1. Thinkfinity.org Give yourself plenty of time to explore this website. The site contains tens of thousands of standards-based lesson plans, interactive tools, reference materials, research lists, and more. There are resources for educators, students, parents, and after-school groups. It also has a dynamic search function that makes it easy to find what you’re looking for. Thinkfinity is sponsored by the Verizon Foundation in partnership with numerous content partners including NCTE, NCTM, IRA, American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Kennedy Center, National Geographic and more. The content is standards-based and reviewed by these partners to ensure that it is up-to-date, accurate, unbiased, and appropriate for students.
2. Filamentality.com Filamentality is part of the AT&T Knowledge Network (more about that in future Fab Fives). It is a simple tool (fill-in-the-blank) for creating and sharing hotlists, webquests, and other online learning activities. In the end, the activity is posted on the Internet, and you can share it with your students without having to know anything about creating web pages. In addition to creating your own activities, you can search for thousands of online learning activities that other educators have posted.
3. Xpeditions Atlas at National Geographic Access to hundreds of printer-friendly maps (up-to-date) that you and your students can copy and/or print. Choose to print/copy them blank or with details.
4. Searchme.com Jen Kowal showed me this site. Searchme.com is a visual search engine that lets you see an image of what you’re searching for. As you start typing your search term, categories appear that relate to your query. Choose a category, and you’ll see pictures of web pages that answer your search. You can review these pages quickly to find just the information you’re looking for, before you click through. Users can also create “stacks” of web pages that they can access, name and share with others. This allows researchers to quickly find, view, evaluate, organize, and share web resources.
5. Animoto.com A fun and easy tool for producing awesome videos from still photos. You simply upload your pictures, choose a piece of music from many different genres, and Animoto does the rest. The end-result is a professionally produced video with some amazing effects and it only takes a few minutes. You can produce an unlimited number of 30-second videos at no cost. They also have options for producing longer videos for a fee.