Images Canada
www.imagescanada.ca

The Library and Archives of Canada developed this central search engine that provides access to thousands of images held on the websites of participating Canadian cultural institutions. Through Images Canada visitors can find images of Canadian events, people, places and other memorabilia that make up our collective heritage. There is a universal search engine that allows users to search the collections from every page on the site, and the Advanced Search feature on the site allows your search. Teachers can also find Educational Resources such as Activity plans and writing ideas, as well as activity files that can be used for early high-school students. With images from such notable institutions, such as the University of Toronto, the Toronto Public Library, the Canadian Aviation Museum, and more, this is definitely a site you will not want to miss.

Librarian Chick Wiki
http://librarianchick.pbworks.com

The Librarian Chick Wiki is an extensive webliography of sites that link users to the best of the Internet’s FREE educational resources.

The links on this site are current and they are maintained on a regular basis by a professional librarian working in the states. There are links to almost every type of online educational source imaginable, such as e-books and audio books; dictionaries; open source software; and much, much more.The sites are arranged by a list of topics at the top of the page and each site site has a brief description of the types of free resources contained therein.

The Librarian Chick Wiki is a site that would be of great interest to not only teachers and educators from all grades, but it would also be useful for anyone looking for free online resources for their own professional and/or personal development.

The Psych Files
www.thepsychfiles.com

The Psych Files website contains a number of podcasts developed by Dr. Michael A. Britt, adjunct pscyhology professor at Marist College.

These podcasts are designed to provide users with an introduction to a wide variety of psychological concepts in a way that is fun, original and easy-to-understand. The podcasts care arranged by the major topics in psychology, such as intelligence, emotion, and more. Visitors to this site can find podcasts that provide useful introductions to such topics as Erikson’s Stages of Psychosocial Development; gender theory; critical thinking; statistics; and more, for anyone interested or just starting to learn about pscyhology.

This site would be of great interest to anyone studying and/or interested in studying psychology, human development, social work or any form of human behavior. The topics are presented in an informal way which makes them accessible to almost any viewer.

Discovery School’s Puzzle Maker
http://puzzlemaker.discoveryeducation.com

Discovery Education is the developer of this  free puzzle generation tool that can be used at home and at school. This free, easy-t0-use, online tool will automatically generate word searches, crosswords, math puzzles and more using your own word/number lists that you can enter into the system. Puzzle Maker also allows you the ability to create puzzles as large as you want and as comprehensive as you want.

This free online tool is a great tool that teachers can use in a wide variety of educational settings such as building vocabularies in an ESL class; creating word searches and/or word puzzles centred around a particular theme (i.e. celebrations & holidays); and creating fun and challenging exercises for a mathematics class. Teachers can also generate and print the solutions to their puzzles for evaluation purposes.

Alberta Education: Physical Education Online
http://education.alberta.ca/apps/physicaleducationonline

The Alberta government is the maintainer and developer of this nicely designed website for health and physical education. Although designed for the Alberta curriculum many of the resources can be used in Ontario as well.

This website contains a database of teacher-submitted lesson plans for physical education; a bibliography of valuable resources; curriculum models and more. There a database on the site that allows teachers to search for lesson plans based on grade, desired outcome; and there is a lesson plan generator that allows teachers to design lesson plans on their own.

Each pre-designed lesson plan contains its own assessment strategies; equipment needed; what adaptations users can adopt and more. There is also an authorized resources section that allows teacher candidates to look up authoratative teaching resources for the teaching of physical education.

Introducing EDULinks Canada

The Tyndale Education Library, in collaboration with several members from the Ontario Teacher Education Library Association (OTELA), is pleased to announce the launching of an innovative new search engine called “EDULinks Canada”.

EDULinks Canada, developed using the power of Google Custom Search, is your portal to the best content on Canadian education the internet has to offer. What makes EDULinks Canada different from other search engines is that it only searches web sites selected by highly qualified education librarians and faculty from across Ontario.

Teachers can use this search engine to locate the best and most current lesson plan sites; job boards; professional organizations; educational publishers; and more. EDULinks is also equipped with refiners that can help you narrow your search so that you can get exactly what you want FAST.

Teachers can also add the EDULinks Canada interface to their IGoogle accounts for quicker and easier access. The EDULinks search engine will also be added to the Tyndale Education Library website over the next couple of weeks.

If you want to provide us feedback on how we can make EDULinks even better, please e-mail Mark Mueller at mmueller@tyndale.ca. Or you can call him at 416-226-6620, ext. 2227.

EDULinks Canada (English)

EDULinks Canada (Francais)

Book Adventure
www.bookadventure.com

Summer is just around the corner and now is as good as time as any to start thinking up ways to encourage our young to read.

What better way to do so than by getting the young people to go the “Book Adventure” website maintained and created by Sylvan Learning. This website allows children to create their own book lists from over 7,000 titles, take multiple choice quizzes on the books they read in order to earn points and prizes for their literary endeavors.

Teachers can also create their own class site where students can track their reading lists on personal book pages. Teachers may also to visit the teacher’s lounge section of the website and check out the vast webliography of free teacher resources and online teaching materials.

Parents interested in enrolling their kids in the annual TD Summer Reading Club may also find this resource useful for motivating the young people to read.

While you’re at it be sure to visit the Education Library and take out one of our many books contained in our extensive children’s literature collection.