EduTecher

We also were introduced to the EduTecher website in class this week. This website is also chock full of resources. I have discovered quite a few fun ones just by simply clicking on the links option at the top of the homepage and then choosing "elementary" under grade level, and all their resources are alphabetized. 


Resource 1) That I found that I like is called ABCya! it's a very cute website that has a ton of activities for students of the elementary age to do. 

The actual description of the site is "ABC Ya is a free site with some nice flash activities for elementary students to use to enrich their curriculum. All the educational computer games and activities were created or approved by certified teachers! The activities incorporate content areas such as math and reading while introducing basic computer skills." 
-It offers a lot of basic alphabet and math games, and allows you to choose the grade level, it offers content for grades K-5. Since I am planning to be an ESL teaching, I feel like this website will be very helpful and a fun way to introduce the English alphabet to my ESL/ELL students. 

Resource 2) Another cool resource I found is called "Bembo's Zoo"  it is a very simple website, but very cool in my opinion. First you must select what version of the website to view depending upon if you have flash or not. Then it will load a page filled with letters, when you click on a letter - J for example, it will give you an animal starting with that letter and then the letters of the word themselves will morph into that animal, very cool! Since I'll be teaching english to students i'm hoping, this resource will be great if i'm working with younger students. Also, this resource is great for native-english speakers as well, because it could potentially help them learn their alphabet in a fun way. 

Resource 3) www. searchypants.com  - 

this is a neat way to let your kids do safe searches on the internet. I found this resource through the EduTecher videos that they have to watch, and this seemed interesting so I tried it out. All you have to do is let your studetns go to the website, and say they want to search for "math". Have them type this in, and it provides a safe search, with mostly school related resources that come up - here is what came up when I searched for math... 




2 Tools that I found that I  really liked were:






3x3 Links  a website that basically mimics what google chrome and safari do on start up - bring up your most recent webpages and favorites. However, with this tool you can access this start-up page on any computer - to me this is pretty cool! As a teacher, I might not always be able to access my own computer and might have to be flexible. This way, my links and my start-up page would be accessible pretty much anywhere....

Another tool I found interesting was... Zoodles I feel as if I have briefly heard of this resource before, so it was cool to accidentally find it again! :)
Zoodles allows a free-safe way for your children or students to browse the web. It allows the parent to set restrictions, and basically creates a browser specifically for your child/student full of educational websites and games based on the child's interest. Some of the features are listed here. 
And here is a small pic of the features webpage...

The only downfall to Zoodles, is that some options are only available with the "Premium" option - so while a majority of the stuff available is free, some of it isn't. However, I still feel like this would be another great way to make browsing safe and fun for my students should I ever want them to have some computer time.

Overall EduTecher has SO many great things and link/resources/tools to offer, it's going to take me a while to browse through them all, so in the meantime take a peek and i'm sure you'll like what you find :)