Educational Internet Websites

By Peggy Steffens

Here are some excellent educational websites and tools available for teachers and students.  Try these out and see how you might use them with your curriculum.

Read Write Think Student Tools -  provides an excellent collection of interactive activities that target literacy skills for all grades.  Read Write Think is an excellent site with standards-based reading and language arts materials.  This part of the site provides engaging tools you can use to supplement your lessons to support literacy instruction.
http://readwritethink.org/student_mat/index.asp

National Geographic Podcasts - National Geographic provides audio and video podcasts for students and teachers. You can download the latest nature and science news, view amazing photography, listen to audio travel guides, view wild animal adventures and much more.
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/podcasts

Information Fluency Tutorials – provides an excellent collection of tutorials and practice challenges to help students attain mastery of 21^st century information fluency skills. The tutorials are designed to take 10-15 minutes. Many of the modules contain audio and/or video segments to communicate key concepts.  They have modules to help students evaluate web sites for bias and accuracy, perform effective searches, learn about plagiarism, search the deep web and much more.
http://21cif.imsa.edu/tutorials/

Thumbstacks – this site provides an easy-to-use online presentation creator tool. You or your students can make slideshows or outlines using your web browser and then share the presentations with anyone, anywhere, just by sending them the link.  This is a great alternative to PowerPoint and helps students work on their 21^st century communication skills.
http://thumbstacks.com/ 

Read Please – Read Please has a free version of their software that reads any text on the computer screen.  It is an all purpose text-to-speech software that can be beneficial in a variety of learning environments.
http://www.readplease.com/