A Few of My Favorite Things

Hey, there! It's been a while!
Sorry, but you know how it is. I was sucked into the giant vortex called the End of the School Year, but have managed to emerge victorious. I survived! You survived! And now (sound the drums of anticipatioin)...it's Summer Vacation - even though there are a few weeks of spring left. If you are not able to share in our summertime joy yet, I apologize.  It's not my fault Old Man Winter took snow season off. But please, stay in the techKNOW this summer - because now is as good of a time as ever to organize, plan, and recharge for next school year.
So, since many of you are still recoiling from the craziness or are still embroiled in it, I've decided to dedicate this post to the basics. Now is the best time to take stock in what went right this past year, what went wrong, and what wasn't really right or wrong - just could have been a bit better. The sites I'm going to list are oldies but goodies - but if you are about to embark on a teaching career in the Fall, you may want to acquaint yourself with them. Now. Get organized NOW - or at least after you've soaked up some sun and sleep.
Here are a few of my favorite techKNOW things - the "trusty blue jeans" of resources that you can always count on and can't live without:
Portaportal - Yes, that's right. Portaportal. No, not port-a-potty, althought that would be pretty funny. Make a (free) account on here, and you'll never have to worry about writing a website on the board for your students to visit or forgetting the name of your favorite sites again. Portaportal allows you to save all of your internet bookmarks to your own page so you can access them from ANY computer at ANY time. Not only that, you create a username for your page that your students can type in to access your bookmarks. That way, you can take your class to the computer lab, have them find the link on your page and BOOM they're there - no more trying to type in the website character for character. It saves you and your students tons of frustration and valuable time. You can create folders and subfolders for all of your links to make it ultra-organized. Every website I use in my classroom is on my Portaportal page - it's almost like my online classroom! And since there's no limit to how many bookmarks you can put on your page, you can do that! You can even bookmark other teacher's Portaportal pages! If you want to be a true techKNOW teacher, this is the first step to saving your sites as well as your sanity.
Rubistar - Want to make a rubric for assessment fast? Go here. In record time, Rubistar allows you to make a rubric for just about anything with very little effort on your part. Choose the type of project or subject area, select the areas you want to assess, and BOOM (again) you get an awesome rubric with preset performance indicators you can choose to keep or modify. You can print your rubric out or download it to your computer so you're sure to have it for future use. If you want to search other teacher's rubrics for similar projects, you can do that, too. Best of all? You know me - it's FREE.
Pete's PowerPoint Station - Not quite sure who Pete is, but he's pretty amazing for this collection of HUNDREDS of awesome PowerPoint presentations and games. Any subject, any topic, any grade level - you will find the PowerPoint for your lesson. If you have just been bestowed the awesomeness that is an interactive whiteboard of ANY kind, this is the first place you want to go (right after you make your Portaportal page!) to find ways to quickly techKNOW-logized your classroom. Sometimes they aren't perfect and you have to modify to meet your needs, but the PowerPoints you find on this site will save you all kinds of time. And there all FREE!
SMART Exchange - If you have a SMART board or are about to get one in your classroom... Here.You. Go. You could easily spend your entire summer on this site searching for incredible, already created templates and interactive presentations. From cool ways to take attendance to hands-on lessons on the parts of speech - tailor you search by grade and subject level and BOOM (one more time!) your SMART notebook files await for you to preview! Once you create a FREE account, you can even download them to the computer connected to your SMART board so you can access them later.
These resources alone could keep you busy all summer long, so check them out now before I load you down with more ;-) And if you all ready know your stuff and use these cool tools...good for you. But don't worry, there's more coming - because I'm out of the vortex and back on the blog.
http://www.portaportal.com/
http://rubistar.4teachers.org/
http://www.pppst.com/
http://exchange.smarttech.com/#tab=0