Linking to Learning
Think Thinkfinity for lesson plans and more
Feb 5, 2009 5:20 PM
Instead of relying on Google for lesson plans, think Thinkfinity.org, a Web site with more than 55,000 free instructional resources that have been reviewed, approved and aligned to state standards so that teachers, students, parents and afterschool personnel have a wealth of reliable materials for teaching and learning.
The Verizon Foundation, the education arm of Verizon Communications, believes that technology-based approaches to literacy and K-12 education are the keys to developing the skills required for the 21st century knowledge economy. Verizon’s Thinkfinity provides a free standards-based education resource that includes lessons, interactive activities, worksheets, Podcasts, media and reference materials that are vetted by education experts and content partners so you can be sure that the resources you find are accurate, up-to-date, unbiased and appropriate for students.
“Teachers can rest assured that the high-quality resources on the site have been rigorously reviewed and approved by nationally recognized education organizations,” said Mindy Schwartz, an instructional technology specialist for the UFT Teacher Center who is also the Thinkfinity training administrator for New York City.
Because the UFT Teacher Center believes that Thinkfinity can have a direct and positive impact on teaching and learning, it has committed to providing workshops that will help teachers get the most out of the resources on the Web site and that will help teachers develop the confidence they need to integrate technology into their daily classroom practices. For more information about the Teacher Center’s free “Thinkfinity: Resources for Instruction” training, you can contact thinkfinity@ufttc.org.
When you visit Thinkfinity.org, click on the Educator tab and then on Free Training. This is a self-guided overview that explains what you’ll find on the Website, how to navigate through its various sections and how to do a search. But it is easy to get started on your own. In the search boxes, you enter a keyword, then the subject and grade range. The next steps asks you to refine your search by adding parameters like lessons, interactives, media or worksheets, and what content partner you want to use. Adding these parameters is optional; you can simply leave “search all” as the default setting. However, if you are searching for an interactive activity or a worksheet, it makes sense to narrow the search to that specific resource.
Searching for lesson plans by using the keyword “writing” in the subject area “reading and language arts” for grades 6-8 yielded 889 results with the top return linking to a lesson from the “Read, Write, Think” Web site of the National Council of Teachers of English. By defining a resource type, you get different, more specific, returns and this alone helps make it easier to find what you want than most other sites on the Internet. For instance, if you narrow the resource type to “interactives,” only 79 results are reported. The top return is an interactive letter generator from the National Council of Teachers of English. Change the resource type to “media” and the results include audio and video resources that help motivate the writing process.
Searches in math, science, history, art, social studies, economics and foreign languages yield similar results across all the resource types. You can also match the result to a state standard by clicking on the gold star with the “s” on the lower right side of the result. Then click on NY in the drop-down menu and you will see how that lesson or activity is aligned with the New York State standards. Conversely, if you need to do the search in the other direction — you want to find a lesson that meets a specific New York State standard — you can go to www.thinkfinityny.org and start from the standard. The results will show you links to resources on Thinkfinity.
Thinkfinity.org is a rich resource that requires time to fully explore, but this is one Website where teachers, parents and students can create learning, teaching and technology partnerships that can benefit everyone in the educational community.
