The Choices Program

The Choices Program was shown to me by a social studies teacher I work with here in Fairbanks and found it to be a very useful website for teachers teaching current events. They have detailed lesson plans that include extended reading, video segment links, and additional websites for even more resources. They add about one new topic a month and have topics that focus on US and World Events. They also have other lesson plans that you can pay for if you want the complete lesson plan for a given topic, but they do give you a wealth of information without purchasing anything.

I found three tools for use in the classroom from the NY Times "The Learning Network" today. "The Learning Network" is a blog by the NY times that reports on educational issues and provides some useful resources and tools.

The first is called News Quiz where they ask 5 questions about today's headlines. The NY Times include a link to the headlines of the day with the story's that the questions are based on. This is a Monday through Friday post that started on October 15, 2009. This would be a great warm up exercise for a social studies teacher or a reading teacher.

The second one is called "Fill-In" which is similar to a Mad Lib style exercise that is based on an article. It has been happening since October 23, 2009 but they had such an overwhelming positive response to it that they decided to make it a weekly event. They tie their "Fill-In" to a real news story and you can either have the students fill it in with their own words or you can give them a scrabmled list of words that were removed for the fill in the blank part of the story. The NY Times also gives you a link to the original story as well.

Finally, the NY Times provides a "Word of the Day" complete with pronucation and definitions. This is weekday post and they use words that most teenagers should learn. When you go to read more about the word they explain how often it has been used in NY Times articles and then try to use the word in context as well. They also have a link to a tool call the visual thesaurus as well.

Maps, Maps and More Maps

Ever stumble upon a great site and go wow, where was this a week ago? Well I think I found in this site on maps. It has old maps, new maps, online maps and interactive maps from the housing crisis to a long long time ago. The University of Texas Libraries have created a vast database of maps that are either public domain or have been given permission to use for educational purposes.

An Exmaple of these wonderful maps:



"The Public Schools Historical Atlas" by Charles Colbeck. Longmans, Green; New York; London; Bombay. 1905