Social Bookmarking

Below are the eight websites I visited for this social bookmarking scavenger hunt.

1. Dear Bess: Love Letters from the President is an online exhibit of love letters Harry and Bess Truman sent back and forth to each other. There were scanned, digital versions of the letters they wrote. Primary sources are important because they are originals. It's always important to use some kind of primary sources in research and your students should understand the importance of primary sources.
2. The National Education Association website outlines how to become a culturally competent educator. Some of the things I believe I would do as an educator include: Assessing what the school staff perceive as their staff development needs related to providing services to each group. By doing this you can see where the rest of the staff believe the needs of the school are. Another thing I feel is important is networking. Networking with other schools, staff members, students and community organizations to get them culturally involved is also very important. And lastly I feel it's important to engage school staff in discussions and activities that offer an opportunity to explore attitudes, beliefs, and values related to cultural diversity and cultural competence.
3. Through KidsClick.org I found a cute online story called A Fishy Tale. This is a story for young kids in kinder to second grade. Beginner readers. The site also has a few other beginner reader stories that will help develop kids reading.
4. Kathy Schrock has some great ideas and resources for educators. Once I become a classroom teacher I will use her website as a tool to help me use rubrics and assements for grading my own students. The only thing that needs to be updated on the site is a lot of her links are no longer active.
5. The George Lucas Foundation does a good job explaining what multiple intelligences are. In the "what" section of the site it nine different levels of intelligences that I never knew exsisted. It would be important to know about these things intelligences especially for teachers so that they will be able to understand peoples levels.
6. The Teaching Tolerance website is a wonderful resouce for teachers to come up with specific lesson plas to help their students learn about diversity and tolerance. One lesson plan I really liked taught lower level students about acceptance and diversity using a box of crayons. The lesson is called What Can We Learn from a Box of Crayons? It had kids draw a picture using a single color and then using the whole box of crayons. The teacher then asks the students which picture they like better the picture with one color, or the colorful one. Then the teacher asks, "What a boring world it would be if we were all alike — like the picture drawn with only one crayon. The diversity in the world makes it like a wonderful box of crayons with endless colors." Next the teachers read The Crayon Box that Talked and asks their students questions such as "Wasn't it silly for the crayons not to like each other just because of their color? Each crayon had something special to offer to the picture — green for the grass, blue for the sky, yellow for the sun." I really liked this lesson because it teaches an important lesson "We could learn a lot from crayons. ... (They) all are different colors, but they all exist very nicely in the same box."
7. EdChange.org has a few different multicultral quizzes. I looked over a few of the quizzes and I was shocked to learn that compared with White women, African American women in the U.S. are four times as likely to die during childbirth due to a lack of access to prenatal care. That, to me, is outragous. It was also an eye opener to find out that accordng to
   UNICEF the treatment of children in the 23 wealthiest countries in the world based on 40 indicators of child well-being, the two countries with the lowest ratings were the US & UK. Also to read that over 84% of teachers will never or rarely respond to homophobic remarks according to gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender high school students.
8. The web is a very popular tool these days that almost every child has access to. It's important to follow the Netiquette rules so that you won't be rude in cyberspace. I took the Netiquette quiz and I knew alot about the rules of the web before even reading about them. I scored 80%. =]