Curriculum and Lesson Planning Links for Teachers
from El Dorado High School Library

Need ideas to enhance your curriculum or perk up your lesson plans? Try some of these sites for great ideas. You may go directly to any of the following sections:

SchoolNotes

"Teachers - Create Notes for homework and class information and post them on the web in seconds using this free community service."

General Sites for Lesson Planning

Cable in the Classroom

"CIC works with 39 national networks including CNN, the History Channel and Discovery Networks, to provide educationally rich and commercial-free programming and online resources." The print magazine is no longer available. Check online for program schedules, enrichment materials, and professional growth resources.

High School Exit Exam - Resouces for Teachers

The links on these pages will connect you to resources organized according to High School Exit Exam selected standards. Click on the "Legislation" section to follow the progress of SB84 concerning the administration of the HSEE.

Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators

"Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators is a categorized list of sites useful for enhancing curriculum and professional growth. It is updated often to include the best sites for teaching and learning."

SCORE: Schools of California Online Resources for Education:

An exciting new network of Online Resource Centers in California linking quality information from the World Wide Web to the California curriculum.
SCORE: History/Social Science
SCORE: Language Arts
SCORE: Science
SCORE: Mathematics

California Learning Resource Network

"Your source for California standards-aligned electronic learning resource information and lessons." Use CLRN to: perform searches in a database of electronic learning resource reviews, access, create, and edit standards aligned, technology enhanced lesson plans, and link to other state wide technology services and calendar of events.

Blue Web'N

Blue Web'n is a searchable database of outstanding Internet learning sites categorized by subject area, audience, and type (lessons, activities, projects, resources, references, & tools).

Filamentality

"Filamentality is a fill-in-the-blank interactive Web site that guides you through picking a topic, searching the Web, gathering good Internet sites, and turning Web resources into learning activities ."

TrackStar

"TrackStar helps instructors organize and annotate Web sites (URLs) for use in lessons. The resource list remains visible allowing the user to easily stay on track."

Lesson Plan Builder

The Lesson Plan Builder makes it easy for you to create or modify and share your lesson plans using electronic learning resources.

Microsoft: Lessons, Tutorials, and Classroom Activity Guides

"Find lesson plans, tutorials and other resources to help you bring technology into your classroom."

AskERIC Lesson Plans

"This collection contains more than 2000 unique lesson plans which have been written and submitted to AskERIC by teachers from all over the United States and the world."

Webquests from EMT Online Resources

Webquests are curriculum units utilizing online resources.

ThinkQuest

ThinkQuest is known for its collection of educational web sites created by students and their teachers.

Teaching and Learning Resources Curriculum Guide For Career Academies

This comprehensive site includes descriptions and links to search engines, indexes, lesson plan sources, and sources for online projects, interactive multimedia resources, and career and subject resources. Produced by the Career Academy Support Network.

Media Awareness Network

This Canadian site has been given a five star rating for best site for media and communications. It offers a clearinghouse of information, teaching units, student handouts, and media education tips. Best bet: online modules to teach students how to surf the web.

 

A New 3Rs

"A Directory of compelling Web sites that make learning more Real, Rich & Relevant."

Primary Source Learning

...this site, created by practicing educators, "assists teachers and students in using Library of Congress primary source materials" and includes lessons that target the best instructional practices.

PBS Teachers

Multimedia resources and professional development opportunites for educators.

Rubrics

Rubric, Rubrics, Teacher Rubric Makers

"The rubric generators [here] will allow you to make grading rubrics by filling out a simple form. The materials are made instantly and can be printed directly from your computer."

Rubric Builder

"As teachers increasingly design online learning experiences for their students, evaluation of those activities remains a challenge. The Rubric Builder enables teachers to build effective assessment rubrics and to make them available over the World Wide Web."

RubiStar: The rubric maker

" RubiStar does away with the tedium of creating rubrics from scratch by allowing you to customize one of our many template rubrics. You can use the rubrics as is, or modify the templates to better serve your particular students' needs. You can choose from six skill categories: Multimedia, Products, Experiments, Oral Projects, Research and Writing, and Work Skills."

