EDIT 7500 @ UGA

I'm actually not sure what to call this, but I will throw it into the "tool" pile. It's just too neat not to share. With this flash program, users can create Jackson Pollock-style "splatter paintings" by moving the mouse around.

Free pdf creator.

The New York Times has a nice Learning Network behind the scenes for educators and students with daily lesson plans, a lesson plan archive, and more, all leading back to the content of the New York Times. A variety of subjects are covered.

This site, affiliated with the University of Utah, has many different activities and modules related to learning genetics. It's pretty well done, and very slick.

Educational software (free!) from Owl & Mouse Educational Software. Software and activities for learning, class projects, afterschooling, homeschool, and teachers. It includes reading software for students also.

Students learn the locations, capitals, abbreviations and over 500 important facts about our 50 states. These games include a "learning" option and a "playing" option. Students locate the state, place the state (beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels), state postal abbreviations, state capitals (beginner, intermediate, advanced), and state clues (intermediate, advanced).

tutorials on key calc topics.

A lot of PBS' excellent Frontline programs are available for viewing via Quicktime or Windows Media here. These are some great documentaries that apply to a lot of the Social Sciences.

This site features many interactive learning and design tools for teachers and lots of ideas and examples for integrating technology. 4Teachers features professional development, educational video games, success stories, and a videos channel. It also has links to a "Family of Tools" including QuizStar, RubiStar, Academic Skill Builders, PersuadeStar, Equity, TrackStar, Assign-A-Day, Casa Notes, PBL Checklists, Teacher Tacklebox, Web Poster Wizard, NoteStar, Think Tank, and KidsVid. There are also assessment resources available.

I will throw this in with software, even though it is a site. Jay Is Games are the premier bloggers associated with casual games, many of which have mathematical and puzzle components. It's a good place to start to look for casual (and often educational!) "time-wasters."

Trig applets and good student interaction

This website provides several flash games that teach kids math concepts such as fractions, percentage, money change, and geometry. Students will like the way the site is deleivered, as well. On the "Play with Numbers, Give Your Brain a Workout" pages, students can do flash cards, use manipulatives, use a calculator, model math problems with blocks, etc. There are new problems for each month, as well.

This study finds that kids and teenagers are increasing "new media" use while not decreasing "old media" use at all. In fact, sometimes they do both at the same time (going online to read the newspaper). Interesting regarding child behavior...

Hot Potatoes includes six applications: interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises to put on web. Hot Potatoes is free to publicly funded, non-profit, educational users who make their pages available on the web. Other users must pay for a licence.

Hot Potatoes kind of straddles the tool/software divide. It's a fun powerful program that I have mainly used for crossword puzzle creation, but it is able to do a lot more, like matching games and short answer quizzes. Good for testing Knowledge-level content.