Greetings! Here’s the second part of this series on free multidisciplinary lesson plan and lesson planning sites available to students, teachers, and education workers. Subsequent editions will highlight sites focused on single or narrowly defined academic disciplines. Here we go… LessonPlanz is a searchable directory of free online lesson plans and lesson plan resources for all grades and subjects. Hotchalk’s Lesson Plans Page bills itself as "lesson plans by teachers for teachers" where you will find more than 4,000 lesson plans on pretty much all subjects, all classroom tested. The University of North Carolina’s LearnNC contains several hundred lesson plans that span the wide range of curriculum areas for every grade from K to 12 created by North Carolina educators to sync with US state and national standards. LessonPlanSearch is a site containing more than 1400 lesson plans on subjects ranging from cooking to technology to media studies. Suite101 is a general sharing site that includes a wide variety of sharing streams driven by the interests of its users… including lesson plans. Lesson Plans and Teaching Strategies from CalState Northridge is a fairly large clearinghouse of lesson plan links and resource links. While there is a lot of good stuff here, it hasn’t been updated recently and some of the links are broken. The Teacher’s Corner isn’t a place to go when you’re bad, far from it. Rather it’s a place to go for lesson plans, worksheets, and other useful resources. BetterLesson (I’ve been a member for years) is a browsable database of over a million lesson plans and resources on practically any subject imaginable. OERCommons (Open Educational Resources) is a searchable collection of public domain resources such as lesson plans, projects, and classroom activities that align to US Common Core standards. OK. That’s it for Part 2 of the Lesson Plan Edition. Tune in later this week for Part 3.   The post Web 2.0 Weekly: Lesson Plan Edition - Part 2 appeared first on Many Pebbles, One Pond.

Greetings, and welcome to Part 3 of my series on lesson planning, and lesson plan sharing resources out there on the interwebs. In this edition I’m still wading through the plethora of multidisciplinary lesson plan websites available to educators. A couple of issues down the line, I’ll be examining single discipline or narrowly define lesson plan and resource sites. Here we go… ReadWriteThink is an all around great educational site with more resources than you can shake a stick at. Here you’ll find a large lesson plan bank, interactives, videos, tutorials, PD opportunities, and more. Their lesson plan and resource bank covers all grade levels and subjects. One of the best sources of educational material out there is the US Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). They’ve been creating useful resources for teachers since before I was born (I remember my kindergarten teacher using PBS shows in class and that was in 1965) so they’ve pretty much got it down by now. PBSLearningMedia is one of a host of sites operated by PBS with an aim to assist educators. The site contains learning resources, lesson plans, activities, and videos across all grade levels and most subjects. You can use 3 without registering, but registration is free in any case. Curriki is another site I’ve belonged to for years. Once run by a consortium lead by NorTel (remember them?) Curriki survived their demise through sponsorship by Oracle and ATT. In any case, Curriki has over 300,000 members who have contributed and shared over 50,000 educational resources for every subject under the rainbow. One of the best features is that you’ll find educational resources here in a variety of languages. LessonWriter is a bit different. LessonWriter is a lesson plan creation platform that also lets users share the lessons they’ve created. Do note that this is a freemium site but the basic free level is serviceable for most needs. K2.0ALT is an interesting collaboration site that bills itself in the following terms: "collaborate, dialogue, engage in lesson study and creation, and acquire content-specific PD all at the touch of a button through Virtual Communities of Practice." Ranking up there with PBS as a source of high quality educational resources is the BBC. BBCSchools: Knowledge and Learning is a centralized portal for scads of educational resources. While it by no means exhausts the cornucopia of excellent educational sites created by the BBC, it is an excellent place to start exploring what they have to offer. My last offering this time out is TeachBuzz. TeachBuzz "serves as a global community of educators creating, sharing, rating, and using lessons online. Designed by teachers, the lessons are searchable" by age, grade, subject, and uniquely by duration. You can also filter results by "special needs", or "developing world" That’s all for this missive. Check in later in the week for Part 4 of my series on lesson planning resources.   The post Web 2.0 Weekly: Lesson Plan Edition Part 3 appeared first on Many Pebbles, One Pond.

