Tools for Teachers-Websites

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This website is a resource provided by the two sisters, Joan and Gail, who wrote The Daily 5 and CAFE. There are some free resources on the page that are extremely beneficial. However, the website does require a subscription that is worth your while. The website includes articles, blogs, and videos of the two sisters themselves teaching every lesson.

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This website it an excellent resource for language arts teachers. The Teachers College is associated with Columbia University in New York City, New York. "The goal of the Project is to support 'best practice' literacy instruction through research, writing and the professional development of teachers and school leaders." Lucy Calkins is the Project's director. This website has information for teachers on literacy, assessments, as well as information on their summer institutes. If you have not had the opportunity to go to one of their reading or writing summer institutes, I definitely recommend it! I went last summer and I hope to go again this summer! CLICK HERE to read some of the amazing information I learned from this experience!
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This website is a great resource for teachers. This website has printable resources for every subject, grade level, and holiday. The printables are everything from comprehension activities to holiday coloring pages to word searches. This is a great resource for quick sub plan activities to quick holiday activities. The website requires a membership (which can be shared between several colleagues (shhhh!) and is not very expensive. 
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This website contains a library of electronic books. The books are actual pieces of literature written by real authors. This website requires a subscription that our school purchased for our entire building. The students then take the code and can use this website at home. TumbleBooks reads the books out loud to children. The pictures move and the text is highlighted as each word is read. The students can listen to fluent readers who read with expression. TumbleBooks also includes comprehension quizzes and activities. A great resource!
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This website is an excellent literacy resource. Not only can you order books from the book orders for yourself and your classroom on this site, you can also you the "Book Wizard" function for free. The Book Wizard search allows teachers to type in an author or title of a book and find out what genre, level, and grade level that book fits. The website uses Lexile, DRA, and Guided Reading Level to level the books. It will also give an approximate grade level equivalent. It also categorizes the books by genre and theme, which can help you to organize your classroom library more specifically! If you decide to get your class going on book orders, it is TOTALLY worth it for you! I have received hundreds of free books from Scholastic just because my students order from the book orders. Scholastic also conveniently has a parent online ordering option so that parents can shop and order from home. For each parent that orders online, YOU earn $3 to spend for your classroom! This website is definitely worth checking out!
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This website is a great tool for teachers who have built up a large classroom library and need to organize what's in it, or even for teachers who are beginning to build up their libraries and want to stay organized. LibraryThing allows you to catalog your books. The first 200 books are free and the membership is super cheap ($25 for life!). This site also allows you to review books, discuss books with other people, and find people with similar book interests. The website states, "LibraryThing helps you create a library-quality catalog of books: books you own, books you've read, books, you'd like to read, books you've leant out..whatever grouping you'd like." This website allows you to create collections of books and search by different categories of books. This is great for you to easily be able to pull books from your library for unit projects, leveled readers, current events, read alouds, and much more!
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This website is an excellent literacy resource as well. This website requires a membership that is not cheap, but it is worth it. You can print out booklets for any level (A-Z!) on almost any subject. There are also running record assessments with both fluency and comprehension components that can be printed out. There is also a conversion sheet to convert the A-Z levels to guided reading levels, DRA, grade level equivalent, Lexile, etc. This website also includes books available on iTunes at different levels. CLICK HERE to see this list. 
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This website is a fantastic resource for you to use with your students during computer lab time! It is also something they can access from home. This website has an extended free trial for Michigan Teachers! To begin, you create an "avatar" of yourself. Basically a cartoon character of yourself. Your students can access your classroom Bitstrips site with a classroom code and their own password. Next, the students can put themselves into comics along with other characters they create and other avatars from students in your class. All of the comics are sent to you when the students "submit them" and you approve them before they are visible to the rest of the students. When you make them visible, students can comment on each other's comics. One of the best parts is that you can create "assignments" for the students to complete. For example, I gave my students the assignment that they needed to create a comic that showed examples of both "scarcity" and "opportunity cost" as an assessment for economics. The students did a great job! The kids love this and you will, too!
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  • Weebly: http://www.weebly.com
This website is a resource to help you make your own websites! This website you are at now was made by me through Weebly! Weebly is a free site and is so user friendly. I have used Weebly to create a professional teaching website, a classroom website, a book club website, and this website, My Teaching Toolbox! It is user friendly enough that older students would be able to use it. The best part is that it is creative, easy, and absolutely free!