Jefferson County Schools

If you have never visited the Jefferson County Schools website, you must. As a teacher in Tennessee, this resource has been priceless for me. It does, however, have much to offer to teachers in any part of our country. The links down the right side of the page take you to some great resources. Here are only a few:

Cybrary Man

Through a friend of a friend of a friend (you know how Twitter works), I stumbled upon Jerry Blumengarten. After following him, he provided links to his sites. I am in awe. The abundance of resources here are amazing!!






Check these out and let me know what you think!

Differentiation

My current position this year, among lots of other things, is to help teachers differentiate activities/lessons, etc. in their classrooms. There is a ton of research out there on this and people have written numerous books on the topic. My favorite authors on the subject are Carol Tomlinson, Beverly Tyner, Sharon Walpole, and Michael McKenna.

This week, at my school, there has been a push for teachers to show on paper how they are differentiating each subject in their classroom. I've found a few links to share with them. Hopefully this is the start of a long list. Does anyone have others to share?

http://www.wilmette39.org/DI39/distrategies.html

From Wilmette public schools, this site provides printable pdfs and presentations for teachers as well as ideas and examples.

http://www.doe.in.gov/exceptional/gt/tiered_curriculum/welcome.html

Great examples per grade level and subject of differentiation by readiness, interest, and learning styles.

http://its.leesummit.k12.mo.us/different.htm#Lesson_Examples

Links to all things differentiation.

Portaportal

On today's web, there are tons of ways to share links online. Two of the most popular are delicious and diigo. While I enjoy the benefits that comes with both of these services, there is a slight learning curve involved as well as creating an account. In order to share links with the teachers and students at my school, I needed something simple that they could access in a blink without any training. That's where portaportal comes in. I created a portaportal at the beginning of the year and set it as the home page for all of the lab computers as well as several student computers throughout the school. I love the response that I have gotten from teachers and students. It is very simple for them and the students are able to easily use it from home. I am adding links on a daily basis thanks to the fabulous resources I get from my friends on Twitter.

After attending TETC this year, I was able to see the many other uses for portaportal. The best session of the conference for me was given by Jackie Elam and Kris Marshall from Rutherford County Schools. Jackie shared this fabulous portaportal with us. She even exported her bookmarks (under portal resources) so that you can have a huge head start in getting your own portal up and running. Portals are very simple to create and easy to clone and share. Another great idea that I got from Jackie was this portaportal in which the teacher has created a folder for each of her students with personalized links under each. I thought this was a fantastic idea for differentiation in the classroom.

The best news is that portaportal is free. I pay the small fee for having an ad free site because I use it with so many students, but it is not required.

Does anyone have any other great portaportals to share?