By Mary E. Odom
This website for Educators uses a color theme throughout its pages. Proves to be enjoyable to "page" through. The graphics are interesting and informative (includes a connection to a printable lesson plan relating to the same head graphic the give away in a poster).
It is organized with the teacher in mind. It includes a tutorial and links to other partner sites that also contain lesson plans that are standards’ based.
Some of the partner sites can be slow to open (especially Xpeditions), but worthwhile if one has a computer that can handle the graphics.
I find the overall quality of the site very informative and an exciting tool to use by teachers and middle school to high school students.
www.mcrel.org/standards-benchmarks/
This is by John S. Kendall and Robert J. Marzano. It has simple, clean use of color and graphics, which is perfect for this type of information.
It is a good resource for the search for Standards-Based Education at the National level. There is an informative section on the "eight questions you should ask before implementing standards-based education at the local level". I find this to be a good reference site.
http://k12science.ati.stevens-tech.edu/curriculum/
Again, a site that uses simple color themes and graphics, but gets the point across. There is information that facilitates the use of the Internet as a classroom tool. Because it was created as a part of the a National Science Foundation grant, the NJNIE project staff developed some lesson plans which allow students to use real-time data gathered from the Internet to participate real scientific analysis and discovery on a variety of topics ranging from the aurora borealis to earthquakes. The claim is that if you "are teaching first grade or college prep, these lesson plans are an opportunity to try unique lessons that can only be done using Internet resources."
Though not all of the "contact" links worked, the main links to the scientific data sources seemed to work, if not a little slow on some. This is still a worthwhile site to begin science lessons.
This is a great site that contains hundreds of education resources supported by agencies across the U.S. Federal government. Everything is clearly laid out and by subject as well. First downloading the home page is a little slow, but the graphics are clean and meaningful. This has been the best site I have found at keeping information up-to-date as well as organized.
The National Education Association has a site that is both visually pleasing and helpful to educators. They are using a mixture of graphics and animation (one of the pictures above changes every few seconds). Made it a little slow in coming in, but not enough for me to go searching elsewhere.
It contains two ways of navigation through their site, pull down menu and clickable links on the right. Going through the other pages of the site proved to be faster that its home page. It is like the Federal Resource Page in that it is very current.
http://www.thegateway.org/index.html
"The Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM) project is a consortium effort to provide educators with quick and easy access to the substantial, but uncataloged, collections of educational materials found on various federal, state, university, non-profit, and commercial Internet sites." This site is barely a year old, but I found to be useful search engine for educators. It does take some reading at first to figure out the best way to use it.
The graphics and color are pleasing and do not interfere with its main function. It loads fairly quickly and offers a unique access to out of the ordinary lesson plans not always listed in other educational resources.
This is the home page for an energetic global community of teachers between Phoenix school districts and their "sister cities" around the world. It began with a $6.9 million five-year Technology Innovation Challenge Grant received by Phoenix Union High School District from the U.S. Department of Education and seems to have expanded. The graphics are clean and the colors used are simple. It also contains simple tools for students, nothing to make it an exciting place to visit, but to do homework. The teacher’s tools does include technology tutorial information. For being so simple, it seems to be slow going between the pages.
This is a dry site in the matter of graphics and color, but informative for Arizona resources related to education. "ASSET is providing services to teachers and students in using technology to strengthen teaching and learning." It is organized to link visitors to some strong links, such as the Star Schools Project, ThinkQuest, AZ Tech Corp and PBS Mathline. It also offers a physical resource for AZ teachers in the matter of a Digital Lab, PC Lab and Mac Lab.
http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/
This site does take awhile to load, but is a great introduction to the PBS program, New Perspectives on The West. It contains great graphics and the colors flow well throughout. It is well organized with clear information and photographs on the old west.
A good use of color and graphics and is well organized by tables. It contains active, current links to other educational sites. It loads fairly well for the amount of graphics it contains. It does have the option to going "text only" if needed.