Common Lit is one of my new all time favorite READING sites. First and foremost it is free to teachers. Materials are rigorous and relevant in a user friendly format. It is a unique resource available to promote critical thinking. It has an amazing collection of texts and even features paired texts which allows students to explore enduring themes. It aligns with Common Core standards and brings an immediate benefit to teachers and students. I am finding it a new “go to” resource and my students really love it!…

100 People: A World Portrait

Global Studies lesson plans included!

“While living in Paris, I received an e-mail from my friend and fellow filmmaker Isabel Sadurni entitled, “If the World Were 100 People.” It offered an accurate description of the world population proportionally represented by 100 individuals (1:62.5 million), based on criteria such as age, nationality, gender, religion, and language. We both found the statistics describing the present state of our humanity on the planet both stunning, and deeply moving. We then asked ourselves, what do we really know about the people with whom we share the planet and why should we care about them, or more to the point, how do we express our care? We recognized that as a result of looking at the world population as a village of 100 people, we could better come to know …

There is an entire page of this website dedicated to teacher time. But it is a topic we find ourselves as educators returning to over and over and over again. Maybe because being a teacher is the only career where you have self imposed guilt for leaving your classroom for 2 minutes when your bladder is about to burst just to rush across the hall to take a restroom break. Or possibly it has to do with the fact that you have 30 minutes scheduled for lunch each day all while being accompanied by a class of about 28 students that have no chance of ever knowing who Emily Post is.

Time is a teacher’s greatest commodity. So when I saw a friend’s post on Facebook with a picture of her nuzzling her newborn baby daughter captioned by “The …

eSpark Learning is enabling students to succeed in school and in life with innovative, differentiated technology. Frontier is one of their products that will captivate unique interests, challenge learners at all levels, and inspire creative application. It is a great way to start personalizing learning in your classroom. Students sign in and select a project based on a topic of their interest. Each project is aligned to the student’s unique learning level. Within each Frontier students are faced with an Essential Question that is meaningful to them. Engaging, diverse, online resources are curated to to help students research the essential question. Quick quizzes are interspersed throughout the project between articles, videos, infographics and podcasts to help them synthesize learning. Finally they express and publish their work to a larger audience.…

Children are encouraged to form their own opinions, make decisions, get involved and understand the impact their own actions have on the environment.

Designed to inspire children to become life-long environmental stewards, EcoKids is an invaluable resource for …