Links for Teachers


Preparation
The San Jose State University Department of English: Information on Earning a Single-Subject Credential

The San Jose State University College of Education

How to Become a Teacher: San Jose State University College of Education Guidelines

ERIC Digests Index Page:  The latest update to the ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center) Digest database features 43 full-text short reports aimed at education professionals and the broader education community. Each report includes an overview of an education topic of current interest and offers references for further information.  Sample titles include: "Gender Issues in Children's Literature," "Urban After-School Programs: Evaluations and Recommendations," "Guidelines for Evaluating Web Sites," and "Meeting the National Standards: Now What Do I Do?"  Users can search the entire ERIC Digests database from the index page. ERIC, part of the National Library of Education (NLE), is a nationwide education information system sponsored by the US Department of Education's Office of Educational Research and Improvement (from The Internet Scout Report).


Credentialing and Testing
Teaching Credential, Subject Matter Competence, and Supplementary Authorization Information
                    for elementary, secondary and specialist teachers

The California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, California Department of Education

California Student Aid Commission: financial assistance for prospective teachers

The California Basic Educational Skills Test (CBEST) Homepage: The latest CBEST testing
                    information from National Evaluation Systems, Inc.

MSAT and PRAXIS Testing Information

Reading Instruction Competence Assessment (RICA) Homepage


The Job Market
Santa Clara County Office of Education

CalTeach: The Interactive Recruitment Network of the State of California

Statewide Ed-Join: Online Education Job Opportunities Network for the state of California

School District and School Information: searchable A-Z list of every school and district
                in the state of California

EduTech Online Education Employment Search
 


Lesson Plans and Guides
 

K-8 Kids Place: Developed by Houghton Mifflin, this site contains a number of helpful online educational, interactive materials for students from kindergarten to 8th grade. The Web site is divided into three main sections: School Books, Games, and Brain Power. In School Books, students have the ability to pick
from a number of activities ranging from spelling quizzes, mathematic skills reviews, and reading activities for grades 1 through 6. Several of the activity areas here are also available in Spanish. The Brain Power section contains a number of activities designed to challenge and hone the analytic and problem-solving abilities of young people. The questions are geared for students in grades 3 through 8, and an archive containing the previous three week's questions is available for perusal. The Games section features four different activities, including Fake Out! -- where students guess the definition of a word and also have the ability to submit their own fake definitions. Additionally, Houghton Mifflin has placed a statement online regarding its commitment to protecting the privacy of children using the site (from the Internet Scout Report).

Reading a-z: A Complete Online Reading Program:  A project of LearningPage.com, Reading a-z provides educators with over 150 downloadable guided reading books to help children become more proficient readers. The site also contains over 212 lessons plans, over 500 worksheets, and over 200 flash cards to help teach alphabetic principle, phonemic awareness, and sound/symbol relationships. Although there is an annual subscription fee, viewers currently have free access to 28 sample books, along with their accompanying worksheets and lesson plans  (from the Internet Scout Report).

The Hot Potatoes site offers six applications, enabling you to create interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises for the World Wide Web.

The M-Tech Worksheet Generator: Creates printable worksheets; allows you to make word/letter scramble, matching, and fill in the blanks exercises.


Multicultural Resources

Children and Technology
700+ Great Sites--ALA:  The American Library Association's Children and Technology Committee of the Association for Library Service to Children has compiled a collection of more than 700 sites for children and their parents and teachers. The site is basically composed of two collections of annotated links. The first, Sites for Children, contains seven sections, including Literature and Language, People Past and Present, Planet Earth and Beyond, Science and Technology, and Arts and Entertainment. The other half of the site is aimed at adults who work with kids. It includes sites for parents and caregivers, home schooling families, educators, and sites about children's literature, storytelling, and puppetry. All of the selected sites have passed the ALSC CTC's selection criteria, which are also provided to help users of all ages analyze and evaluate sites they find on their own (from the Internet Scout Report).  

