Useful websites-Updated July 26, 2012

Here is a list of web pages I have found with useful resources for instructors, especially if you have an Interactive Whiteboard, A CPS kit, or a CPS Chalkboard or Mobi (wireless tablet). Or even if you don’t!

I began compiling this list back in 2007. I have just updated it and added some new files and links. I tried to go back and check the links to make sure they still “work”, but if you find a broken one, please let me know.

And while most of these files are “K-12 centric” I think there are files useful to almost anyone here, who teaches , trains, or presents, and that includes those that aren’t currently using an eInstruction product

These websites have CPS databases you can download. Most of these are k-12 files, but do serve as examples you can ‘deconstruct” if you like.

Several include complete lesson plans

http://its.gcsnc.com/act/technology_lessons.htm

Has lesson for grades 2, 3, 4, and 6, 7 and 8

http://www.tcet.unt.edu/weblibrary2/itc/lesson_plan/?id=19

Sixth grade math lesson

http://technology.usd259.org/resources/clickers/ClickerLessons.htm

http://cps.mrcoward.com/index.php/samples

This site has 7th grade language arts CPS lessons.

CPS databases download in .cps format. Each is a separate database. You can also use CPS to import a signal lesson from another CPS database to yours.

The databases, although they may have been created with an older version of CPS, will import into the latest version.

There are quite a few lessons and some good tutorials here :

http://sarahlowey.pbworks.com/w/page/14445588/K12%20CPS%20Lessons

First, Second and Third grade CPS Lessons :

http://www.stjohns.k12.fl.us/depts/itd/Lessons%20Page

CPS Lessons :

http://www.bluevalleyk12.org/education/components/docmgr/default.php?sectiondetailid=28643&catfilter=4618#showDoc

More CPS Lessons :

http://leopardtechie.weebly.com/cps-lessons.html

CPS Lessons :

http://www.gtccmt.org/crt/index.htm

This site is part of the official eInstruction site. I mention it here because it is several “layers” down and folks have tended to overlook it.

http://www.einstruction.com/products/examview-learning-series-samplers

These are “samplers” of the Learning Series. eInstruction offers a “for sale” version of these test banks. These are samples that come in the various versions that are offered

1-Topic Aligned2-Core Curriculum Aligned3-Versions aligned for various State standards.

eInstruction has versions for MOST of the states. They are working on the rest. It apparently take a lot of time to do these standard-aligned versions, so while most states are covered there are still a few to go.

These questions are in Examview format. These can be imported into CPS, used with Examview, or edited with Examview and “repurposed”

The new Insight 360 products from eInstruction include a copy of the Learning Series

DK Books are well known for their wonderful graphics. A huge selection of these is available for free download from this web page. These could be used to illustrate CPS questions, or to import into Powerpoints.

http://www.dorlingkindersley-uk.co.uk/static/cs/uk/11/clipart/home.html

Http://www.bgfl.org/bgfl/15.cfm

Another UK site. The Birmingham learning grid has all kinds of activities that can be used with a tablet like the CPS Chalkboard, or an Interactive Whiteboard. Because these are in Great Britain, part of the fun for your students might be the fact that many are narrated in “British English” .

http://www.sheppardsoftware.com/web_games_menu.htm

Not just games, but activities like SAT prep words. This could be used with CPS in the “verbal question” mode.

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/

No, not tips on how to be a spy. But there are accurate and up to date maps of the world,and every country in the world here. You would hope the CIA keeps up with this kind of stuff..and they do.

http://www.brainybetty.com/

This site a smorgasbord of free graphics, powerpoint images, clip art and tutorials.

www.fiddlersgreen.net

A site selling paper models. Mostly of airplanes but also many buildings. A Great source for dioramas. There are several freebies there and lots of info on each model plane and house. Thoreau’s cabin and Emerson’s home are among the models relevant to English teachers, for example. My college American lit professor, Dr. Joel Myerson, a world’s expert on Thoreau and Emerson, shared this site with his students, and sent me a nice email in return. Each model includes a write up about the history of the house or airplane. Everything from a Norman Castle to a model of the World Trade Center can be found here.

One could combine the “hands on “ learning for the paper models with the info and history about each file.

