Wednesday, April 29, 2009

“The Home Stretch” or Keeping Your Students with Spring Fever From Looking out the Window

Spring has finally sprung across the nation. Most states have completed their end of year assessment testing and parents, teachers and students are starting to look forward to the summer.

One question that a teacher may ask herself is, “How can I keep my students engaged and focused on the curriculum for the rest of the school year?” or parents may wonder, “How can I keep my children engaged in school, when all they want to focus on is the lure of their summer activities?”.

Just as Internet 4 Classrooms provides the best sources on the internet for various activities and resources, here are some links to information that will help you address “Spring Fever” whether in the classroom or at home.

  1. Keeping Students on Task as the Weather Warms Up!
  2. From a Homeschooling blog, an article about “Spring Fever” offers some ideas about getting the kids outdoors and engaging them in fun projects.
  3. Read about the importance of having a little fun and rewarding hard work, great article for high school kids and college students.

Also, check out Summer Teaching Opportunities for Teachers to help you plan for your summer.

Feel free to comment and add sources to this list and share the strategies and activities that you use to keep your students engaged.

All the best,
Susan

Monday, April 20, 2009

Tennessee Really IS the Volunteer State!

As many of you know, we are in the middle of redesigning our website in order to make it easier for you to find the resources that you need in your classrooms or for your own learning.

One of our main content areas is based upon the State of Tennessee Standards with corresponding exercises and activities for each standard. We have both the current 2009 standards, as well as the prior standards on the site. Because Social Studies is still following the old standards, Internet4Classrooms Co-Founder, Bill Byles put out a question on a Tennessee State website to get some feedback about organizing the information, because he did not want our current standard listings to be misleading. The responses that he received were very thoughtful, thorough and extremely helpful to us in presenting this information in a clear manner.

Thanks to all of the Tennessee teachers that participated in this discussion. It is by using your feedback that we will be able to keep the site as user friendly as possible. We hope that you will continue to engage us in dialogue on this blog by asking us questions or leaving relevant comments.

Sunday, April 5, 2009

Internet4classrooms is a Teacher Driven Site

What does " teacher driven site" mean?

Our site was created while Bill and I were both tech coordinators working beside teachers who needed help with technology resources. If they needed a resource, it was put on a site where all the other teachers could see the resource and use it in their classrooms also. As a result of this, teacher requests drove the site to become what it is today.


Today we receive many emails daily from teachers asking for resources on various topics. We do everything we can to help find these resources for their classroom needs. We post them on the site so that other teachers who teach the same concept can benefit from that teacher's request. Many new areas of the site were developed because of teacher requests.

Internet4classrooms' mission is finding the best free concept specific Internet resources available to assist teachers in their job.

If you have a need that we are not meeting, please do write and request resources for the concept you are working on in your class. We would love to help you out. By helping you out , we will also assist thousands of other teachers.

Thank you so much for your kind words of encouragement over the years. We will continue as we embark on our new redesigned site to meet your needs and your students’ needs.

Susan