netTrekker Blog

MasAlto: Escritores/Writers

Engage your ELL/ESL group by finding sites in their language quickly!  Use any keyword in any grade level, then personalize those search results to your non-English speaking population by applying the Language Refinement Menu.  Many times there are multiple language choices you can make, depending on the keyword and availability of those topics in different languages.

For example, keyword search “writers” and refine by Spanish to locate this user-friendly Site of the Day written in Spanish and geared toward younger internet users. The site features information about many famous authors from throughout the world. For each writer, students will find a picture and short biography.

Click here to login to netTrekker and access the Site of the Day.

Login to netTrekker before midnight (eastern) today to access the netTrekker Site of the Day and add it to your “My Portfolio” for easy future reference.  After midnight, the new Site of the Day will go up and you’ll have to look for today’s site using netTrekker’s search tool. Need help with My Portfolio? Easy, handy instructions can be found here.

Not yet a netTrekker subscriber? Visit www.nettrekker.com and click on the Free Trial link at the top right of the page for 14 days of complimentary access to netTrekker.

Tags: ELL, ESL, site of the day, spanish, writers

Health, Physical Education and Nutrition: Jump Right in!

I recently hosted a Tip for Tuesday Webinar and I was amazed at the incredible resources I found as I created a My Portfolio collection.  With warm weather settling in now is a great time for everyone to learn more about health, physical education and fitness.  Listed below are a collection of resources including interactive explorations, fitness challenges, nutrition demonstrations, games, and even instructional dance videos.  I enjoyed sharing the items below and many other resources during my Tip for Tuesday presentation.  Use these resources to plan a classroom unit, a school-wide event, or a family fitness quest.

• Heart and Stroke Foundation: 25 Heart Healthy Activities You Can Do in Minutes
• Kidnetic Fitness Challenge: Experience 10 different fitness challenges, including sit-ups, pushups, and jumping jacks.
• Weekly Reader:  Does Your Health Measure Up?: Read information, answer personal questions and calculate your health score.
• Nutrition Explorations: Test your understanding of the food groups by playing an exciting Tetris-style game.
• Famous People in Health and Physical Education:  amazing netTrekker biography sites
• Educator’s Reference Desk:  Choose nutrition and select the Salad Party activity to enjoy in your classroom or kitchen.
• Knowledge viaVideo: Learn how to do ballet, Latin, Hip Hop and other great dances.

Visit netTrekker Village to sign up for the upcoming netTrekker Tip Tuesdays.

Content De-Classified

I remember at the end of NECC 2007 I was walking out of the Georgia Conference Hall with Randy Wilhelm, netTrekker CEO,  and a few others from the netTrekker team. I had officially just been hired, and still had much to learn about this great company. I asked Randy how the idea of netTrekker came about, and I honestly cannot remember his exact words, but I remember him telling me a few key points. 1. The team behind netTrekker wanted to do something good for the kids. 2. As a parent, he wanted to be able to make the web more relevant to his children’s educational needs. 3. Professionals like lawyers have Internet databases of relevant resources to aide them in searching for cases relevant to the ones they were working on. netTrekker is the educational answer to finding safe, relevant resources, and it’s good for not only the students but everyone involved in education.

But where does the content come from? Who scours the web, evaluates the resources, and adds them to netTrekker? I share how to click on the evaluator’s name to see their educational history and work background, and I encourage participants to click on the “more” button to see the information on how the website was actually rated. However, I’m often asked for more details about the process.

Who better to ask than the Team of Content Editors. They agreed to take over the afternoon blogging for a few days to share more with you.  The team will introduce themselves and explain the process for how a website is added to netTrekker, including the process of rating, tagging, and more. After all, each website in netTrekker is not added by a robot spider, but a real live person who evaluates the web resource for relevance to education. For this very reason, we pride ourselves on being the #1 educational search tool in K-12 schools currently used in thousands of schools nationwide.

Feel free to ask questions by leaving a comment at the end of this post and look forward to hearing more from our Content Editors .

Reading Takes Flight with Writing

Tomorrow is going to be a wonderful day! How do I know this? Because tomorrow is March 2, and that means it’s National Read Across America Day! I think that this should be a national holiday where everyone is allowed to be off from work if they promise to read, read, read! And many teachers do this with their “Read-Ins” and “Pajama Book Parties” and other fun events.

Of course, netTrekker has many great resources to help you plan for your reading day, whether you are celebrating it Seuss style (it is his birthday you know!) or going for a different approach. And reading fun shouldn’t stop with elementary! I cannot tell you how thrilled I am that books like Harry Potter made reading fun again in middle school. And now we have vampires showing up year round in high school, encouraging students to pick up a book and lose themselves.

I remember in one of my Children’s Lit classes, the instructor made it a point to tell us that any good reading program needs to be balanced with a good writing program. So it makes me ask, if you have one of those great reading programs worth celebrating, how are you balancing it with writing? Do you encourage your students to come up with their own tales? The Internet provides so many great places for students to be creative, such as Storybird. Here, your students can create online books for others to read. You can either have students write a non-fiction story, using netTrekker for research, or have them use their imagination and create a story of fiction. It’s really easy to use. I made my sample in about 8 minutes. It’s not the next best seller, but I’m proud of my first attempt.

Whatever you choose to do, make sure you celebrate National Reading Day tomorrow. And the next day.