This week, while working on putting together a lesson for a classroom of future middle school science teachers, I ran across a few great sites. As we all know, locating and collecting resources can take up a HUGE amount of time. That's why I love my Diigo and bookmark like crazy. Every once in a while, somebody uses a cool tool at a presentation or conference or (and this is REALLY weird), the supermarket and that is when I pull out my handy-dandy smartphone with bookmarking app installed to make sure the tool is saved for future reference. There are bookmarking apps for everything and I encourage you to pick one and install it everywhere. Aside from Diigo, another one I can recommend is Evernote (though not as novice user-friendly as Diigo). Advantage to bookmarking: Easy way to start your personal learning network!

Here are a few sites I just added to my Diigo account:

1. More Ideas Than You'll Ever Use for Book Reports
2. Top 20 (should be Top 1 million!!!) Web 2.0 Must Haves for Every 21st Century Classroom

Finally, I recently posted a research article that compared what parents want from teacher websites to what teachers THINK parents want from teacher websites. Here's a quick and dirty summary of that table:

Obviously there are some issues here. Your parents and teachers, if surveyed, might give you a completely different list. There are also some questions: parents want a forum for class information and news but not a blog - maybe these parents did not truly understand what a blog was. However, these results do point out the importance of communicating with parents and students before spending time designing a website for your classroom or school library. Why put effort into something they will never use or look at while ignoring information they want?