Prezi Webquest

Last semester I had the opportunity to create a 4th grade Social Studies unit plan about Florida explorers with a group of my peers. We created a Webquest using Prezi (one of my favorite presentation tools). To kick off the unit, we created a Prezi on Christopher Columbus, a familiar explorer for many 4th grade students. During this presentation, the teacher will also model important presentation skills that the students will be assessed on when they present at the end of the unit. After the Christopher Columbus presentation, the students will break up into groups and learn about a Florida explorer. Students will use teacher approved websites using diigo, graphic organizers, and various multimedia tools to create a presentation about their explorer. Throughout their learning journey the student groups will follow the step by step directions stated on the Prezi Webquest. The entire unit plan, including printables and other resources can be found here: http://ucfgr4flexplorerssp12t.wikispaces.com/ Although we tried to plan our activities across the curriculum, looking back it is apparent that we had too many activities for a 5 day unit plan. In the real classroom this unit would require 2-4 weeks. Overall, completing this unit plan was a great experience. I learned so much from this project and my peers. I cannot wait to put these ideas into action in a real classroom.

UPDATE: After completing our course, my peers and I had the opportunity to present our unit plan at our university. Below is the Prezi we created for the workshop.

FCRR: Florida Center for Reading Research

http://www.fcrr.org/ is another fantastic website for teachers. This site provides a lot of information on best practices used to teach and assess reading it. I've found the intervention strategies for struggling readers very helpful. However, my favorite resources is the student center activities page. Lots of printables for centers and all of the activities are aligned to the common core!

Fun Math Website...

Big Brainz is a great website for multiplication practice!

KB...Konnected

Have you been to kb...konnected? It's one of my favorite teacher blogs! KB is constantly posting useful teacher resources. Many of educational websites she has shared have become my kid's favorite places to play online. She also posts tons of freebies and great printables. Check it out!

Read, Write, Think

readwritethink.org is one of my favorite websites for teacher resources. There are tons of great lesson plans and activities for specific books or learning objectives. They also have online activities to engage students and fantastic printables to use in the classroom. 

I've found their Strategy Guides to be extremely helpful for a student teacher. The Strategy Guides provide information on great teaching techniques and key concepts that I can teach to help my future students become effective readers.

CAST Learning Tools

CAST.org strives to provide using UDL (Universal Design for Learning). For instance, the CAST UDL Book Builder allows a teacher to create a digital book to support various types of learners. The students can view the pictures of the book and read along as the computer reads the story aloud. Also, the student can select the text and ask the computer to re-read that section or translate it to to Spanish. You can also read and rate books that were created by other teachers/authors.

The CAST UDL Lesson Builder helps teachers to customize their lessons to meet individual learning needs. I haven't had a chance to play with the lesson builder yet, but I'm eager to test it out.

There are many other Learning Tools at CAST.org and the best part...it's FREE!

Learning how to reflect...

Powerful Learning Practice is one of my favorite teacher sites. I love to read blogs from the Voices from the Learning Revolution. These teacher reflections are inspiring. They have helped me to learn how to reflect on my own learning journey and are helping me to shape my personal teaching philosophy.

Here is my recent favorite posts from the PLP site...

 This summer I won’t be learning how to be a better teacher | Powerful Learning Practice 


I love the idea of staying connected and being a co-learner with my class!