My very first nomination for "great online resource for science teachers" goes to. . . ScienceGeek.net! At this site, Mr. Allen of El Diamante High School (located in the San Joaquin Valley, CA, in case you were wondering) shares a multitude of resources for the High School Biology, Chemistry, or Conceptual Physics teacher. Using his Chemistry resources as an example, all of his powerpoints, videos, and favorite freeware are linked to and organized in such a way as to be very easily accessed and explored.
His powerpoints are accurate and useful and often include excellent, uniquely explanatory animations, tables, and graphs. His interactive reviews are excellent resources when students need a little extra practice. The only drawback of the site is that his powerpoints are not editable files, so customizing them can be a little bit of a chore, but I would still highly recommend this site to anyone who, like me, teaches Biology or Chemistry at a secondary level and who profits from seeing what other people have already done with the subjects they themselves have to teach. He also sets an excellent example of how to keep communication lines with parents and students open in the digital age - at his site, parents and students can sign up to be on the class mailing list, log in to see their grades, and access the course calendar.
The Biology Corner is simply too basic a biology teacher reference for me to leave out. For learning vocabulary, there are myriad puzzle-making tools and pre-made worksheets and games. There are labs ranging from very simple to very complex in many of the major areas of biology, commentary on effective and ineffective uses of
Last but not least comes Discovery Education. This place offers a lot, but it offers a lot more if your district or school has subscribed to it, so make sure you check right away to see if you have a login that will give you special access to Discovery Education's best offerings. But even if you don't have school-bought-and-paid-for access, you can use Discovery Education for its consistently good lesson plans, access to (some of) the Discovery Channels very cool footage and matching activities, invaluable assistance in participating in or running science fairs (I personally had never participated in a science fair before this year, and I had one very interested student). One of the coolest things about Discovery Education is that they have resources for many subjects at all grade levels, broken up by grade levels, but often including suggestions for revamping each lesson plan to accommodate older or younger students.
I hope these are useful to some of you out there. I know they've been useful to me this past year teaching Bio and Chem.
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