Teachers spend an incredible amount of time with tedious tasks, record keeping and lesson planning which leaves little time to spend searching for teacher resources on the Internet.  This page will hopefully save teachers valuable time when searching for reliable information of educational merit. 

    While searching for information it is often difficult to keep up with your favorite Web sites and organize them in a meaningful way.  www.portaportal.com   is a web based bookmarking utility site which allows teachers to bookmark and categorize their favorite sites as they search the Internet.  Once bookmarked, you can access your bookmarked sites from any computer that has Internet access.

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WebQuest

     A WebQuest is an inquiry-oriented activity in which some or all of the information that learners interact with comes from resources on the Internet.  At the end of a WebQuest, a learner will have been exposed to a significant amount of new information and made sense of it.  The Internet resources are pre-selected and the WebQuest involves students in a task, which guides the learning.  Using a carefully designed WebQuest assures the students will not be "just surfing" the Internet for information.  This is teacher-sharing at its best.

    WebQuests lend themselves very well to cross curricular teaching, differentiating instruction, and cooperative learning. Some general WebQuest resources and sample WebQuests can be located at the following Web sites:

The WebQuest Page
http://edweb.sdsu.edu/webquest/webquest.html

Building a WebQuest
http://projects.edtech.sandi.net/staffdev/buildingblocks/p-index.htm

Kathy Schrock's Guide to WebQuests http://school.discovery.com/schrockguide/webquest/webquest.html

WebQuest Resources
http://www.biopoint.com/WebQuests/resources.html

Filamentalitly
http://www.kn.pacbell.com/wired/fil/intro.html
This web site takes you step-by-step through the process of creating your own WebQuest and then will host if for six months.  There are many WebQuests already made and ready for you to use, however, you may have a topic or instructional unit for which you may want to create your own WebQuest. This wonderful web site makes it easy to do!

Teaching Across the VA Curriculum
http://www.radford.edu/~sbisset/
A collection of k-5 WebQuests correlated to the VA SOLs.  Click on WebQuests and Treasure Hunts.

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Recommended Sites

So many wonderful websites have been established either commercially or by fellow teachers just willing to share. These are excellent sites for you to find ideas to add to your existing plans or to find ways to integrate technology into your curriculum. Each site contains many categories and unless specified in the title to be subject oriented, all of these sites are collections of many ideas about many subjects - all of interest and benefit to teachers! I like to call them Teacher "WOW" Sites, because as I visit them, I am always amazed at the shared resources from teachers all over the world.

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Interactive Sites