SAS and Vital NY

Channel 13's database of lesson plants on Vital NY is a great resource for beginner teachers. Not only does it have lesson plans that can be directly lifted from the site, but most of the lesson plans can be reformatted to fit any lesson. As long as a teacher takes the lesson activity or idea he or she can change it to fit any topic. The many video resources will also be helpful for the ever growing visual learner students.

SAS Curriculum Pathways, as seen from their demo, have many tools at the disposal of teachers and students. The programs look to be engaging and even entertaining for the students. For English, the writing reviser will be extremely helpful for student writing. Although I fear it might kill the style and voice of some students who are already competent writers. It also may make students lazy in correcting mistakes in their writing on their own and have them depend on a program to correct grammatical errors.

Intel tools

Both Intel tools seem like great teaching tools. The visual ranking tool as modeled in class is a great discussion starter. Everyone values things differently and it is the teacher's job to make sure students can adequately voice their reasons why they rank things a certain way. This is very important in writing.

The seeing reason tool is excellent for cause and effect relationships. This can be useful for organizing complex plots in novels and stories. I tried making a character web with it but it didn't come out exactly the way I wanted it since the tool is more concerned with how things are greater and lesser rather than equally connected.

Oh, and free things are always good things in my book. Good job Intel!