Resources for Teachers

A to Z Teacher Stuff: This teacher-created site designed to help teachers find online resources more quickly and easily. Find lesson plans, thematic units, teacher tips, discussion forums for teachers, downloadable teaching materials & eBooks, printable worksheets and blacklines, emergent reader books, themes, and more.

ABCTeach Border Papers: Spice up your lessons with these templates for papers with fancy borders and themes.

ABCTeach Classroom Charts: Download and print several useful charts including assignment forms, award charts, calendars, reading logs, weekly planners, and more.

Adventures of CyberBee: Integrate the Internet into the classroom with excellent online resources found at this site.  Resources include: curriculum ideas, research tools, treasure hunts, webquests, web links, articles, and more.

AOL@School: Find resources by subjects for students in all grade levels.  There are also educational resources for teachers and administrators.

Authentic Assessment Toolbox: “a how-to hypertext on creating authentic tasks, rubrics and standards for measuring and improving student learning.”

Basic Steps in the Research Process: Part of the CRLS Research Guide this guide also gives students tip sheets.

Blue Web’n:  This site is “an online library of 1200+ outstanding Internet sites categorized by subject, grade level, and format (lessons, activities, projects, resources, references, & tools).” You can search by grade level, broad subject area, or specific subcategories.

Busy Teachers’ Web Site: “This Site is designed: to provide teachers with direct source materials, lesson plans/classroom activities with a minimum of site-to-site linking, and to provide an enjoyable and rewarding experience for the teacher who is learning to use the Internet.”

CEC Lesson Plans: Over 600 quality K-12 lesson plans can be found at this Columbia Education Center site.

Certificate Creator: Create an online certificate or search through their templates and print them out for your students.

Chico High School Library Helpful Bookmarks: A site of hundreds of links to topics of interest to high school students and educators.

Create a Welcome Brochure: At this simple to use site, create a brochure that will organize all your info for back to school, set student and parent expectations, and introduce yourself. Create a brochure that offers a readily available reference for parents to keep throughout the year.

Dr. LeBeau’s  HomePage: A resource for teachers, students and curious adults.

Easy Test Maker:  A free test making site for teachers (does require registration).  You can create multiple choice, fill in the blank, short answer, and true and false questions. You can also come back to edit your test at any time.

Education Index: This is an annotated guide to education-related sites on the Web.

Educational Hotlinks for Middle School People: Hosted by Kean University, "these websites have been chosen for their quality and special relevance for middle level educators.

Educational Portals and Starting Points: This site contains links to general education portals, thematic starting points, along with subject area and grade level portals.

Education World Lesson Plans: Find lesson plans submitted by other teachers at this site.

The Educator’s Reference Desk: This site has great links for educators in the areas of counseling, general education, librarianship, family life, teaching, technology, subject areas, and more.

EduHound: This site contains educational resources, lesson plans, clipart, worksheets, K-12, teacher websites including grants, webquests, classroom websites, school websites, homework, multimedia, technology tutorials, and an education newsletter.

Eleven Discipline Techniques for New Teachers: For a positive, well-managed classroom environment, try these tips for eleven techniques to focus on a discipline program right from the start of your teaching experience.

Enchanted Learning: This site “produces children’s educational web sites and games which are designed to capture the imagination while maximizing creativity, learning, and enjoyment.”

The First Days of Middle School: New middle school teachers will find a large resource at this site including tips for discipline, classroom management, suggestions for the first days of school, downloadable forms and letters links, and more.

FirstGov: Find links to sites related to our government on virtually any subject.

Five Common Mistakes in Writing Lesson Plans (and how to avoid them): Here are some suggestions on writing lesson plans and how to avoid making mistakes.

The Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM): “The key to one-stop, any-stop access to high quality lesson plans, curriculum units and other education resources on the Internet!”

Global Metric Time Service: Find out the time in over 1500 cities and towns, and across 237 countries.

The Global Schoolhouse: Find online opportunities for teachers to collaborate including more than 750 online collaborative projects.

Goodcharacter.com: Find lessons and resources for teaching character education on all three levels.

