45 Go-To Education Resources Alternate Route Candidates Love
Since the COVID-19 outbreak began, educators have realized that sharing resources is more important than ever. Teachers across the globe are connecting virtually to share best practices and professional development resources.
Sharing resources is important to education because it benefits everyone. Educators are introduced to new teaching methods and tools and students benefit by having an engaging educational experience.
Recently, we connected with many Alternate Route candidates on which websites they use for educators and why. Below are 45 go-to education resources for multiple subjects that come highly recommended.
COMPUTER SCIENCE
“The site’s benefits during this distance-learning time are vital to the teachers and students. First, it helps the teachers find instructional videos that can be useful to the students when it comes for them to understand and complete their assignments.”
-Max J.
“Using Scratch, my students have a workspace for creating programs using block-chain coding. This site has been very helpful with allowing the students to take the training wheels off and be creative with their coding ideas. It has given them a place to emulate coding provided by me.”
-David S.
ENGLISH/LANGUAGE ARTS
“This is a fun website for students from K-6, that has interactive games and lessons for a variety of subjects. This is great for students to use when they have down time or can even be incorporated into the lesson.”
-Raymond A.
“Actively Learn is a free website for educators. The site contains a multitude of activities and readings that are differentiated and provide templates for teacher input, comments, additions and deletions. The readings also include embedded questions with modifications for special learners. There are embedded video clips with accompanying higher-order thinking questions. Further, the articles, etc. can be uploaded directly from the site to Google Classroom.”
-Jennifer V.
“This site is great for first-year teachers that need assistance on creating lessons, classwork, homework and projects for students. There are a multitude of resources of educators who use the common core standards and those who don't. This website was extremely beneficial in my first year of teaching.”
-Kyra J.
ESL
“There are easy, short videos on many subjects you can show your students. They also have quizzes you can use and short-answer questions.”
-Karina G.
“BrainPOP ELL has a placement test and lessons at three different levels for beginning to intermediate ELLs. It is full of interesting lessons that are good for elementary and middle school students. Each lesson has a video that is 3-5 minutes long and covers engaging topics. There are a variety of activities related to the video topic, including vocabulary and grammar, to help strengthen language for the students.”
-Michele G.
“You can make flashcards for students and read on ways to engage your students in learning and remembering using flashcards.”
-Kayla M.
“It contains information about Chinese history and culture.”
-Ting L.
“This is a wonderful resource for any busy ESL teacher. There are over 1,000 printable lessons, more than 3,000 flashcards, assessment forms, warm-ups, teaching aids, digital activities, online homework and reporting tools. Since the COVID-19 crisis, the site has been hosting free webinars to help teachers navigate their digital tools. Unfortunately, the site is not free, but the cost is not terribly unreasonable.”
-Meghan P.
GENERAL TEACHING
“Access to free textbooks, educated- created content and support for publishing tools that make content creation easy.”
-Taiwo Adigun
“This is a bilingual site for educators and families of English language learners. The site provides free, research-based information, activities, advice to parents and educators.”
-Melody M.
“I teach high school and middle school ELA. CommonLit is practical, engaging and productive. The platform offers a variety of texts and curricula for science, history English (fiction and non) that are easy for students to interact with. The site is productive in that it includes many features to track and organize data. Obviously, the various metrics you receive after any summative or formative assessment is variable treasure trove for looking at deficiencies in areas of expected mastery and the self reflection that accompanies that. The site also offers ENSAP translation.”
-Michael S.
“This website has a variety of multimedia-based videos introduced to help teach life skills to students. This website includes videos, worksheets and activities for students.”
-Janell D.
“The CTE site is a good site for me because I was able to find a lot of information around video production. This is a course I may be teaching next year and if so, I need to create a curriculum that will allow the students to start at the beginner level and then grow to a full production. This site has provided me all the information and resources to help me create a curriculum.”
-Tanisha G.
“A huge resource site for what you might need in a special education setting. This includes things like behavior management and social skills.”
-Scott A.
“I really like using EdPuzzle because it allows you to upload any video on any topic, including from YouTube. You can then embed questions for students to answer in order to check for their understanding. They offer different types of questions, including multiple-choice questions that are automatically graded and open-ended questions. You can also find videos with questions that other teachers have already created and make a copy of it in order to make edits. This helps save a lot of time when creating assignments, and I can also edit, remove or add questions based on grade level and the needs of my students. Also when grading, I can analyze student responses, provide feedback using the comment feature and also adjust grades when necessary.”
-Jordan A.
Edulastic
“On this website, teachers can create a classroom where they can assign both summative and formative assessments. The assignments can also be shared on Google Classroom and are graded automatically.”
-Asifa A.
“I look at Edutopia almost everyday. I love the coverage of specific topics, current events and just about anything and everything timely and relevant. Edutopia also has a great social media presence.”
-Ronni B.
“edWeb.net is a free social network and professional-learning community that can help you with online learning and collaboration. It offers personalized professional learning, can be public or private and a community hub or specifically a Zoom hub. You can earn CE Certificates and view it Live or On Demand. They offer personalized professional learning.”
-Monique S.
Exploring Nature Education Resource K-12
“This site has samples of lesson plans that can guide first-year teachers or any classroom teacher/coaches who want to be adept with content and essential questions by topic and lesson objective. It also has anchor charts and posters.”
-Margaret M.
“During distance learning, I used this very helpful resource for my MS Word and PowerPoint courses. It includes videos and lesson plans.”
-Valeria A.
“This site has instructional lessons for grades K-8 on all content areas. There are pre-made lessons that are interactive and engaging. They also offer tools to customize pre-existing lessons or to create your own. Due to COVID-19 it is free, but it usually offers 30 days free and then charges a membership fee.”
