Great Educational Resources

Summer may still be sizzling all over the country for students, but many educators are already preparing their classrooms for the 2016-2017 school year.  Read on as veteran teachers share their strategies to make preparing for the new school year (and calming those first-day jitters!) as easy as a 1-2-3.

Many don’t realize this, but educators are trained to have many of the same skills that coincide with other careers. Some of these skills include organization, public speaking and presentation skills, leadership, multi-tasking, and effective time management. In fact, being an educator is a beast of its own. To quote Ryan Fuller at Slate, “Giving a presentation to NASA about how the thermal protection system of a spacecraft is connected to its primary structure is a cakewalk compared to getting 30 teenagers excited about logarithms.”

In a 2013 study executed by Jaison R. Abel and Richard Deitz, they found that only 27% of college graduatesheld jobs that we…

Being an ESL teacher can be a difficult, yet rewarding, job. Textbooks can be very helpful. There are plenty of great textbooks out there, but many ESL learners cannot afford to spend a lot of money those big and thick workbooks. Fortunately, there are many fantastic online free resources that you can easily implement into a lesson plan. Here are some of the most useful educational resources and teaching ideas available on the internet for ESL teachers.

• TEFL Tunes

Plenty of scientific research has shown that many people learn best when th…

People say unbelievable things all the time and often we may wish they were true. These stories touch our imagination, as we feel ourselves playing a role in the story in both time and place. More often than not, they are make believe and are told to attract the audience, whether it's a small group of friends or family or a larger group such as a school classroom or even a conference attended by the business community.

When it comes to teaching in the classroom, research shows that children tend to retain more knowledge when they can connect it with a classroom activity. One of the most common classroom activities is storytelling. Children love listening to their teachers telling stories. While they listen, they begin to focus and follow the story through until its end.

As a teacher, this is exactly what you want: a …

With an average debt load of more than $35,000, the college class of 2015 was inarguably the most indebted in history.

Many of the 40+ million college graduates with student loans are bending under the weight of their monthly debt obligations. This struggling demographic includes teachers, of course, since our nation’s educators are historically underpaid despite being highly educated.

One silver lining teachers can look forward to, however, is that there are several

Any student that’s taken classes during the Internet era has both been told to never use Wikipedia for research papers and used it anyway. With a treasure trove of information available on virtually any topic, person or event one could think of, Wikipedia can be used as a valuable tool when used properly. Legal Morning came up with a great infographic about proper academic use of the every growing, ever changing online encyclopedia to help sort out when it's appropriate to use--and when you're better off citing a more permanent source. Here are some of the highlights from the infographic and scroll down to see it in full. Feel free to share with students!

• Wikipedia has more than 30 million articles and is available in more than 285 languages
• Read the outside sources referenced in the body of the Wikipedia article and use those as citations and for information about the topic
• Wikipedia Projects can be a great way of finding authoritative sources…