Graphic Organizers: A great site that shows how to apply graphic organizers.

Graphic Organizers: More than 30 graphic organizers can be printed from this site.

Graphic Organizers: Find printable graphic organizers at this site.

Graphic Organizers Overview: This site explains common graphic organizers.

Graphic Organizers:  This site contains a whole selection of various graphic organizers including an Inter-action Outline, and Anticipation/Reaction Guide, Chain of Events, Compare and Contrast, and the usual Venn diagrams.

Index Graphic Organizers: Find a wide variety of graphic organizers here with descriptions of each and tips on how and when to use them.  You will also find samples along with strategies and links.

The Issues: What Student Teachers Want: What do student teachers want to know? Follow these insights for valuable tips from former student teachers on how to make the most out of the experience, for both the supervising and the student teachers.

Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators: A categorized list of sites for educators with over 800 links including search engines, webquests and slide shows for computer training.

Landmarks for Schools: “One of the earliest educational websites on the Internet, Landmarks has served teachers since 1995 with links to teaching and learning resources on the Net and collaborative online projects.”

Learning Page: “Learning Page is a huge collection of professionally produced instructional material for you to download and print. Lesson plans, books, worksheets and much more can be found on the site.”

Lesson Planet: “Search from over 20,000 online lesson plans by keyword and grade!”  There are also links to clipart for teachers, online projects, webquests, and maps in the news.

LessonPlanz.com: This site is a searchable directory of free online lesson plans and lesson plan resources for all grades and subjects.

Library Spot: A free virtual library resource center for students and educators, librarians and parents.

McRel Lesson Plans: Contains hot links for educators organized by subject area.  Within each subject area are a lesson plan library and related resources.

Middle School Do's and Don'ts: Whether starting your year as a beginning teacher or returning as a veteran educator, try the tips here for excellent pointers on creating a valuable and successful middle school learning experience.

New Jersey Core Curriculum Content Standards for Career Education and Consumer, Family, and Life Skills

The New York Times Learning Network: A site for both students and teachers that feature articles for students, news summaries, news quizzes, puzzles, science Q & A, lesson plans, issues in depth, etc.

November Learning: The home page of Alan November, a promoter of the effective use of information and communication technologies that support and enhance learning for children and communities.

101(+) Teaching Tips: Find unique teaching tips written in my teachers to Dr. Kathie Nunley's web site for educators.

Onlinenewspapers.com: “Thousands of world newspapers at your fingertips.”

Personal Educational Press: “Create free educational worksheets such as flashcards, game boards, and quizzes to print directly from your browser.”

Project Based Learning: Create your own rubric using the templates by subject and grade level located on this site.

Puzzlemaker: Create your own puzzles and games for your class assignments.

Quia Web: Create activities, quizzes, games, surveys, and more!  Ideal for foreign language teachers and other classroom teachers.

Riverdeep:  Find educational links for educators, tech coordinators, and administrators.  Sign up for The Classroom Flyer, a daily email full of links and ideas for teachers.

Rubistar: Create your own rubric or view examples at this site.  There are also rubrics in Spanish.

Rubrics and Evaluation Resources: View general rubric templates as well as rubrics for multimedia projects.  Other links will give you bookmark management tips, critical thinking resources, etc.

Scholastic Network: This site has links appropriate for kids, teachers, and parents.

Secondary Assessment Tools: You will find all kinds of product, process, and reading/writing assessments.  Create your own assessment or look at other links for topics such as ESL assessment.

Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies: A site developed for educators which provides lesson plans, resources, media catalog, field trips and more.

Springfield Township High School Virtual Library (Joyce Valenza): Loads of links can be found at this site for both students and teachers.

Standards Locator: Find a handy reference here with national standards, or select your state for standards in each subject area.

Super Thinkers: “Our mission is to inspire creative problem solving, critical thinking, deductive reasoning, and logic.”  This fun and challenging site is targeted for students in grades 5 through 8.

TeacherTube: A site similar to YouTube but for teachers showcasing educational videos.

