When it comes to teaching websites, it can feel a bit like a labyrinth. There are so many resources out there to choose from, it’s hard to know where to even start.
Teaching is a pretty full-on job. You need to plan lessons, keep a classroom running smoothly, engage students and keep up with the latest trends and pedagogy. On top of all this, you also need to maintain a life outside work.
The idea of these educational websites is to make your teaching job easier by providing ready-to-go lesson plans, ESL worksheets, and materials created by expert educators. Or interactive tools, ESL games, and activities that make learning fun, innovative, and engaging. Perhaps you need some inspiration to create a stimulating and colorful learning environment. Or maybe you could find inspiration by reading a blog to reinvigorate your passion for teaching. Whatever you need, we’ve got you covered.
So, whether you’re an ESL teacher teaching abroad, or a general teacher from pre K – grade 12, our list of teacher websites to help both you and your students out is invaluable.
Resource Websites for Teachers
Lesson plans
Great for ESL teachers, Breaking News English has a wealth of over 2,800 free English lessons in 7 different levels, from elementary to advanced. Lessons are mostly designed around current affairs.
These guys offer a lesson plan library, created by educators, for pre K through 5th grade, in subjects including math, writing, and science. They also offer games, activities, worksheets, and articles.
Designed for students from K – 12, this website offers hundreds of lesson plans written by educators who use current instructional practices and research. There are also dozens of interactive tools, activities, and professional development resources.
National Geographic Learning offers lesson plans and instructional materials, featuring amazing content from National Geographic, for a variety of subjects. Their digital and curricular classroom materials can be used for Pre K – 12, as well as for ESL learning.
This website is a great grammar tool for ESL teachers, offering a range of downloadable lessons that cover a number of English grammar topics, plus spelling and writing activities. There are also online exercises and quizzes.
Free to download, British Council offers over 400 full ESL lesson plans for children, teenagers, and adults that cover a variety of topics and themes. They also provide other practical materials like short activities, poems, songs, and stories.
With over 700,000 resources created by teachers for teachers, you can find both free and priced lessons and materials to download for all age groups in a variety of 3
topics. You can also upload your lessons to share or sell within the TES community.
Offering ready to go lesson plans for every subject, grade, skill, and season, Scholastic provides resources to help you deliver a rounded and differentiated curriculum. Games, puzzles, and skills sheets are also available.
These lesson plans, created and shared by community teachers, are for a range of subjects and grade levels and provide resources such as openers and closers, as well as assessments and modifications.
Worksheets
Claiming to save you hours of prep time when teaching English, the BusyTeacher educational websites for teachers offers 17,300 free printable worksheets and lesson plans for adults and children, from beginner level to advanced.
As the name suggests, this website has a tonne of free math worksheets based on a range of topics, including addition, subtraction, money, fractions, and statistics. They also offer math games, like Sudoku, to help keep learning fun.
This website has free worksheets and workbooks based around a range of subjects, including math, literature, and science, for preschoolers through to high school students. You can also use their online tools to make your resources, like crosswords.
These guys offer free math and spelling based worksheets, printables and resources for teachers to use in the classroom, from preschool to 6th Grade. You can also generate tailor-made word search puzzles using their online tools.
Interactive Tools
A great source for instructional educational videos and audio resources, from math-based teacher raps to Ukulele scale warm-ups, TeacherTube covers a variety of topics and subjects in a safe environment.
If you can’t take your class to the zoo, why not bring the zoo to your class! These educational websites for teachers offer thousands of interactive resources for educators, including virtual trips and live feeds of animals, as well as games, lesson plans, and detailed animal information.
Here you can make interactive posters, or ‘glogs’, which contain pictures, text, video, links, and animations. These multimedia posters can be used for a variety of classroom activities, like to share information or experiences, to tell a story or present a project.
Powtoon is a simple movie-making tool that offers endless classroom possibilities. Students and teachers can create short animated clips by writing a script and choosing characters and graphics to bring the story alive. You can also make presentations.
TED-Ed provides hundreds of short, award-winning videos intending to spark the curiosity of students. You can also browse their growing library of thousands of video-based lessons, which can be used for a variety of subjects.
