Microsoft Office Tutorials

This site gives good tutorials for all the Microsoft Ofiice products, in particular MS Word 2007, PowerPoint 2007 and Excel 2007.

5th Grade Resources

This is a Understanding by Design unit that I created for 5^th grade students. This uniit. teaches students how to talk and share ideas with others on the internet. It also teaches them how to protect themselves as they visit sites requesting private identity information.

7th Grade Resources

People for TIME Magazine Project

Students in my 7^th grade class were creating TIME magazine covers and feature stories based on well known people who are helping to combat poverty. It was a good resource when students were choosing people to do research on.

7th Grade Blog

This is a blog that I set up for my 7^th grade students so that they could post their assignments and communicate with each other.  I got this idea from the Introduction to Educational Technology class  that I took at Fairfield University.

Site Reviews 

Social Studies on the Internet

Websites I reviewed from the book Social Studies on the Internet, are

The History Place

This is a great web site with photos, speeches and timelines. The white background on the pages makes the text and links easy to read. I like the fact that this web site has a menu bar on the left side which makes it easy for visitors to navigate to other pages on the site.  This site has updates with photo, and speech of the week. It’s a good supplement to history lessons

The Cybersmart Curriculum

This site is great for middle school students, in that it teaches safe and effective use of technology. The web site is very colorful and therefore would appeal to younger students. This web site uses tabs across the top of the page and a navigation menu at the bottom of the page, offering different options for navigating through the site.  What I find most attractive about this site are the very easy to follow lesson plans and the vast array of activity sheets.  Also, the added bonus is the internet safety posters that you can print from this site

NetSmartz

This is an interactive site which offers games, videos and music. The site is hosted by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and the Boys and Girls Clubs of America.  I would imagine that this site’s color and graphics would be appealing to younger students.  Not only is it a great site for kids to learn about internet safety but it is also a great place for parents and teachers to learn about the dangers of the internet. There are no links to outside web sites making navigation pleasant and safe for kids. IM, computer viruses and internet privacy are just some of the topics covered on this site. What better way to learn about these topics than through rap videos, puzzles and games.  Also, this site offers free stuff such as e-cards and computer wallpaper.

SafeKids

This site is a good resource for parents and teachers to learn about keeping kids safe on the Internet. The site includes articles on the issues of child safety and reviews of filtering software. Parents can download a Family Contract for Online Safety to be posted beside the family computer. A slide show based on the booklet "Child Safety on the Information Highway" is included.

HyperHistory Online

The home page contains a lot of information making the page cluttered and hard to read. The text is small and not easy to read.  You can use links on the timelines to find information about that time period.  There are too many different colors, in particular in the timeline section. It makes it confusing and hard to read.  The layout of this site takes getting used to but there is a lot of valuable which makes the reader’s efforts worthwhile. This is a good resource for history teachers and students.