Rubric Maker, Rubrics for Perfomance Assessment

"Teach to the Standards...Not to the Test." Tools here include an interactive rubric maker, a rubric master, a PowerPoint presentation on the writing prompt, and much more.

Rubrician.com

This site was designed for educators, teachers, parents, students and evaluators. Categories include: language arts, math, performing arts, physical education, social studies, technology, science, and writing, as well as "general rubrics".

Rubrics for Educators

This page includes links to rubrics for cooperative learning, writing research reports, PowerPoint/oral presentations, multimedia, video, web projects, and lesson plans all created by classroom teachers. There are also links to sites that will help you create your own rubric.

Language Arts and Reading

Mathematics

TERC

TERC is a not-for-profit education research and development organization ...[whose] mission is to improve mathematics, science and technology teaching and learning.

History and Social Studies

Civic Action Project

"Civic Action Project (CAP) is a project-based learning model for civics and government courses. It offers a practicum for high school students in effective and engaged citizenship and uses blended learning to engage students in civic activities both in and out of the traditional U.S. government classroom. By using web-based technology and civics-based instruction and activities, students exercise important 21st century skills in digital literacy, critical thinking, collaboration, self-direction, and learning to be an engaged and effective citizen in a democracy."

American Memory Learning Page

The "front door to more than 100 American Memory collections. Here is a teacher's eye view of over 7 million historical documents, photographs, maps, films and audio recordings. You will find lessons, features, activities, and tips and tricks for using these collections in your classroom."

History Matters: The U.S. Survey on the Web

History Matters is "Designed for high school and college teachers of U.S. History courses. This site serves as a gateway to Web resources and offers useful materials for teaching U.S. history.

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NARA Digital Classroom

Lesson plans and ideas on how to use primary materials in history research.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

This indispensable resource for teaching about the Holocaust will give you ideas, lesson plans, and other resources.

History Channel

Click on classroom resources for topics and teacher's guides for history. Of special note are the Oral History Interview Guidelines, which are downloadable as a handout.

Time for Kids

Clickable headlines lead you the latest news stories, behind the scenes information, fact files and viewpoints. Shows you how to structure a lesson around the news.

U.S. News Classroom Program

Focused on politics, government, and international affairs. Includes teaching units on the federal budget and foreign policy.

USA Today Education

Daily information of national interest with teaching aids for all levels of students. A four-page lesson plan around the news is available online at 9:00 p.m. the night before class.

The Buck Institute for Education

Focused on project-based learning and problem-based social studies with links to project-based resources. A good source of projects for economics.

Science and Health

The Franklin Institute Science Museum

This site has online exhibits in biology, aeronautics, and history (such as the life of Benjamine Franklin), as well as lots of resources for teachers.

The NASA Quest Project

Searchable lesson plans for Space and aeronautics. Includes a section on careers in aeronoautics, plus teacher's guides.

American Museum of Natural History: Resources for Learning

"Resources for Learning is a collection of activities, articles, evidence and analysis and more, for educators, families, students and anyone interested in teaching or learning about science."

Consumer and Family Education

Consumer Jungle

Consumer Jungle features consumer education curriculum including printable classroom materials and interactive student activities (Credit Cave Activities include Find the Fees and the Credit Card Safari). Units include the Credit Cave, Surviving Solo (tips for living on your own), Esmarts (safe surfing on the web), Car-fari, and Jingle in the Jungle (the mysteries of phone, cell phones, and internet service).

Resources for Food History Lessons

...a fun site to use in support of social studies, culinary arts, or foods and nutrition. It includes a food timeline, food customs, and a whole lot more! You can go directly to the Food Timeline or the Culinary History Timeline.

Technology

Digital Content Toolkit

...a site which "provides information, support, tools, ideas, models, research, and a community of practice for educators interested in using flexible computer technologies to reach and teach diverse learners" including text, images, sounds, and videos

4Teachers

This is an online space for teachers integrating technology into the classroom. This great free website has a program called "QuizStar" Which allows you to create quizes for your students to take from any computer.You might also love their TrackStar and RubiStar programs. Give it a try!