Decorations/Classroom Ideas
A fantastic resource that offers a wealth of ideas for anything and everything. If you’re stuck for classroom ideas, you can browse other classrooms for inspiration, basing your search on specific subjects or themes, or general classroom organization.
These guys offer a classroom decorations gallery for you to browse, giving teachers inspiration and creative ideas for their classrooms. When you click on a classroom you like, you’re given the option to buy the decorations to recreate that classroom.
SparkleBox is a UK website that offers thousands of free primary school teaching resources, from name tags and peg labels to scientific life cycles, to decorate the classroom. You can also edit some of the resources to suit your needs.
Activities/Games
Said to be the leader in educational games for kids, ABCya has a whole bank of free kids computer games designed for preschoolers through to 6th Grade. Kids can develop a range of skills, like counting to 100 or rhyming words, in a fun and interactive way.
Aimed at the younger generation, this website helps to teach kids about the world we live in – from the land to the people, animals, and plants – through interactive resources, videos, and computer games.
Poptropica is a virtual world in which kids can explore, engage in quests and stories, and play games in a completely safe environment. Kids use gaming literacy and problem-solving skills to discover and solve mysteries often rooted in factual history.
Teachers can select a grade level, from Pre K to Grade 8, and then choose from a wide range of math, reading, and strategy games. On top of educational games, Funbrain has a variety of educational video content and reading resources.
With this online interactive tool, you can quickly create fun learning games for your class or choose from millions of existing games. These games can be used to introduce a topic, for assessment purposes or to review and reinforce students’ understanding.
For Students
When your students need a brain break, Go Noodle could be the perfect go-to website. It provides free movement and mindfulness videos, created by child development experts, to benefit kids’ physical and emotional wellbeing, and their academic success.
For all those curious learners out there, this website answers the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ questions on a variety of topics, including science, health, animals, and adventures. It’s probably more suited to middle school students upwards.
It can sometimes be tricky to find a kid-friendly news platform, which is why a San Francisco mum developed Dogo News. Catering towards a younger audience, this news site is a great place for your students to catch up on current events.
This non-profit website is a platform for students to improve their vocabulary and world hunger – Free Rice donates 10 grains of rice to the World Food Programme for every vocabulary answer a student gets right.
Blogs for Teachers
Created by Vicki Davis, who is a teacher herself, this blog covers all sorts of educational topics from creating positive learning environments to using comics to teach chemistry. It also features a 5-day-a-week 10-minute teacher podcast to help inspire teachers.
Laura Candler’s blog shares her posts on a variety of categories, including different subjects, growth mindset and cooperative learning. She also has some educational podcasts for teachers, as well as a range of teaching resources.
Created by Melissa Taylor, a former elementary teacher and literacy trainer, this blog shares information on a range of reading and writing resources, including the best books for different age groups, reading ideas, and writing prompts.
For all the overworked and exhausted teachers out there, Angela Watson has created a blog filled with practical resources, like podcasts, books, and printables, to help teachers live a more purposeful and conscious life which is healthy and balanced.
Focused on the pedagogy of teaching, Jennifer Gonzalez’s blog offers insights into how you can develop your teaching skills so you can ‘crush it in the classroom’. Perfect for those of you who love to talk about the science and art behind teaching.
Offering humor, classroom ideas, career advice and posts on life and wellbeing, this blog by We Are Teachers covers a huge range of interesting topics for teachers to vent, laugh, be inspired and get reinvigorated to teach!
One Response
Good morning, I am writing to you to invite you to visit our new website and request that you may consider recommending it to teachers on this site if it meets your criteria.
The website is called ‘Rags to Riches’. It is an innovative new English teaching resource for teens and young adults, aimed at teachers and learners of levels A1 to B1. It consists of a two-season comedy-drama series narrating the rise to fame of a young rock band called Rags to Riches. Each episode is language graded and comes complete with a song, a language glossary and seven categories of activities ranging from grammar and vocabulary practice to games, debates, quizzes and song or script-writing workshops. Lesson plans and PowerPoint presentations are provided. Its flexibility means it is suitable as an ideal course book supplement, a revision resource or a complete English language course in itself.
Some materials are free, while others are behind a pay wall. We would be happy to send you free access to all materials for you to review if you are interested.
Many thanks