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

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.

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.

Here's a great tool that I happened across today. If you're interested in doing podcasts or making your own (or editing) sound files for presentations, among other things, the Audacity Free Audio Sound Editor is perfect. It's a cross-platform application that is cost free as well as being open source. I've already downloaded it and it's very userfriendly and working great already. I've used at least three other costly programs that never worked correctly, didn't translate well to other platforms, and cost money that ended up being wasted. This is a great program. Try it :)

Here's a wonderful site called the Favorite Poem Project. A short description from the site:

Robert Pinsky, the 39th Poet Laureate of the United States, founded the Favorite Poem Project shortly after the Library of Congress appointed him to the post in 1997. Since its launch, the Favorite Poem Project has been dedicated to celebrating, documenting and promoting poetry's role in Americans' lives.

During the one-year open call for submissions, 18,000 Americans wrote to the project volunteering to share their favorite poems — Americans from ages 5 to 97, from every state, of diverse occupations, kinds of education and backgrounds. From those thousands of letters and emails, we've culled several enduring collections.

Once again, National Poetry Month is almost upon us (April). The Academy of the American Poets has a number of resources on its site, including a Poetry Read-A-Thon for classrooms. You can download the official logo at the site, and also order posters to display. Another neat part of this event is having a poem emailed to you every day for the month. You can sign up here.

The University of South Florida library website has a number of helpful links on designing information literacy lessons.

The top part of the page has a number of links to definitions of information literacy and the second half of the page has a number of links to information related to information literacy objectives, designing library information literacy lessons and assignments.

The Western New York Library Resources Council has developed an online tutorial teaching students and patrons about how libraries share materials and how to go about requesting materials from a library other than your own.

EBSCO publishing company (one of the database companies in NOVEL) has free tools for librarians.

There are tools to assist in marketing which include printable flyers, bookmarks, posters, etc. as well as promotional tool kits for special events (check out the library scavenger hunt or the Reading Rave site to encourage teen reading).

You may also want to look at their success tools. For teachers there are lesson plans using EBSCO Host resources (again, part of NOVEL) and student resources on bibliographic citation and note-taking.