Resource+Links

//Scroll down to see additional categories//.

(Planning Acquisition Lessons) || ||
 * Quick Reference Guide
 * Picture Gallery || Link to photographs depiciting various LFS strategies in actual classrooms. ||

Activating Strategies
 * Discovery Education || Show students a video clip with focus points. Follow with discussion (pairs) or give them a writing prompt. Many of the videos at Discovery Education provide a Teacher's Guide and other resources to help you with plannning activities. (Not sure how to use Discovery Education? Contact Dr. Sipe for assistance. ||
 * Webspiration || Create interactive graphic organizers that multiple users may access at the same time, ||
 * Webbing Tool || This tool allows your students to create their own graphic organizer from home or school. Provide a topic or word that you are about to study and have them map it out. ||
 * Webbing Tool || This tool allows your students to create their own graphic organizer from home or school. Provide a topic or word that you are about to study and have them map it out. ||

Summarizing and Extending Refining
 * Literary Elements Mapping || Students can map out the key literary elements of character, setting, conflict, and resolution as prewriting for their own fiction or as analysis of a text by another author in this secondary-level interactive. ||
 * Persuasion Tool || Want your students to write a persuasive essay on a topic you just covered? Have them use this tool to help them plan out their arguments before they start writing. ||
 * Character Trading Cards || The interactive Character Trading Cards tool is a fun and useful way for students to explore a character in a book that they are reading or as a prewriting exercise when creating characters for original stories. ||
 * Animoto || Much like Photostory, Animoto allows students to create a project from photos and audio. One big advantage here is that Animoto is completely online, which means students will have access to their projects even from home. ||
 * **Exploratree** || Thinking Guides are tools or frameworks for thinking through an issue and considering different aspects or perspectives. They can help to develop thinking skills. ||
 * **Thinkport** || Graphic organizers that can be downloaded in HTML, PDF or Word ||

Vocabulary
 * Visuwords || This site allows you to look up words and see their meaning and association with other words and concepts--all in a graphic format. You can make your own diagrams with your class, too. ||  ||
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: large;">Quizlet || This is another tool you can use to make flashcards... well, sort of. You can make simple quizzes that act much like flashcards. Their sample quizlet quizzes you on US capitals, but you can easily make this an interactive review of vocab words for you classroom. ||
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: large;">Visual Dictionary || Merriam-Webster has created an online visual dictionary that is free to use. This could be a helpful tool for introducing vocab words to your students, so they have a visual representation of the word. It is growing almost daily, so if it doesn't have the word you are looking for, check back. ||
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 130%; vertical-align: sub;">Wordle || Remember word splashes from LFS training? Well, this is the technology version of a word splash. You can make a graphic with words in different color schemes, different sizes, different directions, etc. The finished word splash is easy to share online or print. ||  ||   ||
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 120%; vertical-align: sub;">Everything Vocabulary! || West Virginia Department of Education resources and links for the development of vocabulary. ||
 * **ABCYA** || ABCya! Word Clouds are graphical representations or words. A Word Cloud can represent any main idea or topic based on the words used. ABCya! Word Clouds are fun and exciting because they allow for creativity and imagination beyond lists or graphic organizers. ||
 * **Solution-Tree.com** || Marzano reproducible documents for vocabulary ||
 * **Academic Vocabulary** || This site has a variety of games and activities K-12 for building vocabulary. There are a handful of games that can be saved to your computer and tweaked for your content. ||

