Anne Frank and the Secret Annex

Are you always looking for new materials and interactive resources to use with your students?  If so you will have to check out this website. http://www.annefrank.org/en/Subsites/Home/  This website it packed with really great information about Anne Frank and the struggles that she had to go through.  There is a 3D house which you and your students can tour and actually see where Anne hid out when she needed to.  There are some great videos of real footage from World War 2 as well as tons of information about the occupants that lived in the house as well as many other great resources.  If you like this website and you would be interested in more great websites (K-12) sign up here to receive emails when anything new is posted. After signing up look for the follow up email which will verify your subscription.

Voting Made Easy

With the election fast approaching some of you may still not know who to vote for.  You are also trying to explain all of the ads that are on T.V. to your students.  I just found a great website that will hopefully help you figure out who to vote for as well as help your students learn about the current candidates running for office.  VoteEasy is a neat little tool that will let you choose the state that you want to work with and then it will show you who is running for office.  You can click on the pictures of the individuals to learn more about them.  You can also choose the issues that you are concerned with and learn more about the issues.  Once the issue is selected you can answer how you feel about that issue and VoteEasy tells you which candidate shares your views.  Even if you don't want to use this with your students you can help yourself choose who to vote for.

How does this apply to the classroom?
This can be used to inform your students about the different candidates.  You can view the candidates and then have a mock election within your classroom.  Just be weary that some of the issues may be controversial.  The more that we can inform our students the more likely they will get out there and vote.

Teaching with Maps

Just recently I came across a website the compliments the Promethean Board called Scribble Maps.  If you are like me you have been using Google Earth to show your students everything from where their school is located to how far away Japan is.  While ActivInspire has the tools to annotate over the desktop it definitely takes some time to learn how to annotate over the Google Earth map that you have up.  Now with Scribble Maps the drawing tools are built into the map so it makes it easier to draw on top of the map that your students are viewing.  You can also add markers to your maps, plus find directions to and from any location during your lesson.  With this website even the most novice user will have no problems using this website to bring your lesson to life.

GeoGames for the Promethean Board

I just found a great website to help teach geography skills.  On this website there is one activity called GeoGames where the kids can play a game that relates to the globe and maps.  During the game the students have the ability to choose between building planet earth and placing the correct countries and cities on the globe.  While building planet earth the students can take the poles and drag them to the correct spots on the globe and then take the countries and drag them as well.  The countries and cities work the same but they are a bit more challenging.  I would recommend the countries and cities for the middle and high school students.  The best part about this game is that it is timed and the students can have races to see who can place everything in the shortest amount of time.  After you build your map you can print it out for the students to use at a later date or even so that they can refer back to later.