Free Teacher Resources: Best Educational Websites

Teachers are forever trying to create lesson plans, worksheets, and come up with new and innovative ways to present material. With so many changes in technology, it is not necessary to spend late nights and long hours trying to reinvent the wheel.

Here are some of my favorite online teaching tools for the classroom. The best thing about them is that they are free and do not need a lot of new technology to use. A few of these resources are for students to use, but the majority of them are tools that will make the life of a teacher just a little bit easier!

• Discovery's Puzzle Maker Puzzle maker is just plain fun. You can create your own word searches, crossword puzzles, math squares, cryptograms and more. This is great if you are looking to reinforce vocabulary words or math skills or just to give your students a fun break!

• Rubistar If you are a teacher, then most likely you have spent some amount of time creating a rubric for one writing assignment or project in your time. This website provides teachers with a template and allows you to input the data that you want to evaluate.

• Thinkfinity From math to science to history and even music, this site has it all. There are great interactive games for students as well as a plethora of lesson plans complete with additional resources and extensions. This is one that I personally will be going back to many times.

• ABC Teach This site has both paid member services as well as a portion of free resources. There are resources for all subject areas and offer worksheets, printables, flashcards, and Promethean board lessons and activities.

• Promethean Planet If you have access to white board technology, this is a fantastic resource. There is a wealth of white board lessons that can be filtered by content area as well as grade level. You will need to register, but it is free.

With the new Common Core State Standards and national assessment that is coming down the pike, students need as much exposure to technology as possible. If you are a teacher, then hopefully you already know that the test, which will be given to third grade students and older, will be completely computer based. This includes math and manipulating items to give proof of your answer. Here are some great math sites that will both help you create these experiences for your students as well as help you to create additional resources for them.

• National Library of Virtual Manipulatives This website is an absolute must use in every classroom. This site allows users to filter by both grade level and content strand. The online experiences available to kids range from counting money to recognizing and creating patterns to positive and negative integers. It is a fantastic resource for math manipulatives.

• Illuminations Dynamic Paper This website is hosted by NCTM (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics). The dynamic paper portion part of this site allows teachers to input numbers and create customized 'math paper.' Number lines, graph paper, tessellations and more are all available here. The bonus is that the site is also filled with amazing interactive games as well as lesson ideas.

• Soft Schools Math Soft Schools is not exclusively a math website. They have resources for reading and writing as well but I was not as impressed with that portion of the site. However, the math games that are offered are wonderful. There are addition/subtraction, multiplication/division, place value, number sense, fractions, and more.

• NCES Kids's Zone This website has a few resources for both teachers and students. You can create an online graph, practice probability and play some other math games.

• Read Write and Think This site is fantastic for helping kids organize their thinking as they write. They can create poetry, comic strips, and play language based games. The interactive tools that are provided are even great for teachers to use as a model for their students.

• Beth Newingham's Site If you teach reading and writing workshops or would like to start, Beth Newingham's site is a must have in your teaching tool kit. She provides amazing pictures, videos, downloadable pages for you to use in your classroom.