CLASSROOM ENRICHMENT THROUGH THE WEB
 Dear Child Advocate,
Happy New Year! If you have spent any time on the Web, you know that half of your time is spent weeding through different sites hoping to find what you are looking for. As responsible adults, we often find ourselves looking for sites that our students in the classroom, or our own children at home, can visit for an enriching, educational experience.
As teachers return from the holidays, and parents send their kids back to school, we thought a nice way to return everyone to the normal routine would be to take care of the weeding out process for you and give you a few sites we have found that may make your job as a teacher or parent a little bit easier:
Please note: with the exception of iLAND5, which does not allow outbound links, the sites listed below do allow outbound links.
The first site we will visit today provides the parent, teacher, and child with a collection of sites that have been reviewed. Here, syndicated columnist Barbara J. Feldman has provided a review for thousands of individual Web sites that fall under two sections.
In the Directory of Site Reviews, she has broken down the various Web sites according to content area. In the Directory of Kids Games, she has taken the different categories of online games and organized her reviews by these categories. The date of each review is also listed so you know how current the information actually is.
The site is ad supported and there is also an optional membership area if you wish to print certain documents from this site.
It would be great if the entire Discovery Education site were free, however much of the digital content requires a paid membership. Fortunately, Discovery provides free resources for both the home and school user. For teachers, no visit to Discovery Education would be complete without a stop at the Kathy Shrock Guide for Educators:
Discovery Education - School Rock Guide.
This guide was started in 1995 as a way for teachers to easily locate resources for the classroom on the emerging World Wide Web.
What if you could take different video games, TV shows, movies, books and Web sites to one place and have their content reviewed for age appropriateness? That is what the non-profit group Common Sense Media has done with their site. Each review has an easy to read age-appropriateness graphic and an explanation of the content as well. Not only are adults encouraged to review the different types of media, but kids contribute as well.
For educators, there is a section that provides resources and curriculum for schools on a variety of topics such as cyber bullying, Internet safety, and consumerism. Portions of the site do require a free membership application and there are ads for the different media that is being reviewed.
Curriki is the result of the Sun Microsystems Global Education and Learning Community. They promote themselves as, "an online environment created to support the development and free distribution of world-class educational materials to anyone who needs them." Curriki uses wiki technology to allow educators to share different curriculum and learning activities with others around the world.
Membership is required and there are four different levels: student, parent, teacher, and professional. All membership levels are free; however children under 13 are not allowed to join. Parents of these children will need to become members and access content for them.
As a sponsor of Curriki.org, you may have seen the LearnIT banner on the Curriki web site. This is how I found it. When I first saw this banner, I figured it was another site dedicated to helping schools teach IT skills to their students. Nothing could be further from the truth. While LearnIT does provide a great deal of training and information about the IT field, it is by no means the only type of content on this site.
LearnIT provides information about careers, digital citizenship, tutorials on using different home/school technologies, and information about how to best use the tools and resources on their site.
Teachers, I hope you have found a site on here that you can use to enrich your lessons. If you have every intention of checking out one or more of these sites "when you have a chance," please take the time to do it now. I remember how many times I said the same thing when I was in the classroom.
Parents don’t hesitate to get involved either. Although SafeWave.org is geared towards adults, we encourage you to sit alongside your kids after they log onto
iLAND5 and follow along as they play the games or read the latest adventures of iGGY or Beach High.
Check out the different resources that can help you get a grasp on what you kids are doing online. Sit down with them and look over the site together, but don’t be surprised if you and your kids start competing over who gets to control the mouse!
Have a great 2009,
Jeff
SafeWave™ IT Department
info@safewave.org
"Together We Keep Children Safe Online"
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