One great thing that I love about this source is that each resource is created BY teachers FOR teachers. It's not a big company trying to sell the latest and greatest curriculum. You get to pick and choose what you want and read reviews that other teachers have made about the product.
Two teachers I particularly like on the website are:
1. Joy Sexton
2. Stacey Lloyd
Their curriculum is engaging and easy to navigate for all my students, while still hitting most of the Common Core standards
Their Mission: "Promoting critical thinking, education, and informed citizenship by presenting controversial issues in a straightforward, nonpartisan, and primarily pro-con format.
This sight was great for my PBL. The PBL was a research unit and my students needed to start somewhere for their own inquiry questions. They used this website to be able to look objectively at both sides of their topic so that they could generate their argument and a rebuttal.
Google Docs/ Drive/ Slides
This is the one resource I CONSTANTLY used all year long. It's easy to use and easy for my students to SHARE their homework and writing so that I can give them instant electronic feedback. If a student forgot to bring their homework to school to turn in, they just shared the document with me. Many of my student don't have printers at home, so turning an assignment in electronically was extremely helpful.
As well, I created all my lessons through Google Slides in an organized Google Drive. Unlimited storage means I get to keep everything for all the years to come. AND I can access them anywhere there is an internet connection.
Sorry teachers, but the good old days of playing jeopardy to review before a test is gone. Kahoot is an easy to use website to create review games that you students can instantly access and play on their phones. I've never played a review game in a classroom where there was 100% engagement. Just be careful with some of the settings. Your students can easily create their own (sometimes innapropriate) screen names, and they are automatically logged out if they leave the app (to text). So its best to play on computers if you have them.
If I could, I would make all my students turn in all their assignments on here to check for plagiarism because copying is a teenager disease. It's a website that checks the similarity between your students writing and the ENTIRE internet for plagiarism. Ask your administrator for a school key and have your students create an account using their school email and password.
Accelerated Reader
Need some kind of independent reading program? Look no further. This program has quizzes for millions of books. Students take a reading quiz that measures their reading level (amazing for teacher reference). Then, the program assigns them a reading point goal. Each book is worth a certain amount of points and students must pass the quiz for the book in order to gain all those points for their goal. It's an easy way to check that your students are reading independently. When done 100% honestly by a student, I usually see their reading level go up one or two levels by the end of the year. I make my students take a reading test to measure their reading levels at the beginning of the year, beginning of second semester, and at the end of the year to measure their progress. Only drawbacks is that the program can only be used through the school wifi, so the students MUST be on campus when they use the program.
Pearson Realize
I'm not a HUGE fan of using big corporate curriculum AT ALL. But what's cool about Pearson Realize is that it gives you multiple resources, such as reading guides, grammar resources, and graphic organizers, to use in your own curriculum. For example, I use the reading guides for the books we read in class to measure reading comprehension and to learn new vocabulary. I used many of the grammar practice worksheets to guide my own grammar unit. As well, I used some graphic organizers from the program to guide my own creation of an essay outline. However, this is a program that you district has to purchase.