Greetings, and welcome to the Lesson Plan Edition Part 4. Here I’ll continue my exploration of the cornucopia of sites designed primarily for finding, creating, and sharing lesson plans, printables, worksheets ready to use in the classroom in all disciplines. In subsequent editions I’ll explore lesson plan sites dedicated to a narrow range of disciplines or single subjects. Teachers Printables is devoted to provided free printable worksheets. These cover a wide range of class managements topics ranging from seating plans to homework forms, from signup sheets to rubric and lesson plan templates. As well, you can find blackline masters for a variety of maps, flags, and some for maths. At AtoZTeacherStuff you can find lesson plans, thematic units, downloadable teaching materials, printable worksheets and blackline masters, emergent reader books, themes, and more. Most items are geared to the elementary school level. PlanBoard is more than just a lesson plan web app. Essentially, it takes the place of the teacher’s not so little Red Book: the day planner. Once you register, it takes about 5- 10 minutes to set up your classes. Once that’s done you can search for or create new lesson plans, and slot them into your calendar. You can quickly align daily lessons with provincial or state standards using the onboard standards bank (you’ll be surprised how many different jurisdictions are included). This is the sort of app I wish I’d had when I started teaching, and definitely one to use when getting ready for the next performance appraisal. 42Explore is a nifty site that is sort of like a webquest repository but slightly different. While not exactly lesson plans, each topic provides "four to explore": links that provide you (or your students) information, definitions, links, and other resources. Last up for this missive is Share My Lesson. Conjointly operated by the American Federation of Teachers and the Times Education Supplement, Share My Lesson pledges that their users will be able to download user-generated content free for ever, which is a pretty nice thing to see up front. The site contains nearly 300,000 ready to use teacher resources covering all grade levels and all subjects. Good stuff. Well, that’s it for the fourth installment of my Lesson Plan Edition. Check back in a couple of days for Part 5 wherein I’ll start sharing subject specific lesson plan sites gleaned from my archive of over 5000 educational resource sites.   The post Web 2.0 Weekly: Lesson Plan Edition Part 4 appeared first on Many Pebbles, One Pond.

Greetings and welcome to Part 5 of the Lesson Plan Edition. In what follows, I’ll be looking at subject specific lesson plan sites. This list is by no means exhaustive. I intend here merely to give you a flavour of what’s out there and sample the wide range of lesson plan sites I’ve archived over the last few years. 21st Century Skills The Gateway contains a variety of educational resource types from activities and lesson plans to online projects to assessment items all with a focus on developing "21st century skills". History The US Library of Congress’s Classroom Materials site contains ready-to-use materials to provide easy ways to incorporate the Library’s unparalleled primary sources into instruction. All materials available here were created by teachers for teachers. Children in History is a unique site examining history from the role children have played in it. The site features not only a variety of excellent primary sources but an array of teaching modules to take your students through an exploration of children in history in different cultures and civilizations. Media Literacy The American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the same group that brings us the Oscars) has developed a series of teacher’s guides that explore the art and science of motion pictures. "The activities are designed to capitalize on students’ natural interest in current films and the excitement generated by the Academy Awards to teach valuable lessons in critical thinking and creative writing, and to develop visual literacy skills. Each teaching guide is available in its entirety to download and print." Life Skills LifeDojo perhaps stretches the definition of lesson planning a bit but I thought it still worthwhile to bring to your attention. LifeDojo is a series of behaviour modification apps "designed to inspire, educate, and reliably improve health & life outcomes." Worth a look see. STEM PBS’s Nature hosts an extensive catalogue of support materials (including videos, lesson plans, and teacher guides) in the biology and environmental studies. The site is searchable by grade level, topic, and animal. The Science Spot is jam packed with lesson plans, interactives, class starters, projects, and activities. A great starting point for teaching resources in the sciences. OK. I am, at last, going to bring an end to this EP 5 Part excursion into sources of lesson plans on the interwebs.  Remember it wasn’t meant to be exhaustive and is just a sampling of the over 5000 web resources in my archive. I hope you found it useful. Check back in a couple days for an edition on new sites I’ve found in the last couple of weeks.     The post Web 2.0 Weekly: Lesson Plan Edition - Part 5 appeared first on Many Pebbles, One Pond.