In the case of Henry David Thoreau’s cabin at Walden, it even tells what he paid for nails. I sent this to my college American Lit professor, ( now Emeritus) who just happens to be a world class expert on Thoreau and Emerson and he loved it.

www.funbrain.com

All kinds of on line learning games and activities. K-12. Free

http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/major.htm

The Avalon project is a collection of primary documents found at Yale University. This is a great site for history teachers.

http://teach.fcps.net/trt14/Power%20Point%20Games/power_point_games.htm

A collection of Powerpoint games, Grades 4 and 5

http://www.learningelectric.com/

Free on line video tutorials on Powerpoint, Word, Excel and many other programs. If you don’t know how to use Powerpoint, this is an easy place to learn without RTM( Reading the manual)

http://www.sciencecourseware.org

On line Science activities . High school Level

http://pacificnet.net/~mandel/index.html

Teachers helping teachers. A website with many useful resources.

http://www.uen.org/utahlink/tours/fieldtrips2.htm

A web site with listing of sites for virtual field trips.

http://manufacturing.stanford.edu/

Great animations of how everyday things are made

http://www.pbs.org/shakespeare/theshow/

The site of a PBS Program, “In Search of Shakespeare”

http://www.engaging-technologies.com/CPS-activities.html

My buddy, Dustin Frank, in Kansas has put together a page with links to all kinds of activities that teachers can use with the CPS Chalkboard( Yes, you can use these with an IWB ( Interactive Whiteboard too!

http://www.nytimes.com/learning/index.html?8dpc

The New York Times Classroom Resource Center has lots of useful info , including quizzes that could be downloaded, printed and used with the “Fast grade” aspect of CPS.

www.Pogueman.com

Speaking of the New York Times, David Pogue and I are old friends. He has a new show coming out in soon on the Discovery Channel. David is the technology columnist for the NY Times, and the smartest person I have ever met. You wont find any lessons or clip art, but if you want to learn about what’s new with technology, David is “da man” He also wrote “Classical Music for Dummies” and “Magic for Dummies”(he has a total of 8 “Dummies” books and all the manuals for the music software , FINALE…Like I said, smart guy. You might find his

“Missing manual” books useful. ( I don’t get a commission! ) . He has a new series that premiered May 18, 2007 on the Discovery Channel : “Its all Geek to Me”. He has a show about the Elements now as well.

He has an informative( and hilarious) set of videos on his NY times web page.

Several of David’s “ Its all Geek to Me” videos , and videos on LOTS of topics, Can be found at www.howstuffworks.com.

This is a site hosted by the Discovery Channel. While there are videos here on almost any topic you can imagine, there seems to be a lot of science-related and computer-related videos and “how to “ articles.

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Do you have students with Ipods or MP3 players. How bout some free audio books for them to use ?

Here is a list of the books and stories to be found on this site.

I checked and there are now videos here as well.

http://www.oculture.com/weblog/2006/10/audio_book_podc.html

* A Christmas Tale, Charles Dickens (iTunes) * A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens (iTunes) * Aesop’s Fables, Aesop (mp3 download) * Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll (mp3 download) * Andersen’s Fairy Tales, Hans Christian Andersen (mp3 download) * Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche (mp3 download)' * Beyond Lies the Wub, Philip K. Dick (iTunes) * Call of the Wild, Jack London (mp3 download) * Candide, Voltaire (mp3 download) * Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer (mp3 download) * Chamber Music, James Joyce (mp3 download) * Collected Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson (iTunes) * Common Sense, Thomas Paine (mp3 download) * Discourse on Method, Rene Descartes (mp3 download)

* Dracula, Bram Stoker (Just an fyi, this is not the best reading I've ever heard.) (iTunes) * Emma, Jane Austen (mp3 download) * Frankenstein, Mary Shelley (rss feed) o Also check out the 1938 radio broadcast that is faithful to Mary Shelley's text. (iTunes) * Free Culture, Lawrence Lessig * Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln (mp3 download) * Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death, Patrick Henry (mp3 download) * Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad (mp3 download) * Kubla Khan & The Pains of Sleep (mp3 download) * Lady Chatterley's Lover, DH Lawrence (mp3 download) * Lancelot, or The Knight of the Cart, Chretien DeTroyes (rss feed) * Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman (mp3 download) * Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Washington Irving (iTunes) * Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens (mp3 download) * Notes from the Underground, Fyodor Dostoyevsky (mp3 download) * Poetics, Aristotle (mp3 download) * Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen (mp3 download) * Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe (iTunes) * Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare (mp3 download) * Silas Marner, George Eliot (mp3 download) * Shakespeare's Sonnets, William Shakespeare (mp3 download) * The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain (mp3 download) * The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle (rss feed) * The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain (mp3 download) * The Art of War, Sun-tzu (mp3 download) * The Cask of Amontillado, Edgar Allan Poe (iTunes) * The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calveras County, Mark Twain (rss feed) * The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri (mp3 download) * The Dungeon, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (mp3 download) * The History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides (mp3 download) * The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Washington Irving (mp3 download) * The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde (mp3 download) * The Invisible Man, HG Wells (iTunes) * The Lees of Happiness, F. Scott Fitzgerald (rss feed) * The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka (mp3 download) * The New Accelerator, HG Wells (rss feed) * The New Testament (iTunes) * The Prince, Machiavelli (mp3 download) * The Raven, Edgar Allen Poe (mp3 download) * The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane (mp3 download) * The Republic, Plato (iTunes) * The Social Contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (mp3 download) * The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson (mp3 download)

