13 Peer-Recommended Resources For Teachers of All Subject Areas & Grade Levels
Over 200 Rutgers Alternate Route candidates recommended free online resources that can be useful for teachers of all content areas. The resources included in this segment of our blog series on NJ Professional Standards for Teachers (NJPTS) aligned teacher resources are relevant to teachers working with lower and upper grade levels and diverse demographics. Each resource includes a brief summary of the value the site offers and provides other teachers with tips for maximizing the sites content and features. Whether you’ve been teaching for a few weeks or many years, you are bound to find something of value in this treasure trove of resources.
“They compile quality studies and rate the effectiveness of different programs by content area, behavior management, and education level.”
“What Works Clearinghouse also had some interesting connection to the arts and resources for early childhood teachers. I noticed several resources on pedagogy in early childhood education as well as curriculum materials. ‘The Creative Curriculum’ for teaching about social studies & science (incorporating math & literacy) in early childhood was of particular interest to me and possibly for teachers that work with young students.”
Institutes On Academic Diversity
“The Institutes On Academic Diversity site includes helpful information about differentiated instruction. It explains the differentiated instruction model and recommends ways to build a learning community, and how to incorporate the practice of flexible grouping where students work in a variety of arrangements to complete classwork.”
“I really enjoyed a specific video that refers to "Meeting the Needs of Diverse Learners", since my content area is special education. I wanted to share this website with everyone because there are tons of videos and articles offered for teachers to view and utilize different strategies to use while teaching students. It's also split up into grade levels and content areas (general education areas and arts), which is helpful for content specific teachers to get specific ideas/tips on varying strategies to use.”
“Understanding Fractions through Real World Problems- The Teaching Channel is loaded with short videos showing how to teach different strategies, concepts and techniques. I liked this video because the teacher modeled how to divide watermelons two different ways using real world problems to engage the children. There are also QA tabs, teacher tabs and deep dives. Deep dives encourage you to dig deeper into your teaching profession.”
“This site offers a multitude of videos related to science, and although I teach high school, some of these videos help explain topics at the most fundamental level. Not only this, but they offer me the opportunity to view and gather ideas for how I may want to address a lesson.”
“As a first grade teacher I have difficulty branching away from English/Language Arts (ELA), Reading, and Math. Teaching Social Studies and Science can sometimes be slightly neglected and even forgotten. This website contains fun content, including videos that are fun for students to watch and they end with a discussion question that can be the basis of a lesson and discussion.”
“This site allows you to create your own quizzes, puzzle builder, lesson builder and make them available to the students electronically. This helps draw in our students’ attention through a media rich environment. The software is very user friendly so you do not need to be a techy in order to get started and have your first lesson or puzzle assignment on the way. These features are found under the heading of productivity tools.”
“The interactive aspect of this site is what I love about it the most. There are tons of videos for students to watch, which make the learning process even more interesting. Teachers can filter the content to match the grade level they teach and then select the type of content they wish to provide to students (i.e., audio, video, image, interactive).”
“There are great videos on this site to support teaching the dryer areas of chemistry. I like to talk about and have students put together their own periodic table as a project. Incorporating the history of the periodic table and how it was constructed makes this project even more entertaining.”
Do2Learn
“This is an excellent resource for teachers of students with disabilities. It is created by experts in the field, and is specifically designed to assist students with special needs. It has many educational activities, games, and visuals. It also provides many strategies for teaching children with special needs, including Autism Spectrum Disorder, Attention Deficit Disorder, and Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, to name a few. The "Teacher Toolbox" tab on this website links the reader to various categories in Classroom Management, Learning Strategies, and Educational Resources. The website is full of resources for a teachers to help their students improve their academic and social skills.”
“This website provides free curriculum strategies and techniques for teaching general ed as well as special ed students. Under the link of Teaching Strategies, there is a drop down for special needs. This connects the reader with various resources for classroom management, such as how to adapt your classroom effectively for students with disabilities, printables for special needs lessons, etc... There truly is an enormous amount of articles and information on this website. I also found this website very user-friendly and easy to navigate.”