Greetings all! Over the next week or so I’ll be publishing a 5 part edition devoted exclusively to Geography. Hope you enjoy… here we go. Map of life - an online resource for mapping, monitoring and analyzing biodiversity worldwide Submarine Cable Map 2014 - check out this contemporary map of every major underwater cable. I love this one as my great-great grandfather helped lay the very first transatlantic cable. Mapillary | Crowdsourced Street View - Mapillary consists of a smartphone app, a website, and an API. With the app, you can take street level photos of roads, bike paths, buildings, and other areas relevant for mapping. These photos are uploaded to Mapillary’s servers where they are processed and then put on a map. 40 maps that explain the world - from the Washington Post comes this very clever (and sometimes not quite appropriate for school) series of eye-opening maps. 40 more maps that explain the world - Washington Post does it again with another collection of very clever series of maps that reframe your perspective on a variety of subjects. Where The Streets Have Your Name - Now With Places And Things, Too! -  Just enter your name and locate every street in the world that shares it Global Forest Watch - a dynamic online forest monitoring and alert system that empowers people everywhere to better manage forests. For the first time, Global Forest Watch unites satellite technology, open data, and crowdsourcing to guarantee access to timely and reliable information about forests. Jauntful - Create shareable, printable guides to the cities you love Atlas Obscura | Curious and Wondrous Travel Destinations - the weird, the astonishing, the freaky, and curious. Mapfaire - create any kind of map, for business, education, or pleasure. Natural Earth - Free vector and raster map data at 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110m scales 40 Maps They Didn’t Teach You In School | Bored Panda - OK this one is just plain fun… fun with maps. MapFight - visually compare country sizes earth wind map - real time visualization of global wind patterns EOSDIS Worldview (Alpha) - interactively browse global, full-resolution satellite imagery and then download the underlying data. Most of the 100+ available products are updated within three hours of observation, essentially showing the entire Earth as it looks "right now". illustreets.co.uk - an interactive map of the UK by standard of living and crime rate. Includes detailed information about each point on the map; just click and read. OK. That’s it for Part 1 of this Extended Play Geography Edition of Web 2.0 Weekly. Check back soon for Part 2 The post Web 2.0 Weekly: Geography Resources Edition Part 1 appeared first on Many Pebbles, One Pond.

Greetings! Welcome to Part 2 of this extended play edition of Web 2.0 Weekly all about free Geography Resources out there on the Web. Whilst fairly comprehensive, this list is by no means exhaustive and is meant as a sampling of the over 5000 educational resources available in my archive. Hope you enjoy… ArcGIS Explorer Online - rich client for using, creating and sharing ArcGIS maps online. ArcGIS Explorer Online requires Microsoft Silverlight Measuring and Mapping Space: Geographic Knowledge in Greco-Roman Antiquity. How ancient societies understood and visualized the world — from their immediate surroundings to the edges of their empires and beyond — provides a unique perspective on their political and cultural values and philosophy, as well as demonstrating their mathematical and scientific expertise. Oceans - Views - Google Maps - interactive oceanic explorer from Google, features coastlines, wrecks, and much more. Rising Seas - Interactive: If All The Ice Melted - The maps here show the world as it is now, with only one difference: All the ice on land has melted and drained into the sea, raising it 216 feet and creating new shorelines for our continents and inland seas. Flood Inundation Mapper - for the continental United States from the US Geological Survey Map Stack - Assemble a selection of different map layers like backgrounds, satellite imagery, terrain, roads or labels! Photoshop-like controls like colors, masks, opacity and brightness to make a map your own! Share your map with a link or Pinterest or Tumblr! Where is…? A geolocation game backpacker-adventure-club.de Find given cities on the Google Map and be as accurately as possible since precision will result in points in the end Map Adventures - Index - online lesson plans from the US Geological Survey Introduction to Topographic Maps - how topographic maps are created, what information they contain, how you can use them with a compass to get where you want to go, and how to measure the relative positions of points of interest. Topographic Maps - 27 Ideas for teaching about topopgraphic maps from the US Geological Survey. Map your Recipe - enter a recipe and find out where the