No Time To Waste! Find Great Interactive Websites Quickly

Have you ever done a search online hoping to find a site that would be great for your students to support what you are doing in the classroom? Usually, you type what you are looking for in "Google" or some other search engine and what you get in results is hundreds, thousands, or even millions of results! Feeling overwhelmed, some might shrug their shoulders and reach for those handy dandy (but so boring) worksheets in the binder.

Hey, I understand! You're a busy teacher with a million things to do and you also have family and other responsibilities and spending hours wading through lists of links hoping to find the right one is just not practical!

When I was in the math classroom, I always used my website as an instructional tool and my assignment page was projected to the class at the start of every period. On the page, I always had at least one resource to support the concept I was teaching. And, I had a criteria for that! In order to make it to the page (sort of like it was an honor, lol), I required that the resource site had these three components:
Teaching, Guided Practice, and Independent Practice. (Sound familiar? Like a good lesson plan, right?)

After doing this for many years, people would often ask how I found the time to locate the resources. It never took me more than 10-15 minutes and those asking would have a hard time believing that. Finally, I decided I should write my steps so that others could try them and see if they were able to save time, too. I was surprised that I had developed quite a system that allowed me to scan through a list in seconds and know instantly which links were worth opening for possible inclusion on my web page. On top of that, once open, I could decide immediately whether it would work.

So, dear reader, I'm going to share that system with you in my next post! I hope it works for you the same way it worked for me! It's pretty easy and after a few practices, you'll find yourself locating excellent resources in minutes! And, your students will benefit from always have a great source of support available that teachers, provides guided practice, and independent practice, as well!

Keep reading and you'll be surfing the educational web in no time!