Lesson plan sites - Web Sitings

Instructor, August, 2003 by Kathy Schrock

These great links will provide endless lesson plans for any curriculum area. For more sites, visit www.scholastic.com/instructor

THE GATEWAY TO EDUCATIONAL MATERIALS (GEM) visit www.scholastic/instructor

GEM is a database of more than 30,000 lesson plans, units, and projects for the classroom that can be browsed and searched. This compilation of data comes from more than 300 well-respected federal, nonprofit, university, and commercial sites. You can limit your search by grade level or by material available for free or for purchase. You can even do a simple keyword search on any topic of interest.

TEACHERS.NET: LESSON EXCHANGE www.teachers.net/lessons

Categorized both by subject and by grade level, this collection of favorite lesson plans was contributed by hundreds of classroom teachers. This site gives you the assurance that someone has already successfully piloted, reworked, and taught a lesson before decide to you use it.

EDINFORMATICS http://edinformatics.com/lessons

EDinformatics provides a one-stop-shopping location for compiled search boxes from various lesson-plan sites. It includes many of the "invisible Web" collections that do not show up in search engine results, such as the AskERIC Lesson Plan Database. This site is a good place to start if you have no idea whether a lesson plan exists for your topic.

CRS TECH LAB www.joannegoodwin.com/technology

Many of the K-6 lessons here are informal, but they include ideas and samples of student work using technology in support of the content areas. You should find it easy to blend one of these projects into a multidisciplinary lesson, combining the ISTE student-technology standards (http://cnets.iste.org/) and the appropriate subject-area standard.

INTERNET INTEGRATION ACTIVITIES: GRADES K-12 www2.cmcss.net/~Tech/IT/default.html

This site provides integration activities in the form of a "Teacher Activity Card" and a "Student Activity Card" for grades K-12. The activities do not necessarily target higher-order thinking skills, but the information contained on the cards can create a quick and easy lesson to help students acquire and refine knowledge about a specific topic.

TECHNOLOGY INTEGRATION PROJECTS www.tlt.ab.ca/projects/projects.html

Created by the Alberta (Canada) Regional Consortium, this site offers hundreds of technology-infusion lesson plans. Each includes the formal write-up, the student task, the student outcomes, and an assessment rubric. To begin using the lesson plans, click on a level-based Division (1, 2, 3, or 4) on the navigation bar. The rubrics alone make this a great source of assessment information, but most of the lesson plans can be easily replicated without necessarily using technology.

Kathy Schrock is the administrator for technology for Nauset Public Schools in Orleans, MA. www.kathyschrock.net