ingredients came from. Excellent use of googlemaps The map as history :a multimedia atlas of world history with animated historical maps - on-line collection of animated historical maps The British Library: Geo-referencing - locate and view over 30,000 items from the British Library using this nifty georeferencing tool. Do a Map - easy to use map creation, markup, and sharing platform Flood Map Water Level Elevation Map - just what the title says! mapBattle - you’re asked a question. Find the answer using GoogleMaps. GeoGuessr - Let’s explore the world! - a very clever geography game wherein the user hops globally from place to place via Google Streetview. GeoSettr  - Create your own GeoGuessr challenge by choosing five locations on Google Street View EarthPulse, Maps, Global Trends, Human Impact - National Geographic - EarthPulse explores global connections with vivid and informative imagery, maps, diagrams, and interactives that illuminate where we are today, how we got here, and how our actions may affect the future of life on Earth. World Map, Map of the World - interactive geography, and statistical data There we go for part 2. Tune in again a couple of days for Part 3 of this Geography resources edition. The post Web 2.0 Weekly: Geography Resources Edition Part 2 appeared first on Many Pebbles, One Pond.

Here is a webmix of some of the Maths resources from my presentation at OAME 2014 in Toronto. The post Web 2.0 Weekly: Maths Resources for OAME 2014 appeared first on Many Pebbles, One Pond.

Greetings all! Here’s part three of my Geography Resource Edition. I hope you find it useful. Map Treasure Hunt - Provide as many questions (clues) and answers (locations) as you like to create a virtual ‘treasure hunt’. When finished you can save the game and share it with others. Players use each clue to collect the ‘coins’ that appear in each of your secret location Maps: Tools for Adventure - GIS in Action - National Geographic Education Use maps to solve problems, help animals, and get introduced to GIS. Map Tales -  Journalists, teachers, bloggers and storytellers (to name a few) use Map Tales to chronicle news events, scrapbook holidays, describe walks, plan campaigns, illustrate literature, recount journeys, and bring historical events to life. RouteXL - fastest route with multiple stops - Optimize multiple destinations on Google Maps Ilike2learn.com  - Geography Quizzes: these interactive Quizzes will help you rapidly learn the locations of the countries and capitals of the world. placeSpotting.com | The online map game - here’s a detailed view from a map of the world… find it. Tough. Clever! OverlapMaps - Instantly compare any two places on Earth! Globe Genie - takes you on a journey to different parts of the world using Google Streetview MapFab  - create and share custom googlemaps ikiMap | Create and share your maps - a web service to create and share maps in a fast and easy way. ikiMap helps you to organize, classify and publish your maps and georeference information in the web. Plane Finder - Flight Radar | Aircraft Tracker | Live Flight Tracking - just what you’d think it is. GmapGIS - A web based GIS application to draw on Google maps: polygons, lines, markers and labels MapMaker Interactive - National Geographic Education - Explore your world with map themes, data, and tools for customizing your map Global Conservation Maps - the Atlas of Global Conservation: A global perspective on what’s where, what’s at stake, and what opportunities exist for protecting the natural world MapSkip - Places Have Stories! - explore the world through shared stories and pictures about all the places in our lives using this literacy/map mashup. Explore Countries of the World — National Geographic Kids - great interactive exploration tool for the K-8 crowd. TimeMaps - World History TimeMap - combination of timelines, maps, and encyclopedia entries working together to create both authoritative content and an enjoyable user experience Historical Maps - Perry-Castañeda Map Collection - UT Library Online - Great collection of historical maps from the University of Texas Old Maps Online - easy-to-use gateway to historical maps in libraries around the world. It allows the user to search for online digital historical maps across numerous different collections via a geographical search. Search by typing a place-name or by clicking in the map window, and narrow by date. The search results provide a direct link to the map image on the website of the host institution. Welcome! - WorldMap - Build your own mapping portal and publish it to the world or to just a few collaborators. WorldMap is open source software. That should suffice for now. Check back in a couple of days for part four of this five part series of Geography Resources. ’til next time… peace and love Paul The post Web 2.0 Weekly: Geography Resource Edition Part 3 appeared first on Many Pebbles, One Pond.