Teacher Xpress: “The education web all in one place for busy teachers.”

A Teacher’s Guide to Fair Use and Copyright: Find definitions, examples, charts, and further teaching tools to help you understand copyright rules for your classes.

Teachers Network: This portal contains links to a wealth of information for educators including lesson plans, videos, resources, professional development, and grant writing guidelines.

Teachers.net: Check out the lesson plans under resources but also find articles, free printables, educational website listed under library and more.

Teachnet.com: Provides lesson plans, how-to projects, and power tools for educators.  You can also sign up for a weekly e-mail newsletter.

Teach-nology: A web portal for educators that includes reviews of sites, teacher worksheets, downloads, rubrics and other teacher tools.  Request a teacher newsletter delivered by email.

Techniques that Backfire: New teachers often place their biggest fear in being able to successfully manage classroom discipline. Before you even enter the classroom, take note of these techniques that absolutely do not work.

TechTrekers: This great site for teachers includes sites from early elementary to high school, free stuff for teachers, history, math, and science sites, simulation sites, scavenger hunts, thematic units, virtual fieldtrips, webquests, PowerPoint ideas, rubrics, and web page tools.  Check it out!

ThinkQuest: Enroll in the Oracle ThinkQuest Education Foundation for competitions.  You can view their educational website links without enrolling.

ThinkQuest Library: This free educational resource features over 5,500 websites created by students around the world as part of a competition.

TQC Teacher Quality Collaborative: The home page for the University of South Carolina school collaborative programs.

Virtual Middle School Library: “Open 24 hours a day.”  Find web sites for students, resources for teachers and parents, a virtual wall calendar, daily newspapers and magazines, resources for school librarians and more.

Virtual Tours: Virtual Tours is a collection of tours for the world, museums, exhibits, points of special interest and the U.S. Government.

Warm-ups: Here is large list of improv games for your students to loosen up in any situation, work cooperatively, or use as icebreakers.

Web Worksheet Wizard: This site allows you to create your own worksheets or class exercises.  You can also download worksheets and forms created from other teachers.

WorldPages.com: A phone directory available through the Internet.

You Quote It, You Note It!: You can play this online plagiarism tutorial with your classes as a whole group, or let them play in small groups.

Activities for ESL students: Find over 1,000 quizzes, exercises and puzzles for ESL students.

Alpha Dictionary Language Directory: This site provides links of lexicon lists and dictionaries for over 240 languages.  Many of these sources translate words to or from English.

American Association of Teachers of French: Find out about this association, special events, and resources.

Dolch Word Flashcards: Download and print out flashcards on levels from pre-primer through 2^nd grade

English as a Second Language: Find teaching tips for ESL students that include games, activities, and additional links for information.

English Exercises Online: Find several online English exercises for beginning students of English.

ESL Bears: This multimedia-learning site was created by an ESL teacher to meet the needs of her first-year immigrant students.  The links and activities are appropriate for students from an entry level to intermediate level.

ESL Games and Quiz Corner: Find free games for your ESL students as well as printable sheets, quizzes, vocabulary and more.

ESL Lesson Plans and Class Activities: Find sites for 13 teaching resources which include lesson plans, handouts, teaching ideas, guides, games, and more for the ESL teacher.

The ESL Wonderland: This site offers activities, lesson plans, online resource links, and discussion forums for ESL teachers.

The Internet Picture Dictionary: This multilingual picture dictionary is designed especially for ESL students and beginning English, French, German, Spanish, and Italian language learners of all ages.

K-12 Foreign Language: This site for the foreign language department of the Fairfax county, Virginia, has lots of great links for foreign language teachers.

Merriam-Webster Visual Dictionary Online: "Explore the 15 major themes to access more than 6,000 images and see words like never before."

New Jersey Core Curriculum Content Standards for World Languages

Pizazz: This site offers many creative-writing activities. This is a resource for ESL teachers and all Language Arts teachers.

Quia Web: Create activities, quizzes, games, surveys, and more!  Ideal for foreign language teachers and other classroom teachers.

