10 Websites No Teacher Should Be Without

1.  Crayola Educators –  Believe it or not some amazing art linked lesson plans to many of the K-12 core curriculum units can be found here, and most of them require simple art supplies.  Lesson plans for sculpture, painting, drawings, and more are available with unit topics. 
2. Delicious – This is a free service where thousands of people keep their web favorites, enabling you to view and save the bookmarks to your own account.  To utilize, you will need to think in one word tags (topics) such as “underground_railroad”, “angles”, or “romeoandjuliet”.  Click on Explore Tags which is located on the middle of the screen and type in your topic.  The results will be other people who have bookmarked items with that topic that you can now save.  For more information on Delicious, here is a video.
3. Intel Assessing Projects – This is an amazing resource that provides you with assessment ideas for everything from blogs to drama skits.  The assessment strategies and assessment plans are fantastic, but definitely check out the “Try It” section for a demo of the tool.  If you have a login for the Intel Thinking Tools, it will work here, as well.
4. Microsoft Templates and Google Document Templates – Believe it or not, there is an amazing amount of resources for teachers at Microsoft.  You will find bookmarks, labels, behavior contracts, calendars, brochures, parent letters, and more.  The Google templates are also vast, but they do require you to create an account to utilize.
5. PBS Teachers – Wonderful for PreK-5^th grade on the elementary level and targeted for science and history on the 6-12 level, PBS Teachers is a great resource.  Here you can find videos from NOVA and the American Experience and interactive sites for elementary reading and math.
6. PDF Search Engine – This is a brilliant tool that allows you to locate premade handouts and worksheets in no time.  Simply type in the topic and a list of .pdf printable documents will be available.
7. Quia – Highly recommended for Foreign Language and Language Arts Teachers.  Though it is a subscription based site for you to create interactive games, quizzes, and more, you can take advantage of the thousands of activities without joining.  Simply paste site:www.quia.com into Google along with your search query.  For example: underground railroad site:www.quia.com.  The results will be a list of interactive games and quizzes.
8. Teachers.tv – An educational video site from the United Kingdom that offers wonderful case study classroom videos and more.  Simply click your curriculum area on the left to browse what is available.  You will not be able to download videos from here, but they will play from the website. I do believe teachers do need YouTube and TeacherTube, as well, but this site's focus is on improving teacher instruction.
9. The Library of Congress – We all know that teaching with primary resources is a wonderful tool.  Here you can access over 10 million digitized artifacts to use within your classroom.  Photos, manuscripts, sheet music, and audio recordings are at your fingertips.  
10. Thinkfinity – Hands down one of my favorite websites for teachers.  Thinkfinity is sponsored by the Verizon Foundation and it is actually an impressive partnership with major groups such as the National Geographic Society, The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, and more.   Here you will find some of the best project based learning units, classroom interactives, premade worksheets, and standards-based activities.