faceinhole.com is a fun site with famous pictures of celebrities, movie scenes, music album covers, magazine covers, and more. Each picture has a hole where a face belongs. You can upload a digital photo of yourself and crop it to fit in the hole you chose. You can also post your creation to a blog. These can be done for fun or you can have students create one and tie it into subject matter. For example, they could create a picture of themselves and then use that picture and setting to write a story, using the particular writing elements in your classroom.
What girl doesn't love shoes! This site is fun to rate, read about, and watch videos about shoes! It also gives places to find the shoes you like at low costs. It's not necessarily an educational tool, but lots of fun, none the less.
Teachers can host and manage blogs for your students, use a Class Homepage to communicate with students, review capabilities of entries, and it offers advanced privacy. Students get fully featured blogs to upload text, photos, or insert videos, fun learning experience, customizable visibility and comment settings, and no e-mail address required.
This is a bit like an avatar but it is more funny. Sometimes (If I can get lab time) I will let my kids do an "oral presentation" by using blaberize. There are lots of rules of course, but it is fun seeing them up on the smart board and the kids can get a little goofy with it.
This is an online notice board maker where you can post announcements, greetings, jokes; just about anything you would want to put on a Post It. I think this would be a great tool for students to use in a note taking assignment. This would be fun to collaborate multiple students' posts and try to combine them randomly to create a funny poem or short story.
aMap is short for 'argument map'. The idea's very simple - to get more people arguing by mapping out complex debates in a simple visual format. At its heart, aMap is about helping people get to grips with complex (or otherwise) issues and get people thinking.
aMaps come in two different formats:
Printed pocket-sized aMaps, which you can buy on the eMaps website
Interactive personalised aMaps, which you can make on the eMaps website
The underlying structuring of aMaps is based around "informal logic" - this is the logic people use to argue in everyday life.
Informal logic has a four-tiered structure:
- Your position (I think . . .) - what you think over all
- Propositions (Because . . .) - reasons that support your position
- Arguments (As . . .) - supporting arguments that back up each of your propositions
- Evidence (Supported by . . .) - supporting evidence to back up your arguments
Although aMaps can be used just for fun, to help students improve and/or develop their reasoning and critical thinking in their essay writing and verbal communication.
Fatburgr provides nutrition information for many of your favorite restaurants. Calories, fat grams, carbs, and fiber are all listed for menu items from restaurants such as Schlotzsky's, Chili's, McDonald's, Panera Bread, Krispy Kreme, and many more. With the focus on childhood obesity, this is a great site for kids (and adults) to compare menu items and learn how to make better choices when eating out. This site could be a fun resource for a health, or maybe even a math, activity.
This is a free private journal on the web. How much fun would that be to use the web to keep track of your daily journal entries at school? These entries can be shared with others ONLY when you allow them to be. Images can be added on entries as well.
Those who keep a journal are known to have a better "working memory." Keeping a journal also improves the writing process and aids in creativity.
No more pen and pencil for journals after today!
Smilebox is a fun web site where you can upload your digital photos to create slideshows, ecards, photoalbums, and postcards. You can also add music to them. Then you can email your creations or add them to a blog. It can be used for personal use or you can have students create photo albums or slideshows relating to a particular area of study, to show what they have learned or to teach a concept to others.
I just thought this website was fun for learning all kinds of interesting information. There are so many people online all the time, why not use each other for help with any type of question. It was interesting to read the things that people were talking about and a great way to learn information. I think is also a great tool for using to quickly find information on any information you might be wondering about or may want to start a discussion about.
This allows a person to express themselves through animation. This would be useful to help the reluctant students who have trouble expressing themselves to others. Students could use this for projects and presentations.
On GoAnimate you can make your own animated characters, direct your own cartoons and watch others' creations. It's easy and free! I think this would be a fun way to allow students the creative freedom to construct graphic-novel-type book reports or fictional stories. This would also be a wonderful way for students to retell the plot line of the story for the class.
Wordle is a great Web 2.0 tool to motivate students to look at word choice in their writing. The words that are used frequently, are displayed larger in the word cloud.
Wordle is a site for creating "word clouds." Paste text into the site and it will automatically create a word cloud. The larger words indicate the words that are used frequently in the text. Students can put a piece of writing to see which words are overused. There is a gallery to display your wordle with everyone.
Wordle helps create word clouds. You enter words and the more often a word is entered, the larger the word will appear in the word cloud. It's a fun way to make posters that are fun and informative. It would be a good way to have students create posters over books they've read, end of the unit displays, etc. One tip that I received for Wordle is that it is helpful to type your words in a Word document first so that you can edit them and make sure they are all spelled correctly. If you have a typo in your Wordle, you can't edit it. You have to retype all of the words.
This is a fun online timeline creator, which can be shared with others online. A valid email is needed to create a timeline, but that could be set up by the teacher or LMS. It's very visual in learning about time.
How Many of Me begins by stating that there are 305,818,604 people in the United States. It then asks, "How many have your name?" You type in your first and last name and it will tell you how many others in the U.S. have the same name. It will also tell you how many people in the U.S. have the same first name alone and how many have the same last name alone. There are links for statistics and data on famous people's names. This site would mostly be for fun, but you could tie it into ancestry and immigration lessons in the classroom.
PollDaddy allows you to create your own poll or survey on any topic for free. You can then add your creation to your web site, blog, or social networking page. You can use them for fun or as an educational tool. Teachers can create polls or surveys for their students to answer, regarding current subject matter or students can use their math skills to create their own poll/survey. They can create polls and surverys related to specific objectives and they can incorporate their technology skills by adding their poll/survey to a web page, blog, powerpoint, or other media forms.
Math Playground is an action-packed site for elementary and middle school students. Students can have fun while practicing math skills and playing logic games.