* The Tell Tale Heart, Edgar Allen Poe (feed) * The Turn of the Screw, Henry James (mp3 download) * The Warden, Anthony Trollope (mp3 download) * Time Machine, HG Wells (iTunes) * Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson (mp3 download) * Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe (mp3 download) * Walden, Henry David Thoreau (mp3 download) * War of the Worlds, HG Wells (iTunes)

There are also text files accompany most of these audio versions. You might, for example consider projecting them onto an interactive whiteboard and using the sound files to narrate for your students. You could also use CPS to ask questions about either the text or the sound files. I recently found a cable that will allow my ipod to be plugged into the “sound in “ port on my projector.

If you project onto a screen you can use a wireless tablet( like the new Mobi with Workspace software) and let students highlight a key passage, or ask students to underline parts of speech( Circle verbs, underline nouns). Being able to hear and see a passage of text could be very powerful.

As I get older, it has also dawned on me I can use a projector and Project books on a screen. When I acquired an Ipad, I made sure to get the Ipad to RGB adapter so I could hook the Ipad up directly to a projector or my TV! I have an Apple TV box too, but that is “hard to travel with” and the direct connection to a projector has already come in useful , if only to show a Picture of something, like a CPS pad or etc.

www.juniorgeneral.org

A website with dozens of military history simulations. The neat thing is you can print out , on cardboard, the boards games and the soldiers, etc for playing these simulation games. The simulations go all the way back to the Battle of Marathon in Ancient Greece and up to the 20th century. You can also find templates for building a medieval castle . And there are lots of links from the simulations to websites with the actual history of the battle or event.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Public_domain_image_resources

This site has links to thousands of public domain clip art and other images. These can be used with an IWB(Interactive Whiteboard) to import into CPS questions, or with the the CPS Chalkboard, Interwrite Mobi ( or other wireless tablet) .

Here is a table of contents of the images to be found on this site:

* 1 History o 1.1 Historical images o 1.2 Specific periods o 1.3 People * 2 Art o 2.1 Visual arts o 2.2 Music * 3 Logos and flags * 4 Postage stamps * 5 General collections * 6 Computer-generated public domain images * 7 Public domain image meta-resources * 8 Uncategorized links o 8.1 U.S. Government sites

www.amathsdictionaryforkids.com

An interactive math dictionary. No “math” is not mis-spelled. This site is in Australia, and people who speak British English called it “maths” .

http://www.mrdonn.org/

This site has connections to more things that an average teacher could use than any other site I have found. It is worth checking out for the Clip Art and Powerpoints alone.

http://www.tech4mathed.com/blog/tag/einstruction/

I have become “Facebook friends” with an outstanding Community College educator in Arizona, Sue Glascoe. Sue has “blogged” about how she uses eInstruction’s products to teach math. To be sure, she blogs about other things as well, but she has posted some good info about using eInstruction’s products to teach math.

http://www.sitesforteachers.com/

This site contains a list of Hundreds of sites. Most have free content, while other are ads for “for sale” products. In checking few of the hundreds of free sites, I found many free and useful resources

This website has all kinds of games that can be used with either a CPS Chalkboard, or an IWB( interactive whiteboard or “smart board” I mentioned Sheppard software above. These are social studies activities.

This site also has a lot of info about creating whiteboard movies with Camtasia Studio, as well as much useful info on Examview

http://www.sheppardsoftware.com/states_experiment_drag-drop_Intermed_State15s_500.html

Hundreds of topic-organized Powerpoints, all created and share b y teacher can be found at:

http://www.worldofteaching.com/

Here is another website I just got from my friend and mentor, Dr. Kemble Oliver

http://www.mapsofwar.com/

These are animated maps from world history. These are not “tactical maps”, but rather some very good animated and narrated maps that show the flow and scope of history. Conflict is a key aspect of human history and this site would be ideal to use with a wireless table,IWB, or without.

http://www.assortedstuff.com/top101/?page_id=2

This website, created by a teachers lists what he thinks are the top 101 websites with useful information for teachers. They are broken down by category

http://www.lexington1.net/technology/?page=instruct/powerpoint.htm

A school district website right here in South Carolina that has a lot of really good powerpoints.

http://www.murray.k12.ga.us/teacher/kara%20leonard/Mini%20T's/March%20Mini%20T-Games/Games.htm

A Georgia site with templates for LOTS of educational Powerpoint games and other great resources

http://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/index.html

This NASA website has all kinds of materials on science education that are free to download, along with links to many good science education web sites.

http://i.usatoday.net/tech/graphics/iss_timeline/flash.htm

Speaking of NASA, this site is an amazing animation of the International Space station.

http://www.pppst.com/themes.html

Another site with dozens, if not hundreds of Powerpoints. This site is well organized . There are also Lesson plans to go with many of these Powerpoints!

http://boonehallplantation.com/cms_pages/gallery.php

If you would like to take a “virtual tour” of an authentic antebellum plantation, then check out this page at the Boone Hall website. I have been friends with the McRae family that owns Boone Hall for many years, and “rode out” Hurricane Hugo there in 1989. I have quite a few pictures of Boone Hall in my personal collection I would be glad to share.