Early Childhood Technology Literacy Project: This site from the Montgomery County Public Schools is designed to help parents, teachers, specialists, and instructional assistants "integrate technology into instruction and increase early childhood students' skills in reading and writing." The site offers highly integrated and professional materials for teaching early childhood reading, including lesson plans, training resources, suggested software, resources to help parents, links, and additional pertinent materials. The entire site is searchable. Funded by the Technology Literacy Challenge Fund, the Literacy Project (of which the Website is only a part) appears to be a model of how technology, and the Internet in particular, can be applied to very specific educational aims (from the Internet Scout Report).

Internet Resources for Children:  ERIC Clearinghouse on Information & Technology (ERIC/IT), hosted by the Information Institute at Syracuse University, has released a new publication on Internet resources for children. This site provides links to some of the best educational resources available online and describes over 50 high quality, (mostly) annotated Internet resources for children in grades K-8. Categories include art, current events, health, history, literature, math, science, and more (from the Internet Scout Report). 

FunBrain.com: Kids Center:  Seventeen fun, Web-based educational games are on Funbrain.com's Numbers site. The games cover basic arithmetic, fractions, graphs, algebra, and many other topics. Math Baseball is the most popular game on the site, which awards singles, doubles, or triples depending on the difficulty of the question. All of the games have varying levels of difficulty, ranging from easy to "Super Brain." There is even an activity where the user spells the words of a number written on a check (but you might want to hide this one until your child gets a little older). Sections for parents and teachers are also on the site; so, there are plenty of resources for everyone (from the Internet Scout Report). 

ClassBrain's State Reports: This amazingly impressive site by ClassBrain, Inc. provides valuable educational resources for students, parents, and teachers. The site is equipped with various learning activities and games for students ranging from grade levels Pre-K to 12. In addition, this site contains information on world countries and US states. Both the country and state reports are arranged in alphabetical order and provide data on history, statistics, maps, geographical information, government, economy, and much more. This site is a breath of fresh air for those parents and teachers discouraged by the plethora of untactful Internet sites currently accessible to children (from the Internet Scout Report).

Kim Champagne's Social Studies Homepage - A Teacher's Aid for Integrating Technology: Champagne, a Social Studies teacher at South River High School in Edgewater, Maryland, created this site as a resource for Social Studies teachers wanting to integrate technology into their classrooms. The site currently contains eighteen lessons in four categories: American Government, Law and the Individual, United States History, and World Civilization. Some sample lessons include How a Bill Becomes a Law, An Introduction to Law using the Internet, 19th Century American Imperialism, and Using Microsoft Excel to Make Social Studies Charts. In addition, the site offers several resources for teacher self-education, including a PowerPoint lesson and an Internet guide (from the Internet Scout Report).



Literature for Children
Database of Award-winning Children's Literature:  Lisa M. Bartle, reference/user education librarian at the Lima Regional Campus of Ohio State University, compiled and indexed this database of award-winning children's literature. Parents, teachers, and older children can access high quality book titles via keyword or phrase searching, or by using a form to indicate reading level, genre, language, historical period, gender of the protagonist, and ethnicity of the protagonist, among other elements.  Books listed have been recognized with awards ranging from the Caldecott Award to ALA Notable Books for Children to the Coretta Scott King Award, to name a few. Honorable mentions are also included (from the Internet Scout Report).