Greetings all! Welcome to Part 4 of the Geography Resources Edition. I hope you find them interesting and useful. Spotzi, spot, zoom in and explore - World Atlas packed with more than 1000 overlaying thematic maps. PlanetInAction.com - The planet is your playground - PlanetInAction brings you top quality ideas, applications and concepts that will let you experience your GoogleEarth in a whole new way. PLACE: Population, Landscape, and Climate Estimates - The aim of PLACE is to provide country-level measures of spatial characteristics for a series of statistical areas (countries and other UN recognized territories) including multiple physical, biological and climate variable themes, for statistical areas around the world. These themes include: biomes, climate zones, coastal proximity zones, elevation zones, and population density zones.. Google Maps Mania - An unofficial Google Maps blog tracking the websites, mashups and tools being influenced by Google Maps. Historic Map Works, Residential Genealogy ™ - Browsable collection of hundreds of historical maps David Rumsey Historical Map Collection - over 48,000 historical maps on online ranging in age from the 1500s to the 1950s GeoSense Test your knowledge of world geography alone or against another online player. UNESCOplaces.org - interactive mapping and information on UNESCO’s World Heritage Sites. MAPme.com - Map your World! - Create a Map of your favourite places, travels or destinations. Start a Community map where everyone can add locations, pics & videos Share your map with your friends or the whole world Scribble Maps - Create custom google maps with scribblings … - Scribble Maps is the quick and easy way to rapidly make and share maps! With Scribble Maps you can: - Draw shapes and Scribble! - Pace Markers and text - Create a Custom Widget - Save as KML/GPX - Send maps to friends Test your Geography Skills - Online geography quizzes Hypercities Beta 2 - A HyperCity is a real city overlaid with a large array of geo-temporal information, ranging from urban cartographies and media representations to family genealogies and the stories of the people and diverse communities who live there. The service now exists for the cities of Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Rome, Lima, London, and many more. You do need Google Earth to run the site though. WeatherSpark | Interactive Weather Charts - WeatherSpark provides highly-detailed interactive weather graphs of the entire history of any weather station on earth. BunchaMaps - Compare locations using four maps: GoogleMaps, BingMaps, ESRI, and OpenStreetMap. This is a very clever mashup. Tsunami-Maps.com - This mapplet shows how your local beach could be affected by a tsunami. Simply type in your location and click ‘Find’ to center the map. Then enter the wave height, the direction for the wave to travel, and double click on the tsunami starting point GeoGames: The New Way to Teach GeoGraphy - A variety of interactives, games, and lesson plans on world geography. QuizGeo - Know Your Geo - Create interactive map based quizzes RealTime Emergency Map of the World - Interactive realtime map of emergency events around the globe. Ship Finder - A rather neat google mashup, this site track ship location on the around the worlds oceans. WhatWasThere - Put history in its place! - provide a platform where anyone can easily upload a photograph with two straightforward tags to provide context: Location and Year. If enough people upload enough photographs in enough places, together we will weave together a photographic history of the world (or at least any place covered by Google Maps). So wherever you are in the world, take a moment to upload a photograph and contribute to history! That’s it for this edition. Check back in a couple of days for Part 5 of this 5 parter on Geography Resources. The post Web 2.0 Weekly: Geography Resource Edition Part 4 appeared first on Many Pebbles, One Pond.