“As far as sites I can recommend, I use Quizlet quite a bit when I teach vocabulary. You might think that high school students are too old to play games in class, but they really enjoy playing the matching and gravity games to learn their vocabulary words.”
“This site is one we use for grades 3-6 to reinforce vocabulary. The students can use flashcards to study for their tests. They can also play games utilizing the vocab words. For younger grades, the teacher inputs the words and definition for the class. Older students do it themselves. They can use it at home as well.”
“The Teacher Toolkit has a wealth of resources for helping bilingual students communicate their thoughts. Although, their tool is designed for bilingual teachers who teach math, their technology is beneficial to bilingual students across content areas. Sentence stems provide scaffolding that eases students into speaking or writing without the added pressure of thinking about how to correctly formulate their response.”
“The Teacher Toolkit provides different visual examples of lesson plans and classroom management approaches. Teachers can reference this site for content knowledge, pedagogical assistance, classroom management guidance, and help in coming up with fun ideas for the classroom.”
“I often consult the reading strategies tab on this website, solely because I can always learn different methods for teaching reading strategies to students, especially those who struggle with reading and comprehension skills. It provides different ways for students to be able to comprehend what they're reading by using varying methods that meet students learning needs (kinesthetic, visual, auditory, etc.).”
“This site helps teachers learn how to use the 5 C's—communication, culture, connections, comparisons, and communities—to help students achieve foreign language proficiency. It also provides instruction on how to properly assess students.”
“This interactive site contains tons and tons of lessons. For ELA teachers, there are many pieces of content based on fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama/film. Whatever aspect ELA teachers are working on, they're sure to find something on Annenberg.”
“Annenberg Learner is an incredibly useful site for teaching High School ELA because it provides very specific details and steps for preformulated classroom tasks, lessons, and procedures. Teachers can differentiate between grade level and there are endless thematic categories for ELA teachers to explore.”
“Great site for supportive videos. Especially after we have been working on a unit, I like to show a video that allows students to review the material. A nice change of pace to intersperse. Also good if you have an unplanned sub day!”
“Annenberg Learner has a video series called Destinos. The episodes are contextualized and students learn vocabulary and a grammar function in each lesson. The site has a few resources to accompany the videos, as well. I think that this may be a good way to talk about Spanish and Latin American culture, as it seems that the protagonists travel to many countries. Furthermore, the videos are all online, making them easy to access and show in class.”
“Ted Ed Lessons is a tool that my co-teacher and I recently started incorporating in our lessons a few weeks ago. Instead of having a question to prompt students engagement in the topic for the day, we show a Ted Ed lesson. These lessons are short videos that introduce the main concepts of a topic. We have found this resource beneficial because it provides more information than a single question, as well as more engagement from students since it is a video.”
“Khan Academy has online lessons for students approaching college level. Their visual notes are perfect for drawing out tough topics ranging from states of matter to quantum mechanics.”
“Video-based lectures. Khan Academy is an invaluable resource that uses slow-paced, clear lectures and colorful drawings in order to illustrate and explain concepts.”
“Khan Academy is an excellent website that has instructional videos and practice on every math skill from KG-12. Students have a personalized dashboard where their progress on skills are shown. Teachers can add all their students as a class and track their progress and activity on the site. Teachers can assign specific skills for students to complete as remedy. The site can be used for extra classwork or homework or as a technology center during math workshop. Very motivational for students since the work is online and they can track their progress, fix their mistakes right away.”
Pass My Exams
“Pass My Exams is a website that provides FREE, comprehensive, fully illustrated and easy to follow revision notes with examples, and covers topics in Physics, Chemistry, and Biology that are convenient to structure lessons or activities around (or simply to supplement).”
Identity, Privilege, and Oppression Resources
“This document can be used as a resource when teaching about social identity. It includes A LOT of examples of how privilege and oppression play out for people of different identities.”
Heather Ngoma has over 25 years of experience collaborating with educators across New Jersey to drive education innovation. She currently serves as the Director of the Rutgers-GSE Alternate Route Program in the Department of Learning and Teaching, a program which helps career changers, recent college graduates, and other aspiring education professionals become licensed teachers in New Jersey. Follow her on Twitter @heatherngoma.