Another site for a “virtual field trip” here in SC

www.patriotspoint.org

The World War II Aircraft Carrier U.S.S Yorktown, CV 10 is the heart of this memorial here in Mt Pleasant SC. I began , when I was a teacher, bring kids from 80 miles away to visit the ship in the late 70’sThe displays and collections both on the ship and in the complex as a whole have grown over the years. The website is excellent and has lots of info. And yes, they use CPS for their historical and STEM programs at Patriots Point. And yes, you can do a “real “ field trip there.

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http://gigapan.org/viewGigapan.php?id=15374

This is an amazing photo of President Obama giving his inaugural address. This site posts photos that allow you to “zoom” right in and see very small details. For example, you can zoom in this photos and see all the dignitaries on the platform. There are more photos on this site as well.

www.making-history.com.

This website contains info on a very good historical simulation, the Calm and the Storm, about the events leading up to World War II. You can download the demo version for free. The full working version is reasonably priced. Also, many users have written “Mods” ( Modifications) that can be downloaded. Several of these Mods deal with Alternative History: What if Hitler had won? What if there was a nuclear war?

Great stuff and this program lends itself to use with an Interactive whiteboard or wireless tablet

This program would work especially well with the Mobi, since you can have more than one Mobi( up to 9) inputting on the same computer at the same time. So you could have each “team” or Country with their own Mobi.

I modified a board game called “Diplomacy”, akin to “Risk” for use with my 7th grade social studies classes. It was amazing to see kids, who at the beginning of the year didn't know what continent they lived own complaining to me that their “Navy” was the one who had the right to control the Baltic Sea. “Diplomacy” is still around and at one time there was a web site dedicated to those who play the board game..some by mail. Or email now, I suppose.

http://alltop.com/

This site is the brainchild of my friend, Guy Kawasaki. Guy was part of the original Macintosh evangelist team. He has gone on to write “amazingly great” books about a variety of topics. The idea of this website is simple but brilliant:

Alltop is an “online magazine rack” of popular topics. We update the stories every hour. Pick a topic by searching, news category, or name, and we’ll deliver it to you 24 x 7. All the topics, all the time

So if you have a special interest like sports or education, you can find a collection of the latest files here.

www.slideshare.net

This is a site where members( it is free to join) can post and share Powerpoints. It is searchable, so you can find useful Powerpoints there. I have already posted a couple about CPS.

www.teacherspayteachers.com

This website allows teachers to post files they have created and either give them away ( there are 14 Examview test banks , and a few ARE free) or sell them. A membership is free. There are 2,446 free downloads, including many Powerpoints on page.

http://www.yourchildlearns.com/owlmouse.htm

Free maps, ideal for use with a interactive whiteboard or wireless tablet.

http://www.animatedatlas.com/movie2.html

Educational Sims :

http://phet.colorado.edu/en/simulations/category/new

This is an animated map that shows the growth of the United States over time. This map is free for anyone to use. It is a “teaser” for the other products that this company sells.

http://www.customguide.com/quick_references.htm

This site has free “quick reference guides for Windows, Microsoft Office Programs, and Adobe Programs. These are free , handy “cheat sheets” for the software most people have on their computer.

If you have a site you want to share, let me know and I will add to the list.

And I also use slideshare.net This site organizes the files I post into either presentations or documents, which makes them easy to find :

http://www.slideshare.net/WKMcIntosh/presentations

http://www.slideshare.net/WKMcIntosh/documents

By the way, there are materials of all kinds, on any topic you can name, from cookbooks to computer books and lots of education related materials on these sites. You may find information other than that related to eInstruction products. These sites are basically on-line libraries, where anyone can post a document to share.

Finally , I have begun using, and several of my friends and clients have joined me on Dropbox.com .Dropbox allows me to create “sets” of files, so I have put .CPS databases, Workspace files and Examview files there.

You can see a menu of the files I have posted to dropbox (and how to join) here :

http://www.slideshare.net/WKMcIntosh/einstruction-on-dropbox-july-2012

Thanks

Bill McIntosh843-442-8888Email:WKMcIntosh@Comcast.net