Teacher Tools

Teacher Tools
Teacher Productivity Tools Web Builders Useful Downloads & Plug-Ins

Teacher Productivity Tools:

Graphic Organizers:

Rubrics & Assessments:

** NOTE: Download WinZip for PC or ZipIt for Mac to open any Zipped files below...and don't forget to register this shareware!

Rubric "How To's": Evaluating Internet Research and Multimedia Projects:
How to Hit a Moving Target!
 

Activity/Material Creators:

From Discovery School:

  • Puzzlemaker a puzzle generation tool for teachers, students and parents. Create and print customized word search, crossword and math puzzles using your word lists.
  • Lesson Planner Create and store your lessons online at Discovery School.
  • Worksheet Generator Create customized math and vocabulary worksheets in less than 5 minutes; also contains a library of over 300 ready-made worksheets created by teachers.
  • Quiz Center use to create, administer, and grade quizzes online. Without any Web development background whatsoever, you'll be able to make online quizzes that provide instant feedback to you and your students.

From TEACHnology:

  • Worksheet Generators Includes crossword puzzle maker, webquest generator, science lab generator, assignment generators, world scrambles and word searches that you can make instantly and print out.
  • Classroom Materials Generators Create bus passes, hall passes, bingo cards, bookmarks, timelines, lesson plans, student learning contracts, testing modification charts instantly!
  • Personal Education Press Create free educational worksheets such as flashcards, game boards, and quizzes to print directly from your browser.
  • Casa Notes designed to allow teachers to quickly make, and customize, typical notes that are sent home to parents or given to the students. 12 note templates are available. These include: 1) Notes related to progress and good work; 2) Reminders; 3) Field trip permission slip, 4) Homework pass, and 5) Medication and Self-Medication.
  • NoteStar This free website allows teachers to facilitate project based learning research on the internet. It allows teachers to assign projects and follow student progress in doing research on the web. With it, students can easily use a "digital notecard" format and take notes from the web, easily track information regarding their sources, and organize their notes and sources to create printable notes and bibliography.
  • Blank Map Generator Print these blank outline maps for your students to fill in.
  • Assign-A-Day - This FREE tool is designed to enhance teacher and student communication through an on-line teacher-managed calendar. Teachers create a calendar for each of their classes and add assignments for the students to view. Students view their teachers’ calendars in order to see assignments for classes they might have missed, or to get an overview of the class.
  • Teacher's Domain - a multimedia digital library for K-12 teachers and students. You'll find an extensive collection of classroom-ready resources, as well as media-rich lesson plans and professional development resources. Each resource is catalogued by grade level and correlated to national and state standards. Teachers' Domain is produced by WGBH, with major funding from the National Science Foundation.
  • Learning Checklists -  Project-based learning checklists for for written reports, multimedia projects, oral presentations, and science projects. The use of these checklists keeps students on track and allows them to take responsibility for their own learning through peer- and self-evaluation.
  • Think Tank -Think Tank is designed to help students (grades 3-8) develop a Research Organizer (a list of topics and subtopics) for reports and projects. Based on the subject assigned, the students can refine it by choosing from a variety of suggestions and by using a random subtopic generator. This helps students learn how to refine a subject so that it is more manageable for Internet research.
  • Quia Explore thousands of activities. Create quizzes, games, and web pages
  • QuizStar This utility allows you to create online quizzes, attach media files - check it out!
  • Scholastic Tools - Class Set-Up tool is a new, easy-to-use, virtual layout tool that helps you design customized and effective classrooms to promote learning. Use this tool to rearrange and set-up mock classrooms, and map out virtual seating charts.
  • Hot Potatoes -The Hot Potatoes suite includes six applications, enabling you to create interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises for the World Wide Web. Hot Potatoes is not freeware, but it is free of charge for those working for publicly-funded non-profit-making educational institutions, who make their pages available on the web.
  • Zoomerang - Create online surveys.
  • Education World Teacher Tools:  Templates for just about everything a teacher needs!  Certificates, letters, venn diagrams and more.
  • Word Search Maker - Create your own wordsearches!
  • Create a Graph

Web Builders:

Web Page Tutorials

MetaData:

Web Creation Software Tutorials:

Free Educational Web Generators:

  • TrackStar collect Web sites, enter them into TrackStar, add annotations for your students, and you have an interactive, online lesson called a Track. Create your own Track or use one of the hundreds of thousands already made by other educators.
  • Web Worksheet Wizard Make and post a simple web worksheet in minutes.
  • Project Poster Project Poster is for students who wish to publish projects or reports on the public internet.
  • Filamentality allows you to create hotlists, treasure hunts, WebQuest, and more, and immediately posts them to the web. It does not allow you to add graphics.
  • Homemaker for Libraries "create your own complete library web site painlessly! You decide which pages you want to create, enter information about your library, and click a button. Then, HomeMaker for Libraries will spit out polished web pages for you to share with the world."
  • Filamentality No web publishing software needed! "Filamentality is a fill-in-the-blank tool that guides you through picking a topic, searching the Web, gathering good Internet links, and turning them into learning activities" which are posted and hosted for free by the SBC Knowledge Network. A good place to start for the newbie.

Collecting Your Links:

  • Backflip Create your own web directory of your favorite links and access them from any computer!
  • MyBookmarks a free Internet service that allows you to keep your browser bookmarks and favorites online so you can access them from anywhere.
  • iKeepBookmarks
  • Quick Topic Free Discussion Board Quick Topic is a free super-easy single-topic web bulletin board that's web based and also fully email-enabled: you can get and post messages via email. Use it to keep a list of your bookmarks and/or to start discussion topics in your class or with your colleagues.

First Things First!

Web Design:

Neilsen's Tips for Web Design

Backgrounds:

ClipArt & Animated Gifs, Midi Files:

Download any image by right clicking on your mouse and selecting "Save Image as" on a Windows platform or by holding down the mouse button and selecting "Save Image as" on a Macintosh.  Be sure to save the image in the same folder in which you save your web page.  See also our Search the Web page for more image finders!

Copyright and Fair Use

Accessibility

Useful Plug-Ins and Downloads:

Plug-Ins:

Utilities
  1. Decompression:  Unstuffing and Unzipping Your Downloads
  2. Software Downloads: Large collections of shareware to download