-Daniela S.
“Newsela is a great site because it has short articles and text excerpts on all topics at multiple listed Lexile levels. Students can engage at the Lexile level that is most appropriate for them. Newsela will eventually predict what level students should be and show the articles at that level automatically. There are many writing prompts and quizzes (SAT/ACT style) for each article you can find, and you can assign this via Google Classroom. It is good for all high school, but I'm sure it works for middle school as well.”
-Leslie P.
“The site has all the resources that a new teacher will need - ranging from homework, assignment and lesson planning.”’
-Chioma E.
HISTORY
Stanford History Education Group
“Lessons are designed around primary sources, which give students the opportunity to examine historical issues from multiple perspectives, evaluate the accuracy and bias of each source and draw their own conclusions. The Reading Like a Historian program provides teachers with open-ended questions to stimulate critical thinking. Modifications of primary documents are also included to assist readers of different reading levels.”
-Tim G.
“Primary source history lesson plans and resources dedicated to historical thinking skills. They also have a media-literacy curriculum.”
-Christopher S.
MATH
“GeoGebra is a free, dynamic mathematics software package used by teachers of mathematics. Geogebra allows students to actively and, through the sharing of the work online, socially construct an understanding of geometry. This program allows for simple visualizations of possibly complex geometric concepts, and helps enhance a student's understanding of those concepts. Connect to Google Classroom.”
-Lisandra D.
“The benefits of Khan Academy are: they show various ways to solve math problems, there are videos students can watch (which is helpful for visual learners) and they give students work to complete for mastery before they can move on to another assignment.”
-Kamal R.
National Council of Teachers of Mathematics
“Contains many classroom resources, professional-development webinars and workshops that you can enroll in.”
-Matthew P.
PERFORMING ARTS
“Great articles, videos and games about dance, dance history, choreographing dances, and more.”
-Julia H.
“A reason why I love this website is because it offers multiple resources for dance. Each resource is super creative and well thought out. The ideas that they have for dance are essential in my curriculum.”
-Kassidy G.
Virtual Learning Resources for Music Educators Ideas
“NAFME, the National Association for Music Education, has put together various webinars for the purpose of helping with virtual learning. There have been webinars taking place with experts throughout the country on a variety of distance learning-related topics, which are all available here for free. This is a wealth of riches, on subjects from social-emotional learning to music advocacy.”
-Benjamin R.
PHYSICAL AND HEALTH EDUCATION
“This website is great for my subject area: health. There is an almost endless amount of material for me to use for the different levels of the school, 9-12. Also, the material on this website is new and relates well to current events in health and wellness.”
-Matthew A.
“PE CENTRAL is an excellent web source for health/PE teachers because there are lessons for all units from grades K-12. PE Central lessons also have adaptations for diverse learners.”
-Jaimie P.
“This site offers a variety of professional-development opportunities, using a number of different platforms. The site also details the standard lessons for PE and health should be based around and is an essential tool for any new teacher.”
-Craig B.
SCIENCE
“This resource gives concise, 5-10 minutes labs that students are able to do at home to reinforce in class topics. Labs are easy to follow and reiterate the key scientific concepts of NGSS.”
-Colleen M.
“This site is extremely helpful for geoscience educators. It provides free lessons and activities that include interdisciplinary problems and interactions with data. It also provides the educator with helpful information and advice for how to integrate scientific ideas into the classroom.It is easily adaptable to high school classes.”
-Jessica B.
“Provides fun, interactive ways for students to apply science concepts. Typically, the lessons are presented as games. The site has divisions for games that are instructional and games that are meant to be more of a review. The activities are all standard aligned. The site has resources both for math and science.”
-Nanditha L.
“I find this site to be a great teaching resource. There are dozens of interactive simulations on chemistry concepts such as balancing chemical equations, acid-base chemistry, alpha-decay and atomic interactions to name a few. These simulations are a great way to engage students in chemistry topics because they get to see what actually happens in a chemical system. These can be integrated in the classroom in many ways, such as demonstrations, as virtual labs and as guided inquiries.”
-Kananke L.
WORLD LANGUAGES AND CULTURES
“This website was created by language scholar, Bill VanPatten. Here, world language educators can find resources (including podcasts, videos, books, and articles). More specifically, educators can find episodes of a Podcast led by VanPatten on the matter of second language acquisition and strategies that can be implemented in the classroom.”
-Jessica S.
“Nearpod is great for virtual trips for students. I already tried it twice and my students liked it. I took them for a virtual trip to Paris. It is easy to use.”
-Naima O.
“This is a great review tool that students get so excited about. I have students ask me everyday if we can play kahoot again. We do a lot of vocabulary in Spanish class, so this is great for refreshing or to try and get a lot of use out of the words. I have the students write their names in so I can save them and actually use it for my assessment of their knowledge on vocabulary.”
-Lauren M.
“This is a resource for teaching Spanish for high school students. It is based on video programs that teach speaking, listening and comprehension skills in Spanish. I think it is very helpful since it immerses students with native speakers in everyday situations. the culture, accents and dialects from some Spanish speaking countries such Spain, Mexico, Puerto Rico and Argentina are introduced into the lessons. Another useful tool is that the function of closed caption on these videos are available in Spanish, so the students have the opportunity to familiarize the sound and the words.”
-Girinelda C.
“Words Without Borders is for world literature high school classes and offers literature in translation from non-English language countries. Additionally, it provides biographical, cultural, contextual background information and offers suggestions for building lessons.”
-Liesl O.
If you’re considering following your dream of teaching, Rutgers Alternate Route can offer you the support and training you need to succeed. Be sure to follow Rutgers Alternate Route on Twitter for more information and stories from the field of education.
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.
