Page 68 - Resources and Support for the Online Educator

Leveraging Technology for Teacher Efficiency and Effectivenes • CHAPTER 11

collection is identified not only by grade-level ranges, but also by icons that iden-
tify the resources at the site, detailed explanations of the site’s features, and an “In
the Classroom” write-up on how to use the site with students. As all the resources
are sampled and reviewed by teachers, the realistic descriptions will help you decide
whether particular resources will work well with your students. TeachersFirst also
has resource collections for universal topics, such as 100th Day of School, Martin
Luther King, Jr. Day, Earthquakes, Internet Safety, Presidents’ Day, Measurement,
and Elections. These collections pull together topic-specific resources to save you
from searching for them.

VOICES OF EXPERIENCE

A. Ruth Okoye, EdD, Director of K–12 Initiatives
The Source for Learning, Reston, Virginia

TeachersFirst is an evolving community for teachers. The
TeachersFirst team started back in the early days of search
engines—trying to index the web in a way that would help
teachers. In the 20 years that we’ve been around, our mission
hasn’t changed: saving our colleagues time by finding the “good
stuff” on the web and sharing ways that teachers can use the
free, web-based resources that we’ve found.
Helping teachers to integrate technology in their classrooms requires that we
continue to grow and change. Twenty years ago teachers really needed help to
find materials that they could use. Today, they need our help to understand how
the materials available could be used. To answer that need, we have a number of
ways to help teachers learn about technology implementation.
We try to differentiate for teachers as much as we can, by offering different types
of professional learning opportunities:

• Our blog offers a variety of posts by different members of our team. Each
blogger has expertise in a different area: tech tools, social learning, and
media literacy, to name a few.

Continued

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Integrating Technology in the Classroom: Tools to Meet the Needs of Every Student 68