Educational Information Sources Online

Some resources online for Readers Theater that I've come across.

Internet Resources For Conducting Reader's Theater

Aaron Shephard's Readers Theater Scripts

Gander Academy Readers Theater Scripts

Education World Readers Theater Resources

Fiction Teachers.com

I've designed two new blogs, as companions to my Web Tools Workshop and my Educational Uses of Weblogs Workshop. Here they are:

Web Tools

Presentation Blog 

If you're looking for a decent site to set up an educational blog for yourself or your students, Edublogs is the site for you. The site uses WordPress open source software, which is a very user-friendly and robust application. You can have multiple users, categorize, and password protect posts with WordPress. There are a number of templates to choose from and you can upload audio, video, or document files you would like to share with others (with a size limit). I love WordPress, and the best part is you don't have to have your own host. Edublogs hosts your educational blog for you.

Teachnology.com has compiled a wonderful portal of web links for teachers. Categories include downloads, printables, lessons, tutorials, sheet-makers, and rubrics. The only problem is that resources are not categorized by subject area, which can be difficult if you have a particular topic you want to browse.

The Museum Education Consortium of Western New York has collaborated with a number of local organizations to link to each org's websites and listings of educational programs. There are links to the Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo Zoo, Buffalo & Erie County Historical Society, Botanical Gardens, Theodore Roosevelt Inagural Site, Burchfield Penney Art Center, Naval & Military Museum and the Buffalo Science Center.

The Odyssey Online site is a very attractive site that has exhibits and activities for the Ancient Civilizations of the Near East, Egypt, Rome, Greece, Africa, and the Americas. It is affiliated with the University of Rochester and Emory University. Click on the different areas to see photos of artifacts, read about mythology, daily life, people, archeology, and death & burial.

I found this early elementary reading site that has some great online reading activities for beginning readers. There are activities for ABCs, early readers, comics, puzzles, plays, non-fiction and selections based on holidays. Nice site to help kids with reading as well as learning to navigate web resources.

The Development Gateway is a site that offers access to educational resources. Here's a snippet from the site:

Over the past decade as learning content has cascaded into the Internet, for many, many subjects one website about it has become truly superb. This is a trend caused by an open network: users tend to flock to the best website for a topic and similar web pages that are less appealing tend to fade. An advantage to this effect is that students around the world are more and more tending quite literally to learn from the same page.

The really excellent websites for focused topics are not too surprising, because one or just a few experts in a field can fairly easily keep up with a limited subject. Small subject examples that are favorites of mine are Theban Mapping Project, Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, and Avian Brains. The first is a magnificently illustrated ongoing description of the exploration of ancient Egyptian tombs. The second is a gorgeous online interface to great Dutch art.

CLUSTY is the newest search engine idea, that goes beyond meta-searching (such as Dogpile, which offers results from multiple search engines in one query). The idea is to group your search results into clusters that are connected and in a heirarchal format. Try it. Very interesting. You can see your FAQs answered here.

The link to this compilation of information about teaching critical thinking skills was posted on one of my library listservs. I thought it ties in nicely with information literacy skills education. There are articles, ideas, rubrics and more.