Children's Literature Activities Index

A Collection of Web Sites and Online Resources for Teachers

The Children's Literature Web Guide

Children's Literature Resources from the Fairrosa Cyber Library

Children's Literature and Language Arts Resources from the Internet School Media Library Center

A Selective Guide to Reference Books in Children's Literature

The Newbery Classroom Homepage

Picturing Books: a Web Site about Picture Books

The Center for the Study of Books in Spanish for Children and Adolescents (CSBS)

The Internet Public Library Youth Division

Reading About Children's Literature: a bibliography of criticism compiled by Perry Nodelman

Kay Vandergrift's Children's Literature Page

PBS TeacherSource: ideas for teachers from Public Television, includes resources for high school literature and humanities

K-12 Resources from Random House

Teachers' Guides from Penguin

K-12 Teachers' Guides from HarperCollins
 
 

Literature for Young Adults
 
A Collection of Web Sites and Online Resources for Teachers

The Center for the Study of Books in Spanish for Children and Adolescents (CSBS)

The Internet Public Library Teen Division

Reading About Children's Literature: a bibliography of criticism compiled by Perry Nodelman

Kay Vandergrift's Young Adult Literature Page

A Young Adult Literature Bibliography

A Guide to Using Young Adult Problem Fiction and Non-Fiction To Produce Critical Readers

K-12 Resources from Random House

Teachers' Guides from Penguin

K-12 Teachers' Guides from HarperCollins

A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust

Gary Soto: A Teacher's Resource File

SCORE Teacher's Guide to Gary Soto's Short Stories

SCORE Teacher's Guide to Natalie Babbitt

A site devoted to Mark Twain from the University of Virginia

Mark Twain and American Humor.  From the NEH's EDSITEment: uncover the sources of Twain's comic genius in American traditions of dialect humor and literary satire.

Huck Finn in Context, from PBS TeacherSource

A Poetry Unit for High School Teachers

Can You Haiku?  From the NEH's EDSITEment: students learn the rules and conventions of haiku, study examples by Japanese masters, and create haiku of their own.

I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Someone a Letter.  Using EDSITEment's vast online resources, you and your students read the correspondence of the famous, the infamous, and the ordinary and use these letters as a starting point for discussion of and practice in the conventions and purposes of letter writing.

The Favorite Poem Project Site: sponsored by Public Television, includes poetry lesson plans and a page of poems by teens

PBS TeacherSource: ideas for teachers from Public Television, including Arts & Literature ideas and activities.

A Guide to Teaching With Movies

Resources for Teaching Shakespeare

Mr. William Shakespeare and the Internet: Probably the most complete directory of Shakespeare resources on the internet. This is an excellent place to start a search for materials on any Shakespearean topic.
"Webspeare": resources for high school teachers and students, includes curricular materials and lots of fun stuff (like a guide to learning to speak with an Elizabethan accent)
"Chill with Will": a site dedicated to helping high school students learn to love Shakespeare
Surfing With the Bard: Links to other Shakespeare resources on the Internet, including a special section devoted to Hamlet. Written by a teacher for teachers.
A Shakespeare site put together by high school students in Illinois
The Complete Works of Shakespeare
The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
The Folger Shakespeare Library's Guide to Teaching Shakespeare for grades K-12.
Mr. William Shakespeare and the Internet:  a complete annotated guide to the scholarly Shakespeare resources available on Internet, that includes critical, historical and biographical information and a Shakespeare Timeline, which gives the key events of Shakespeare's life and work along with related documentary evidence, a chart showing the relevant family relationships and dates.
The Shakespeare Classroom: includes resources about Shakespeare, study questions for the plays, and information about filmed versions of the plays,
 
A Romeo and Juliet Unit
A Romeo and Juliet Web Guide for Grade 9
The Romeo and Juliet Theme Page: links to curricular materials and instructional resources
"You Kiss by the Book."  From the NEH's EDSITEment: learn how Shakespeare used the sonnet tradition to enhance his stagecraft by performing a scene from Romeo and Juliet.

An In-Depth Analysis of Macbeth
A Guide to Enjoying Macbeth
An online Macbeth Guide

An online Othello Guide
Another online Othello Guide that includes lesson plans and some readings
 

A Guide to Enjoying Hamlet
A Short Course on Hamlet
The Hamlet Navigator Page: basic, but useful for beginners
SCORE's Guide to Hamlet