The Prince's Rainforest Project for Schools

England has a beautiful website that is all about the rainforest. It has videos, a book, games and all sorts of resources for a great rainforest curriculum. It is aimed at the 3 - 16 year old student according to the website, but I found lots of great resources for anyone!
I recommend that you spend time on this site, even if you aren't teaching the rainforest!
http://www.rainforestsos.org

Writing Prompts - Cartooning

If you are looking for a fun way to teach other ways to write, I recommend you spend some time looking at Make Beliefs Comix.  This web site has the cartoons already drawn. You can print or email your creations when you are done. If you want to save the cartoon, you will have to use a screen grab to do that, but this is an easy thing to accomplish. There are also good one panel cartoons that can be printed out as writing prompts. They have a cute cartoon and then a writing prompt and space for the student to write their response. You find this at the printables page.
http://www.makebeliefscomix.com/

iNudge - Make your own kind of music

This site is really fun to play with sounds and rhythms. I did find that it did not work in my Safari browser, but worked fine on the Firefox browser. http://www.inudge.net/
YOu can then share your sound with others by email or embed it in your web site.

Teaching Internet Literacy

Having a discussion with our librarian, Mrs. C. today, I told her I was working to  teach students how to evaulate web sites. I have been collecting sites with my LiveBinder account, Internet Literacy  and Deb had another link to add to mine. I just loved the site that she uses to teach students about Internet Use and Explorers at the same time.   The site she has found is called. All About Explorers. This site is to teach students how to search better on the internet. It is fantastic as the information on the first pages is obviously NOT accurate, but the pages look wonderful. The students will figure out quickly that it is not a good source for information. If they dig deeper in the information, they will find links to Reliable Resources on their explorer. There are lesson plans connected to this site. It is really a fun place on the web and very appropriate for beginning researchers.

Life Magazine Photo Archives

http://www.life.com/ I read an article about this in the latest Edutopia and had to go and see it. There is a huge archive of photos from the Life magazines. There are a lot of very meaningful pictures on this site. I found the Real or Fake pages fascinating and thought there were so many possibilities for this resource. Whether you are looking for a great picture for a writing prompt, a way to start a discussion about a time in America's past this is worth looking at. There are so many photos that it is important for students using it to have good search skills.

Live Binders

Live Binders - http://www.livebinders.com
This site is my newest and possibly my best find. I love it. I have embedded a "binder" here that will explain it a bit more. It is such an easy way to keep track of bookmarks and make changes easily to them.

Blog Links

Fractions - Paper Folding Books to teach

Fantastic Flexible Foldables  - You won't need an internet connection to use this resource with your students. Instead, you download the worksheets  that can be used to teach fractions. I think that the Fraction Flipper is great to introduce the concept of fractions to kids.  I found it easy to make and would give the students something fun to do with fractions. I also think that the Fortune Teller Fraction Game is a good idea. You might think of other ways to use these booklets. If you are teaching fractions, check out this site - http://pages.sbcglobal.net/cdefreese/foldables/

WatchKnow

WatchKnow - This is a great site that has taken videos found on the internet and put them in an easy format for students to access without all the comments from YouTube showing on the side or advertisements. The motto is - Videos for kids to learn from. Organized. There are not LOTS of videos out there but it would appear to be a growing site. It has a very easy interface to find out what videos are on the website. There is a search engine, but also categories are there on the side that will expand when you click on the green squares. I wish there were more videos, but it is a great place to be able to send students to, much safer surfing than Google.

Tutput Math Practice

I found a new site that I am going to use with my students next week to practice math facts. It is called Tutpup. Teachers can set up a site for their children to use that will track their progress in the program. However, it does NOT collect names of the students. The only name connected on the site will be mine, so I am not 100% sure how I will know what student is WHO. It gives them all different types of drill games that they play against students from other countries. There is a win wall where students can see how they are doing. The word games are spoken to the student, there is a word list that you can print out so you can see what words are on each level. If you are at my school and want to use it, contact me for the class code that I have entered!

OCR Recognition

Online OCR  This is the best news for many of us that do not have a powerful scanner. This site will take documents that have been saved as a .pdf - something that our school scanner can do - and you can upload them to the site and it will make an editable copy of it for you!
If you want it to save it in a formats, like Excel or Word,  you need to set up an account, but it is an easy process to get an account. This would allow you to keep the formatting in the document. There is a small fee for processing the files this way, but if you have a lot of work to do, it might be worth it!
Without signing in, you will have to reformat your document, but it seemed to be quick to get all the text in. The pages that I tested came out perfectly. I think this is a good site to know about.