5 Online teaching resources for aspiring teachers
If you are pursuing a bachelor’s or master’s degree in education at William Woods University, then you are no stranger to the effort it takes to prepare lesson plans and get organized for the week ahead.
Whether you are just starting your supervised teaching experience or are already a certified teacher fully entrenched in the ins and outs of lesson planning, this post offers a few online resources that may be helpful to both new and experienced teachers alike.
1. National Education Association
The National Education Association (NEA) is the nation’s largest professional organization committed to advancing the cause of public education. NEA offers special resources for new or aspiring teachers including a Resources Toolkit for New Teachers. The toolkit includes tips, blogs, and videos on subjects ranging from classroom management and lesson planning to working with parents and learning environments.
2. Scholastic (scholastic.com)
Scholastic Corporation is an American multinational publishing, education and media company. Their website provides literacy resources for children, teachers and families. The teacher’s section of the site offers thousands of grab-and-go lessons plans, unit plans, discussion guides and activity ideas. All resources are specific to grade levels.
3. Jump Start (jumpstart.com)
Jump Start is a creator of mobile app education games for kids ages 3 and up. However, the Jump Start site also offers practical teacher resources including worksheets, lesson plans, activity ideas and articles. The resources are organized by subject area and grade level.
4. Khan Academy (khanacademy.org)
Khan Academy is a nonprofit educational organization that offers a variety of online tools that help educate students. Their online portal offers standards-aligned content, practice exercise, videos and helpful articles. Khan Academy specializes in providing lessons in bite-size segments and offers short videos that can help teachers illustrate an important concept quickly and effectively.
5. TED-Ed (ted.com)
TED-Ed is a youth education initiative organized by TED, a nonprofit dedicated to spreading ideas in the form of short, powerful talks. The education initiative was designed to support learning among students and help teachers by providing a growing library of animated educational videos. TED-Ed also offers a platform for teachers to create their own interactive lessons on topics, including history, math, science and more.
At William Woods University, education students practice lesson planning in a variety of subject-specific courses. For example, students earning a Bachelor of Science in Elementary Education will take EDU 317 – Teaching Language Arts and Children’s Literature. Through this course, students create a unit plan consisting of 4 literature-based language arts lessons. The course includes units on language development, children’s literature, speaking, listening, spelling, grammar, punctuation, capitalization, penmanship, and interdisciplinary instruction.