Useful Information In and Out of the Classroom 12/25/09

Merry Christmas everyone!

Here are some interesting sites that I’ve found this week, thanks to my Personal Learning Network (PLN). As a teacher, I feel we have to keep up to date concerning research in our field and current issues in the education system. I hope some of these inspire you, inform you, and even have you asking questions. Thank you for coming by and visiting!

Dinosaurs - The Smithsonian Institute has a wonderful dinosaur site. There are links to dinosaur info, dinosaur collections and exhibits, and interactives. This is really worth checking out.

You Are Here – free website; “You are welcome to use the resources and activities on this site to teach kids about today’s marketplace. The site is intended for students in 5th through 8th grade and can be used to complement lessons in critical thinking, writing, language arts, media literacy, business, civics, and social studies.”

Cash Cab Quizzes – fun quizzes to use in the classroom.

Skype an Author Network – “The mission of the Skype an Author Network is to provide K-12 teachers and librarians with a way to connect authors, books, and young readers through virtual visits.”

City Data – “We've collected and analyzed data from numerous sources to create as complete and interesting profiles of all U.S. cities as we could.  We have over 74,000 city photos not found anywhere else, graphs of latest real estate prices and sales trends, recent home sales, home value estimator, hundreds of thousands of maps, satellite photos, stats about residents (race, income, ancestries, education, employment...), geographical data, state profiles, crime data, registered sex offenders, cost of living, housing, religions, businesses, local news links based on our exclusive technology, birthplaces of famous people, political contributions, city government finances and employment, weather, tornadoes, earthquakes, hospitals, schools, libraries, houses, airports, radio and TV stations, zip codes, area codes, air pollution, latest unemployment data, time zones, water systems and their health and monitoring violations, comparisons to averages, local poverty details, professionally written city guides, car accidents, fires, bridge conditions, cell phone and other towers, mortgage data, business storefront photos...”