Hands on Experience at the YETC

Today we were given the OPPORTUNITY to experience all of the resources that the YETC has to offer. Instead of just learning and listening about these things we were given the opportunity to actually EXPERIENCE them!

One of my favorite resources that I was able to navigate today was the GUTENBERG PROJECT. I love to read, and I am hoping to instill this love with my students as well. As I was looking through all of the resources they had, I was totally impressed by how broad the collection was. I found a book that I could use for every holiday. For Halloween....The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving. By clicking on the link "HTML" the book appeared on my screen in seconds. The children could easily follow along, or obtain their own copies if they were all seated at a computer. Because this particular story isn't illustrated, children could create their own illustrations, and insert them into the text.

Another interesting page that I found as I was exploring was NATHAN SMITHS EDUCATIONAL TREASURES. The link to this page is found under the main YETC resource page, or by following this link, http://teacherlink.ed.usu.edu/tlresources/nathan/index.html. This page, which is updated yearly provides many useful websites, and their links. I found several sites, that I have bookmarked for future use.
For a math lesson, I could use http://www.hbschool.com/activity/calculator_gr1/.
This site provides a fun tutorial on how to use a calculator. The site also provides many fun math games, with topics and themes that would be interesting to children.
For a disorganized person like myself, an organizational system would be perfect. Based on the sticky post it notes that are commonly seen posted on computers, http://www.zhornsoftware.co.uk/stickies/index.html, this site provides an electronic form of sticky notes.
As a teacher, a common resource is other teachers. Ann Brundige, a teacher who has worked for many high profile companies has created a free teacher resouce found at http://www.annbrundigestudio.com. This link provides many resources for teachers, including activities for each grade level, clipart and how-to activities.

Another really interesting resource is STELLARIUM. This very pleasing resources is found at www.stellerium.org. This is essentially a virtual solarium right on your computer. You can localize the view of the sky to personalize it for your students. However, my very favorite part of stellaruim, is the link that has various cultures interpretations of the constellations. More and more we are learing how we need to have multi-cultural classrooms. This provides such a great opportunity to do so. Stars are a universal concept, which all students are familiar with. Using common ground to learn about different cultures I feel is the best way to go about multi-cultural education.