I find new resources in many different places. I am a frequent visitor, or “lurker,” on many education discussion boards, such as Education World and Teachers.net. I especially enjoy reading Education World because they have a “Technology Integration” thread where other teachers share web sites as well as software specific activities. Our school library receives Middle School Journal, a magazine that publishes the latest trends in education, including technology integration. The best resource, I have found, is word of mouth. I enjoy listening and observing teachers in our county.
For most activities, rather than having the students search for a particular site, I’ll post a direct link on my class web site. My students have this bookmarked on their computers, and it’s much quicker for them to follow a link than to type in a URL. I also have students evaluate their own web resources. For example, what author or organization created the web site, when was it last updated, etc. Legally, I introduce them to citing web sources and encourage them to use royalty fee photos rather than images from Google Pictures. I have links to royalty free photo galleries on my web page.