New Jersey Core Curriculum Content Standards for Comprehensive Health & Physical Education

PE Central: Find lesson ideas and other links at this site for physical education and health.

Sports Rules: This site is “intended to be a concise reference guide, containing easy to understand explanations of the rules and guidelines of many sports.”  Choose from more than 30 sports.

Book Report Ideas: Find dozens of ideas for exciting, hands-on literary projects.

Carol Hurst’s Children’s Literature Site: “This is a collection of reviews of great books for kids, ideas of ways to use them in the classroom and collections of books and activities about particular subjects, curriculum areas, themes and professional topics.”

CyberGuides: Find teacher guides and student activities on core works of literature for all grade levels.

The Children’s Literature Web Guide: “Internet resources related to books for children and young adults.”

Database of Award-Winning Children’s Literature: Search for award-winning children’s books (K-12) by age of reader, genre, time period, and more.

International Children’s Digital Library: “Explore the fun – read 324 free children books online…”

Innovative Teaching Newsletter :English Resources: A newsletter linking a number of great English sites.

It’s Up To You, Gumshoe!: Find facts from the early years of mystery to the present, the history of mystery, and a mystery scavenger hunt.

Language Arts Curriculum Resource and Guide: Specifically written for middle school English teachers—a huge resource for implementing and maintaining an effective instruction strategy.

Learning with Mysteries: You will find lesson plans and resources for using mysteries to teach critical thinking, writing, and literature.  For grades 7-12.

More Ideas Than You’ll Ever Use For Book Reports: This site contains a large collection of book report ideas.

New Jersey Core Curriculum Content Standards for Language Arts Literacy

100 Things to do with Books: Find creative suggestions for responses to literature with suggestions listed at this site.

Pizazz: This site offers many creative-writing activities. This is a resource for ESL teachers and all Language Arts teachers.

Poetry Spotlight: Find ideas for poetry lessons at this site developed by a teacher.

Project Gutenberg: This site contains the Internet’s oldest producer of FREE electronic books.  Find the complete text of books published before 1923.

Reading Rockets: Launching Young Readers: “Explore this web site to find out how you can launch a child into a bright future with reading strategies that work…”

ReadingLady.com: A great site for language arts teachers in the elementary level although some of the suggestions can be used in middle school.  Find author studies, math, poetry, Readers Theater scripts, comprehension, and much more.

30 Days of Poetry: Find thirty lesson plans for writing poetry, middle to high school level, following formats designed to allow fun, creativity, and enjoyment in student work.

Virtual Poetry Workshop: This site provides you with 18 exercises to practice poetry.  You can read poems others have submitted and comment on them in the Forum section.

Visuwords: An online graphical dictionary where you can look up words to find their meanings and associations with other words and concepts.

Wacky Web Tales: This creative and interactive site are for kids, in grades 3 and above, who love Mad Libs.  Students can pick from one of over 20 different tales and fill in the requested parts of speech.  They can then see how their answers were used to create a really wacky story!

Web English Teacher: “Web English Teacher presents the best of K-12 English/Language Arts teaching resources: lesson plans, WebQuests, videos, biography, e-texts, criticism, jokes, puzzles, and classroom activities.”

Writer's Resource Center: Poets and other writers will find many resources here including articles on advanced literary forms.

Advanced Book Exchange: Here you can request a book or out of print book, have them make a search, and receive a price quote.

ALA Great Web Sites for Kids: Excellent web sites that are recommended by the ALA including links to the Caldecott Medal, the Newbery Medal and other literature lists.

ALA Especially for Young People and Their Parents: This page includes links to online safety rules and suggestions, designed-for-children search engines, all ALA great sites, and other great sites for parents and young people.

BCCLS: This is the Bergen County Cooperative Library System site.  You can search for library materials in 73 public libraries in New Jersey’s Bergen, Essex, Hudson, and Passaic counties.

Book Reviews by Frederick Muller: Find Fred’s reviews of middle school book reviews for librarians.

BookFinder.com: A meta search engine for finding new, used, or out of print books.

BookHive: “Your guide to children’s literature and books.”

