Never have I ever seen so many resources in one location. And by resources, I mean things that seriously lessen the intimidation of the profession they call teaching. Kan-ed, thank you for being ridiculously cool.
Before I begin discussing my findings on the site, I just have to say that the thing that I perhaps do not enjoy in this site is the homepage. It is very cluttered with so many links and images. Now, I believe that the teacher can change this once they have their own classroom. When I have my own class, I will make sure that I organize it so that I am not so overwhelmed by all of the business going on in the homepage.
The first link I explored was “Thinkfinity”, a resource powered by Verizon. It turns out that this website is designed to allow teachers access to innumerable lesson plans. The site is designed easily so that all the teacher needs to do is enter a keyword into the search bar and Thinkfinity goes and collects all of the lesson plans that has to do with that keyword. I entered “space shuttle”, and 9 lessons came up, each pertaining to various grade levels. If a search comes back with thousands of results, then the toolbar on the right allows teachers to narrow their search to specific things, a tool that I really like and will use often. What’s more is that this website tells which lessons are aligned with the state standards, something that all teachers today need to be aware of. It will even go as far to produce the indicator of the standard so that the teacher knows exactly which standard he or she is teaching for. What a brilliant idea. The unfortunate thing is that it does not have the standards for all states, for example Colorado, but it does have the majority of the states. After you do a search and look at the standards, it provides a link directly to the lesson plan from which you can plan your teaching.
After I went back to the Kan-ed homepage, I decided to explore “Heritage Quest”, a database of census forms and other historical items relating to real people (kind of like an advanced geneology.com). I decided to look up people from both sides of my family, just for fun. You can look through census forms, newspaper documents, Revolutionary War data and other things to try and find information on a certain person. While I did not find any information on my family (I mean I’m not sure, I do not know my relatives from the 1880’s, sorry), it was very interesting to go in and do searches and look at documents. It is hard because the earliest forms they have are from the 1930’s.
The other resource I checked out was the “Kansas Education Resource Center (KERC)”. What is nice about this website is that all of its links and resources are read over and approved by actual educators who know what teachers are looking for. Kind of like Thinkfinity, KERC allows you to go in and choose what subject, like math, writing, geography, etc., you want and then it gives you the standards and if there are lesson plans for that particular standard and subject, it will give you a link to it. Seriously, these sites are so useful and convenient.
I cannot wait until I am a teacher and can customize my Kan-ed to the things I want, but all of these resources will definitely be on it because they are beyond useful.
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