7 websites for lesson plans & social software

Lesson Planning Sites/Links

Teacher Tap--This website has a twenty-sic links to other website that have lesson plan formats and a link that give criteria evaluation ideas for teachers to use. It allows for teachers to have a source to get to multiple resources from and not have to worry about what each website will offer since a brief synopsis is offered.

HotChallk's--This website gives templates for various styled lesson plans and also will aid teachers in other areas of their field. There are forums between teachers and aids in teachers managing their schedules.

Lesson Plans 4 Teachers-This resource give lesson plan templates for a number of subjects while also giving lesson plans in the format of dates and times instead of based on grade level or subject area. Along with information and tools that are helpful for creating the perfect lesson plan the site allows for the teacher to be able to have access to ideas that will be useful for the personally, such as, free software, grade books, fund raising ideas, and many more.

GETTC- This resource has a number of resources that are beneficial more so for the new teachers, especially since the source is designed by a university to train teachers that will one day go out into the work force. The source has templates and resources that not only aid in creating a perfect lesson plan but resources that will help to verify that the lesson plan created was sufficient.

ETTC- Provides templates for lessons plans either for a daily basis or the format is for the week.

NCRTEC Lesson Planner- Instead of giving various templates for a teacher to fill in this resource has one set template that teachers fill in the answers to the questions to create the perfect lesson. The website is a fill in the blank style that makes creating a lesson plan extremely easy and pain free. After filling in the answers to each question the lesson plan can be printed out and the source will not save any of the information so that it can be used again and again.

I4C- This website is a lesson planning site for K-12 teachers. It does not stop at simply giving lesson plans for one source but from different state and school district. the source has tips on how to make a lesson plan to how to be a better teacher to even a "quiz library".

7 social software sites

Ning-This website allows for the user to create their own social website, which would allow for a teacher to create a site that could be used to do turn in certain homework assignments or have the class do group projects that allows the teacher to watch their progress once the information is posted to the website.

Diigo-This resource allows for users to not only bookmark their finds but to personalize it with notes and even highlight their most important findings. The resource encompasses a lot of useful tools that could be used in a group work setting since a person can obtain membership and then have access to a number of resource that are placed there by other users.

PBS teachers- This website gives teachers the opportunity to interact with teachers from other areas that they may have never met. It allows them access to teachers blogs and other resources for teachers like videos that are geared towards certain grade levels and fields.

Wiki browse my stuff- This website give resources to other site and makes it easier to find useful information since it is selected by other users. Theses resources are then given a small summaries that will allow for the user to know if that is the kind of resource they are looking for.

Yahoo Teachers- This resource allows the teachers to have access to an unlimited number of links and also to have access to other teachers view's since they can look at their blogs through this website. It also gives information that is relevant that will be helpful depending on what the teacher is searching for. There are several categories that a teacher could search and find information.

Technorati- This site not only gives access to the other resources that people found to be helpful but it also gives access to a number of other useful things. A member of this site can share sites they find important or relevant to a particular subject, while they are also able to blog about issues and draw people's attention to "rising news stories".

Newsvine- This website focuses on reporting the news from various sources but allows for its members to discuss the issues that are apart of the news in one location. It allows access to a number of different sources and within the site it allows for the user to tag each article the way they feel is the best representation of the information in the article. But also this gives other users a basic idea of what the article is about.

A Quote from Bransford

On potential and proximal development:

"This line of work has drawn attention to the roles of more capable peers, parents, and other partners in challenging and extending children’s efforts to understand. It has also contributed to an understanding of the relationship between formal and informal teaching and learning situations (Lave and Wenger, 1991) and cognition distributed across people and tools (Salomon, 1993). " (Bransford, 2000, p.81)

I found this intriguing because I never really thought of formal and informal teaching in terms of how a student learns but instead I thought of it as what a person learns. I thought that if a person learned how to add and read that would be formal teaching (book smarts) versus if a person learned not walk alone after a certain time would be more informal (street smarts). But then it seems that depending on how the person learns determines whether it is formal or informal teaching.