The Booklist Center: “The Web’s largest collection of book lists.”

Bookseller Directory (by Specialty): A wonderful collection of links for book collectors looking for out of print books. This site is worth browsing.

Booktalk Resources: Links to great sites dealing with book talks.  Check out the PowerPoint in the list.

Curriculum Roles and Responsibilities of Library Media Specialists: by Robert E. Berkowitz and Michael B. Eisenberg.

CyberGuides: Find teacher guides and student activities centered on core works of literature for grades K-12.

Dewey Decimal Classification System: A listing of all the Dewey numbers and headings.

Doug Johnson: Smart Starts @ Your Library Media Center: Find articles on technology and the library profession from this writer, speaker and consultant.

The Educator’s Reference Desk: This site has great links for educators in the areas of counseling, general education, librarianship, family life, teaching, technology, subject areas, and more.

Infolink: This is the site for the Eastern New Jersey Regional Library Cooperative.

Information Skills Curriculum: Find links on this topic and others.

International Children’s Digital Library: “Explore the fun – read 324 free children books online…”

Internet School Library Media Center: Visit sites of possible interest to librarians and teachers in the electronic library.

It’s Up To You, Gumshoe!: Find facts from the early years of mystery to the present, the history of mystery, and a mystery scavenger hunt.

JerseyClicks: “New Jersey’s one stop library gateway to quality information.” This site will search all of the New Jersey statewide databases simultaneously.  These include databases from EBSCO, Gale, Facts on File, and Reference USA.

Librarians and Library Science: A portal for librarians with over 700 links on anything you need to know about books, electronic resources, etc., including all school levels.

Librarians@Random: Find booktalks, booklists, awards, information of authors and illustrators and more.

Librarians’ Index to the Internet (Education, Librarianship, & Libraries): Find sites related to these topics through this web directory.

The Library of Congress: “Get it Online…Words, Pictures & Sound”.  Look at US history & culture, world culture & resources, Thomas Legislative information, exhibitions, and more.

Library Research Service- School Library Impact Studies: Find school library impact studies done by Dr. Keith Curry Lance.

LibraryInstruction.Com: “The Librarian’s Weapon of Mass Instruction.” Find lesson plans, articles about library instruction, and links to library instruction resources.

Morris Automated Information Network M.A.I.N. Web Catalog: Search the online catalog of the Morris County Library network which is a consortium of 36 public libraries.

Muller In the Middle: A blog on middle school library book reviews by Fred Muller.

Multimedia and Internet @ Schools: “The Media and Technology Specialists’ Guide to Electronic Tools and Resources for k-12 Education.”

Nancy Keane's Booktalks Quick and Simple: Lists of book talks from preschool through young adult.

New Jersey Association of School Librarians: The official NJASL page.

New Jersey Statewide Reference Center: Connect to this site to use their virtual reference desk.

No Cookies in the Library: Much to the chagrin of a temperamental librarian, Sesame Street's Cookie Monster can't seem to comprehend that libraries don't have cookies or other edibles.

A Pathfinder for Constructing Pathfinders: “This page is designed to guide you to resources for constructing online pathfinders of your own.”

Pathfinders: Examples of pathfinders from Media Specialist Joyce Valenza at Springfield Township High School Virtual Library.

PBS TeacherSource: This site provides a number of resources for library media specialists including free MARC records for PBS programming that you tape off the air.

QandANJ.org: Got a question?  Get a live answer online with this FREE interactive search assistance on the web by a network of experienced New Jersey Librarians.  This network offers free live, interactive search assistance to New Jersey residents 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  The New Jersey Library Network sponsors this site.

Quotable Quotes About Libraries: An ALA site listing library quotes.

Read Across America: This site contains activities for your library on all levels.

Resources for School Librarians: This site contains comprehensive resources for school librarians.

S.O.S. For Information Literacy: "A virtual idea factory dedicated to helping educators find motivating ways of teaching information literacy skills to children!"

School Librarian Wiki: LM_NET wiki for school librarians.

School Library Journal Online: A professional site with articles and many links for the school librarian.