<span style="color: #008000; font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode','Lucida Grande',sans-serif; font-size: 130%;">Other Resources
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 130%;">Classroom Games using PowerPoint || Templates and ready-made games for a variety of grades and subjects. ||
 * <span style="color: #008000; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 130%;">More Games for Learning || Templates and ready-made games to support learning. ||
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 130%;">LFS Connections Newsletters || Link for current and past LFS Connections Newsletters. Filter by date or topic to find great ideas and suggestions for implementing Learning-Focused Strategies within your classroom. ||
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 130%;">Teacher Training || Excellent online teacher training and support to Integrate technology tools within your lessons. ||
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 130%;">SAS Portal || Pennsylvania Department of Education Standards Aligned System and supporting components. ||
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 120%;">Google Earth || Take your students on a tour of places you are going to study! Whether it be places mentioned in the Shakespeare play you are about to read, or a trip up the Nile through Egypt, your students will get to see where they will be studying before they study it! You can extend this activity by adding a discussion or writing prompt (example: looking a the geography of Egypt during our Google Earth tour of the Nile, why do you think the ancient Egyptians settled there? or What conclusion could you draw about the theme of the story we are about to read from looking at the sites you just saw on our Google Earth tour?) ||
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 120%; vertical-align: sub;">Teaching with Technology || Use technology to enhance student learning--this site provides links and resources to help you get started with practical ideas for the use of technology in the classroom. ||
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 120%; vertical-align: sub;">Know Your Students! || Before you differentiate and plan for collaborative pairs, teams, and activities, you'll want to check out these resources--especially for the beginning of the year or a new term/semester. ||
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 120%;">LFS & Tech Integration || A great site to link //best practices// for instruction along with 21st Century skills and NET profciencies. ||
 * UNCW.edu/EdGames || This site is for educators who want to use games to motivate and engage students but don't have to time to put it all together. There are numerous templates all ready for downloading. Users just have to add their own content. These would be great for review, to assess prior knowlege of a topic, to problem-solve. The types of questions utilized by the user will move the games to different levels of thinking. ||
 * [|Mr. Printables] || Free site that provides printable flash card activities to print out. (elementary) ||
 * [|Essay Map] || Essay Map is an interactive graphic organizer that guides students through the writing process. ||
 * [|Easy Note Cards] || Free site that allows students and teachers to create a wide range of note cards (flash cards). ||
 * [|Timeline] || It allows students to organize their notes into engaging timelines that features five different units of measure namely: date, time,event,entry or other. Students ,upon selecting the appropriate entry, can add specific descriptions and place it on the timeline. To navigate through the timeline they simply need to click on the relevant entry they want and then there they go. It is really a great tool for teachers to use with their students ||
 * [|Graphic Map] || The Graphic Map is designed to assist teachers and students in reading and writing activities. The organizer focuses on charting the high and low points related to a particular item or group of items, such as chapters in a book, amounts of money spent, events during a day, month, year, or life, or scenes in a play. The Graphic Map creates a graphic representation of these high and low points that displays related images and descriptions. The interactive can be used as a prewriting activity, as students map ideas for an autobiography; as a postreading activity, as students map the significance of events in a story; and as a reflection and assessment activity, as students map the high and low points of their inquiry process. ||
 * [|Notetaker] || It is mainly a hierarchical outlining tool which allows students to organize their information into up to five levels. This is indeed a great organizational tool that educators can use to take notes on their readings and research. It can also be used to plan, revise and organize writings., ||
 * [|The Webbing Tool] || Students will like the Webbing Tool as it will help them outline their ideas in such appealing graphic representations. They can use it to analyze the reading passages they have in the curriculum. They can also use it as a prewriting task to brainstorm all the ideas and notes they want to include in their writing. ||
 * [|Story Map] || Students can use the four key elements of the Story Map to develop multiple characters either in preparation for writing their own pieces of fiction or as a reflection tool to analyze the characters from stories they have read. ||
 * [|Plot Diagram] || Students can use the four key elements of the Story Map to develop multiple characters either in preparation for writing their own pieces of fiction or as a reflection tool to analyze the characters from stories they have read. ||
 * [|Persuasion Map] || **The Persuasion Map** is a great graphic organizer offered for free by Read Write Think. It allows students to map out their arguments for a persuasive or argumentative piece of writing. The Persuasion map starts with a thesis that describes one side of an arguable viewpoint and then moves on to state the main reasons that would convince someone of the validity of your thesis before it ends up with a conclusion that summarize the arguments mentioned in the essay. ||
 * [|Compare and Contrast Map] || <span style="background-color: white; color: #777777; font-family: georgia,'times new roman',serif; font-size: 13px;">Compare and Contrast Map, as its name suggests, is a tool that allows students to draw their differences and similarities about anything they want, be it characters in a text , political system of countries , or simply state what they like and dislike about a lesson plan. ||
 * [|Bio Cube] || <span style="background-color: white; color: #777777; font-family: georgia,'times new roman',serif; font-size: 13px;">It allows students to summarize a person’s biography into a neat and well organized sort of outline. It has an intuitive interface where info are organized into different categories. The final printout you get after you are done with customization can be folded into a fun cube shape that can be used for future reference. ||
 * [|Crossword Puzzles] || <span style="background-color: white; color: #777777; font-family: georgia,'times new roman',serif;">It allows you to make interesting puzzles very easily and at the instance of a click. ||
 * [|Teachnology] || Provides printable graphic organizers to use for a variety of purposes. ||
 * [|Scholastic] || Scholastic is one of the best ** graphic organizer ** providers online. It offers a wide range of graphics covering different topics particularly Reading Comprehension ||
 * [|Teacher Vision] || This collection of ready-to-use graphic organizers will help children classify ideas and communicate more effectively. All of our printable graphic organizers are designed to facilitate understanding of key concepts by allowing students to visually identify key points and ideas. By using graphic organizers across all subject areas, you will be empowering your students to master subject-matter faster and more efficiently. We have graphic organizers for reading, science, writing, math, and for general use. You'll also find blank printable templates like graph paper, dot arrays, and other useful tools. ||
 * [|Educational Oasis] || Educational Oasis provides **free graphic organizers** for teachers . These organizers are in the form of downloadable and printable sheet . The site contains several organizers tabbed under different categories . Some of these organizers can be filled out before being printed . ||
 * [| Holt] || This site provides a variety of graphic organizers that can be printed in PDF format. ||