Well, in Ed Tech class this week our class was introduced to the wide helpful world of Kan-Ed. It is basically a website for school districts to use that provides resources galore, you probably won't be able to access the extent of the website if you don't have a username and school that you work under so bear with me and i'll describe it the best that I can.
This website is CHOCK full of resources for teachers and it really excites me to look around on it! Long story short, I have already used this website quite a bit for my summer job. The past two summers I worked as a teacher's aide for a Summer School Program for Fairfield USD 310. As a teacher's aide, my guiding teacher was wonderful and asked me to design a unit on Financial Literacy for the kids 4th-8th grade that we had for the summer. Well... I had basically no curriculum to guide me, and i'm new at this but I was able to discover several resources along the lines of what I needed through the links from the Kan-Ed Website.
I discovered that I could use what is called the "education backpack" to store my lesson plans. I could save them in the backpack on my home computer online, and then could access them with any computer in the school where I taught, I loved using it!
Some of the ways I was able to find resources was through using ALTEC
ALTEC- stands for Advanced Learning Technologies. I basically just used this website because of the awesome links they provided.
if you scroll down a little ways once you reach the website, and look on the right side you will find the column I posted a picture of above. These are just some of the resources that ALTEC provides links for, if you click on "View All" it provides a lengthy list of great ones to choose from.
Some of the ones I used from this list the past summer are - 4Teachers, and 4Kids, which are listed under the "ALTEC Network".
4Teachers and 4Kids, both have loads of interesting things. The 4Teachers website is tailored for a teacher obviously, and the 4Kids site is a fun, but educational site that provides activities for your students to do. My students this summer had fun with it.
Another link that I accessed via the ALTEC link list is Arcademic Games
The coolest thing about this game website, is that your students can compete against each other - though they are on different computers! I found it really cool that we could do that. All you have to do is create a new game and then "join" it - up to 4 players can compete against each other at once.
School Tube is yet another cool resource that I found this summer with the help of my guiding teacher. It is basically a "school version" of what we know as youtube, and provides great video resources for the classroom.
Overall, Kan-Ed provides us with a great way to access numerous resources and I could spend hours on this website checking them all out, that is if I had time - haha, what college student has free time?
Also, here are some Financial Literacy Resources that I found this summer since I mentioned I taught a unit on that I wanted to follow that comment up:
My Savings Quest is an uber fun game! It teaches kids the basic concepts of spending and saving money. I even had fun playing it with the kids!
Money Instructor - provides some great resources
KidsBank is an interactive website where each piece of money, or part of economics/financial literacy has a personality, and explains what it does, and then you have the option of giving students a pre-made quiz over what they have learned, very colorful!
The U.S. Mint Site for Kids is a government sponsored website that provides fun activities for students to do and the history of money itself, it's quite interesting.
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