Wes Davis' Teaching Tools Online

Website #1

www.SpellingCity.com

This website for early learners holds a variety of spelling games which are interactive and encouraging for students to have fun inside the curriculum.

This website can be helpful in capturing the attention of students outside of the textbook. Instead of writing the words on the white board and reciting each word 100 times, SpellingCity provides games for children to add meaning and fun urgency to learning their vocabulary.

Website #2


http://ebooks-search-engine.com/

I have used this website several times to locate free copies of assigned text books, articles, or sources that pertain to my work. After searching for several teaching related documents I can see how useful this website can be to teachers at any grade level.

With a simple "google" style home page, this website surfaces .pdf files from all over the web. From coloring exercises to lesson plan templates, this website is a great search engine for finding specific and topic related documents without sifting through the other filler websites that google provides.

Website #3


https://www.education.gov.uk/schools/toolsandinitiatives/teacherstv/

This website is a more formal version of YouTube. I know that YouTube is a great website for displaying videos in the classroom, however the content can sometimes be listed incorrectly. No teacher wants to pull up a video with the same video thumbnail photo and title of their desired video, and then be blindsided by a video of a user commentating on the actual\official video. I can't count how many times I have been searching for a new song to play through YouTube, clicked on a title that says "Official music video," and all the video is 3:14 minutes of a 16 year old giving his thoughts on the release.

This website archives educational videos for a web based presentation. Though they cannot be downloaded, I like how the topics are already combed through. YouTube's search engine has become similar to google in that a simple search for school house rock may bring up unrelated or vulgar videos.

Website #4


http://www.chillola.com/index.html/

As embarrassing as it is for me to admit, I most certainly used a children's website to survive my Spanish courses at UTK. This may be the reason I never spoke above a 5th grade level in a foreign language. Nevertheless, this site is an amazing teaching tool that brings interactive games to most language arts classrooms.

Just select your language and a game that coincides with your daily lesson plan and you are ready to go. If you are as far from being bilingual as I am, you might also find this website helpful in laying a Spanish foundation for you to be able to better communicate with newly transferred Hispanic students.

Website #5


www.classdojo.com

Here is another website that serves as medium of electronic organization for teachers. Though it may not house lesson plans and activities, this website is a great tool for recording participation and classroom behavior. I am having a hard time seeing this system working outside the realm of elemtary and middle schools, however some high school courses may benefit from the obnoxious students understanding that their behavior is well documented. As stated in the YouTube video, a great perk of being able to electronically organize classroom behavior is that it is ready to be emailed to administration or parents at any second. I believe this website has the right idea in directing students to gain ownership of their behavior by allowing then to choose their own emoticons and giving them a place in an app they can view from their cell phones.

Website #6


www.prezi.com

This presentation website is ... well a presentation website. There are several bright points to this teaching tool though. Given the short attention span of students today and their familiarity with Microsoft PowerPoint, prezi.com serves as a breath of fresh air. This site is a new way of organizing thoughts and presenting topics with more interactive transitions than Microsoft's slide by slide orientation. Text, graps, pictures, and videos are easily inserted into presentations just like power point, but the experience is more interesting with the different themes that prezi offers. A change up in presentation style can help all teachers whose curriculum is explained through a projector or smart board.

Website #7


www.blabberize.com

This website may seem lame or tasteless to some I'm the teaching profession, but I would be willin to add any presentation style as long as the students are able to retain the information. Given the standards of No Child Left Behind, educators can only hope that their students are able to regurgitate the course information onto the state tests. So why not give the students another form of delivery. While some may think the animated moving mouths are historical or childish, there may be one or two visual learner in the class that can benefit from this website.

And if you do not watch the tutorial, the website allows you to take any picture on your hard drive, add audio, and move the jaw line to imitate speech.

Website #8


www.howstuffworks.com

This website does require some application. There is so much interesting information simplified on this website that it is easy to lose focus. Applying the different sections and caveats in this website can help students better understand course material. For example you ate teaching a history course and you want to break up the lengthy lectures by showing students how different bombs work, the military strategizes, or if you can outrun a bomb blast radius in time. This website allows teachers to delve deeper into their test material through graphics and videos that most students would have never thought about researching. Who knows, these sites may inspire a few students to research even further through the free web page.

Website #9


www.turtlediary.com

This is one of the hundreds of web resources for online learning. This website is more of a jack of all trades website that offers activities and worksheets for several subjects and grade levels. I felt as though my list needed one of these types of websites that strive to have everything than one specific focus shown in my first website. The course material is free and the games are interactive enough to keep your students motivated to find answers in solving puzzles. If one game doesn't seem to grab a group's attention, there are plenty more for the students to gravitate towards.

Website #10


www.vuvox.com

This website allows both teachers and students to create horizontal presentations and collages that are primarily made up of digital media. I would like to center this website as a classroom tool for students to maybe put together a collage that illustrates their understanding of the course material. By allowing them to use their creativity in a technological way can ultimately spark student interest and evaluate their overall comprehension of the state testing material.