Description of one or more resource depositories or lists with materials relevant to my interests

Description of one or more resource depositories or lists with materials relevant to my interests: Let’s see – being the computer teacher, I have many. And I’m assuming that by “my interests” we’re keeping to the professional side and listing educational options. I love http://internet4classrooms.com, the only problem with it is I really need to search through to find the best interactive activities and bookmark them for use on all the machines, especially since they changed their site around to make it more organized than it used to be. They focus on language arts and math skills.

If you want to learn all about Internet safety, try http://www.webwisekids.org, or http://isafe.org, or http://www.netsmartzkids.org. All are leading websites in teaching and providing resources for educators in teaching Internet safety. Since the passage of Illinois State Law, mandating the teaching of Internet safety to grade school students, as well as similar laws in other states, like Virginia, the Internet has exploded with sites to help parents, educators and kids. Even Disney has gotten in on the act, with http://home.disney.go.com/guestservices/safety, formerly known as Surfwell Island, but for parents.

Any site that has multiple activities for younger students, like http://abcya.com or http://littlefingers.com - online without payment, of course, is a huge benefit to my classroom. For less curriculum-based skills, http://funschool.com is terrific on “special” days, like holidays, filled with interactive games that the students like. For fun, most of the younger students also have free or subscription penguins on http://clubpenguin.com or webkinz on http://webkinz.com. http://addictinggames.com is also popular with all ages of my students, but you can run into inappropriate games, especially by Archdiocese definitions – any shooting game that uses guns, even to kill zombies, and games like that are technically banned.

Where purchasing comes in, I use http://micrograms.com and http://mackiev.com. Both have terrific listings for Macintosh software. I also use my Scholastic Software Club points to purchase software for free from http://scholastic.com. Just like the book clubs when we were kids, I pass out flyers to the whole school of students, allowing them to purchase home software at a discount from Scholastic. In return for their orders, I get points and get to trade them for software. It’s one of the only ways we get new software for the school, unless I buy it.