Greetings! Here’s the fifth and final installment of the Geography Resources edition of Web 2.0 Weekly. At some point in the future, as new sites are added to my archive and defunct sites are deleted I’ll repost the modified collection but for now here are the last entries in my geography archive. kmlfactbook.org - a mashup of GoogleEarth with the CIA Factbook. Very clever. Map Jigsaw Puzzles - National Geographic - National Geographic has many special features in their maps section, one of which is puzzles. I would have loved this when I was… wait a minute… I love this now. IfItWereMyHome.com - Great geographical and social statistics interactive overview comparing your country to just about any other.  Measure of America: American Human Development Project - A very informative page devoted to statistics on education, health, and income for the United States. While exclusively American in focus this site has a variety of uses for geography, maths, and social sciences regardless of your country of origin.  Soundcities by Stanza. The Global soundmaps project. Sounds … - SoundCities is a site where you can download sounds recorded on the streets of various cities. It is also a mashup with GoogleMaps such that you not only get the sound, you get the map of the location of the sound as well. TargetMap - Create & share customized data maps on Googlemaps. Free … - Choose a country and a way to create your map by color, type values or by uploading your excel files. All maps are published & shared in the TargetMap community. Once you’ve shared your map, you can also improve and compare it with other people’s related maps & data. You can embed the maps in your blog, or insert customized maps in your PowerPoint presentations. SHOW®/WORLD - A New Way To Look At The World - Show World is a really cool map generator that reframes maps of the world according to various demographics and statistics. SHOW®/WORLD really gets users to view the world via different perspectives. This is a great site! Worldmapper: The world as you’ve never seen it before - This site houses nearly 700 informative maps and posters. The maps are based on economic, scientific, and demographic data sets such that the apparent size of the country is based on the data set rather than the strict geographic size. An excellent example of vaizualizing data. Polymaps - Polymaps is a free JavaScript library for making dynamic, interactive maps in modern web browsers. USGS Education - This is the education gateway for the US Geological Survey. Climates of the world - Climate Zone - An interactive climate map of the world. While not completely granular, it does let the user drill down to the major city/region level. Smithsonian Institution - Global Volcanism Program: Worldwide Holocene … - "The Smithsonian’s Global Volcanism Program seeks better understanding of all volcanoes through documenting their eruptions — small and large — during the past 10,000 years." ArcGIS - From ESRI, the people who brought you ArcView, comes ArcGIS an online map creation and viewing portal. MapAList - Create and Manage Maps of Address Lists - Similar to BatchGeo, MapAList allows users to import their GoogleDocs spreadsheets and, using a mashup with GoogleMaps, generate a map You can then print, save, or embed in your own website. BatchGeo - Make google maps using many addresses / coordinates - Have locations in a spreadsheet? Well try this free and unique tool to… Map them using Google Maps. Post it on your Web site. Create a store locator. Get coordinates, print maps, and more! Full Screen Weather : Weather Underground  - Use the search form to find the weather for any City, State/Province, Zip Code, Country, or Lat/Lon in the world. geognos.com Home - World countries atlas with facts statistics, photos, maps, flags, visual information about geography, history, people, demographics, government, economy, communications and transportation. Geocaching - The Official Global GPS Cache Hunt Site geocaching.com - Geocaching is a high-tech treasure hunting game played throughout the world by adventure seekers equipped with GPS devices. The basic idea is to locate hidden containers, called geocaches, outdoors and then share your experiences online. Geocaching is enjoyed by people from all age groups, with a strong sense of community and support for the environment.  IRIS - Seismic Monitor - IRIS is a consortium of over 100 US universities dedicated to the operation of science facilities for the acquisition, management, and distribution of seismological data. IRIS programs contribute to scholarly research, education, earthquake hazard mitigation, and the verification of a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. And so endeth this special edition devoted to things geographical. Check back in a day or so for something completely different. (OK, not really… same sort of thing just a new subject!) til next time… peace and love Paul The post Web 2.0 Weekly: Geography Resource Edition Part 5 appeared first on Many Pebbles, One Pond.