroupTable. This site allows you to create and share documents and resources, send emails, and set up meetings and plans. This could help a lot with eliminating all those extra problems that do nothing to help the students' learning!

Teaching Speaking

One aspect of teaching Language Arts is teaching speech writing and rhetoric skills. When you're doing that, why not have your students learn from the best? This site has the audio to 100 of the most famous and popular speeches in American history, including Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, and JFK's Cuban Missle Crisis Address. Most speeches include the audio for the full speech- you can play these in your classroom to teach writing to elicit emotion, pace, inflection, and overall how to deliver a powerful speech. This can be a great way to merge history and language arts curriculum as well.

YouTube inspiration and instruction

Here are a couple of quick and fun links I wanted to share with you about the joys and benefits of YouTube in education...

This link sends you to a collection of some of the best YouTube videos for teachers. There are instructional videos to show your class, videos to instruct YOU on how to do various things with and for your class, as well as some videos that are just mean to inspire you or make you laugh :)

This article has a very easy to understand description of various Web 2.0 tools, including YouTube, and the benefits of using them in the classroom.

YouTube isn't as controlled as other sites such as TeacherTube so you obviously need to screen all videos before sharing with your students, and take into consideration if the video is violating any copyright laws. However, if you can get past both of those roadblocks, it can be a great way to engage your students!

Continuing on the issue of organization...

With the ease of finding information internet, many people, teachers included, come across the issue not of finding information on a site, but finding that same information on that same site again later on! That's why this site is so useful. Once you create a free delicious account, you can add any URL to your account. Not only that, you can add tags to organize your links to easily find related links. You can even share your collection of links with others.

Not only can this be incredibly helpful for teachers, this can be a great tool to recommend or require of your students as well. When they are doing research, have them organize their links using this tool so that they and you can easily go back and review the sources. Sometimes, finding good, reputable, scholarly information on the Web is more difficult for students than using the information gathered.

Organizing blogs/news feeds

This is really helpful, especially if you have your students create their own blogs that you would like to monitor and view conveniently and quickly. You can set up your own RSS feed. RSS stands for "Really Simply Syndication", and it basically involves you creating your own news feed of your favorite websites and blogs. Blogs easily work into the RSS feed, but any website that has an "RSS" button on the page can be incorporated into your feed as well. (To see an example of what the button would look like, go to this site for the New Yorker. The main page has a link on the right-hand column for "RSS feeds" and then after clicking on that link, you simply select which articles you'd like to include in your feed and what service you use.)

If you have your own blog through Gmail's Blogger , you can create your own newsfeed right on the Dashboard or main page of your account. Otherwise, here are some free options that you have for creating an RSS feed:
Google Reader
BlogLines
NewsGator

Teachers have enough going on, anything that can save some time is worth it! This can definitely save you time in viewing your students' blogs, or even just keeping yourself up-to-date with news.