Hot Stuff: Media for Educators

Credit: William Duke

Free-Reading.net

Free

Literacy teachers, rejoice! Much like Wikipedia and Linux, Free-reading.net is an open resource center and community, where teachers can access and share curricula on research-based instruction for early readers. The site features a complete set of activities for a typical forty-week core program, or just access specific activities and downloads. Free-Reading.net is continually updated by a large community of users and experts, which means you can share, too.

Credit: William Duke

No Student Left Indoors: Creating a Field Guide to Your Schoolyard

Take a Walk Books, $50

NIMBY should stand for "nature in my backyard." The latest from author Jane Kirkland's Take a Walk series is for K-12 teachers who want to expose their students to the wonders of nature right outside their door. The book contains a field guide that combines all areas of the curriculum, including planning the field guide project, gathering data, exercises, and lessons. Kirkland suggests starting your lesson with a twenty-second nature break to see what the outdoors has to offer.

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Teach the First Amendment

Free

Here's a noble goal: Bring the discussion of civics back into classrooms. And what better time than a presidential election year to do that? Teach the First Amendment offers a wealth of articles, lesson plans, and generally fascinating resources guaranteed to get you and your students fired up about preserving this fragile democracy of ours. There's a First Amendment Quiz, plus the results of a study that queried student, teacher, and administrator awareness of free-speech issues, and a special section for student journalists.

Credit: William Duke

NBC News Archives

Free to teachers

NBC has opened its news archives to teachers via the HotChalk interface. Created exclusively for K-12 classrooms, the archives date to the early 1930s and include more than 5,000 video resources, with an emphasis on U.S. history. Steve Capus, president of NBC News, explains, "In many ways, through our reporting and coverage of world events, we write the first draft of history every day." As first drafts may show biases and be incomplete, it is often students who, with a greater understanding, come to revise them. In releasing these first glimpses of history past and present, NBC tenders a wonderful gift to education and to progress.