Omnivorous Surfer

CC Licensed photo by Clint Gardner

I'm always on the lookout for good listings of websites, and this one via Twitter was a real gem of a find! It brought to my attention another blog to follow: The Innovative Educator: Way out of the box!

The sites included on the 100 Video Sites Every Educator Should Bookmark post are categorized by Educational Video Collections
General Video Collections
Teacher Education (my personal favorite, Teacher Training Videos, is included here)
Lesson Planning
Science, Math and Technology
History, Arts and Social Science
Video Tools
Network and Program Videos
Free Movies and Clips (free is good!)
How- Tos
Government Organizations.

If this listing doesn't appeal to you, you ought to take a look at the blog anyway. There's some pretty great stuff there!

Though it may sound like it, Teacher Challenge is NOT a competition or contest--please read on!

There is a wealth of free tools on the web for educational use. With all the time teaching takes, during the school day and on into the evenings, who can keep up with them, let alone learn to use them? Well, here comes Edublogs, known as a great site for hosting educational blogs, with a great idea.

The goal of Teacher Challenge is providing free professional development for educators. The current challenge presents structured tutorials for free online tools...21 of them at the moment. Each one gives directions to get you up and going with the tool along with tips and suggested ways to use it in the classroom. Take a look at #7--Kerpoof for an example.

Interested in blogging for yourself or your students but don't know quite where or how to start? Previous challenges were "Kick Start Your Blogging" and "Blogging with Students." Links to these are along the side of the Teacher Challenge page.

What about PLNs? The power and connectivity of the Internet makes it an amazing time for building PLNs. That's the topic of the next Teacher Challenge, so subscribe to their RSS feed or keep checking back to the site to see when it starts if you're interested.

If you want a good, thorough tutorial for using a web app, a good place to start is Russel Stannard's TeacherTrainingVideos.com. I have learned how to use so many sites from viewing his narrated screen videos. If you're a Twitter user, you'll want to follow him (russell1955) to be alerted to any new additions.

Above is still of one of his videos, the one for Voki. The list to the left of the screen image is of individual training topics included in the video, so you can skip right to the information you want.

MakeUseOf.com comes through again. One of the top articles of the week this week was 5 Best Sites to Help Students Prepare for the SATs, and some of these sites would be good for students' general use as well.

I particularly like two of the math sites, both of which are FREE. PurpleMath is an algebra help site which also includes coverage of "preliminary topics" and has good textual explanations.

For video presentations of mathematics lessons, TV Math has directions similar to those which would be given by a teacher in the classroom and includes material from both general math and algebra. Each topic is available from multiple presenters, so students have some choice.

I also like the FREE vocabulary site, Vocab Test. Vocabulary for individual grade levels is included, and students can choose to "learn" before the take the "test" part of a particular word/prefix/suffix section. In addition, the site allows the user to create his/her own quiz.

Check the MakeUseOf article for information about and links to the other two sites it mentions.

Reading an old blog post on Edutopia, I was reminded of TeacherTube, a site I had looked at quite some time ago. This is a site for teachers to post videos (and docs, audio, and photos) for use by the educational community. The blog describes it this way:

...it's a place that takes advantage of what uploaded, shared video offers -- community, customization, sharing, creating, and learning from each other.
According to TeacherTube, community members can

• upload, tag, and share videos worldwide.
• upload support files to attach educational activities, assessments, lesson plans, notes, and other file formats to your video.
• browse hundreds of videos uploaded by community members.
• find, join, and create video groups to connect with people who have similar interests.
• customize the experience by subscribing to member videos, saving favorites, and creating playlists.
• integrate TeacherTube videos on Web sites using video embeds or application programming interfaces.
• make videos public or private; users can elect to broadcast their videos publicly or share them privately with those they invite.

 There are tutorials on a vast number of topics, from applications to using different technologies in the classroom. Videos are available which could be used to augment curricular materials. It was suggested by one commenter that since the videos download slowly sometimes, they could be downloaded ahead of time.

I think this looks like a great FREE resource for teachers, for both themselves and their students.