Group items tagged

Looking for a synonym to jazz up a piece of writing? You, and students, can use visual thesaurus to find that word. The "visual" part of this online thesaurus stems from the web of words that results from a search. For example, if I was looking for a synonym for cool, I'd type the word in the search bar, and a web would be created with "cool" in the center. Stemming off the center is a color coded assortment of alternatives for "cool", and the colors are based on the meaning of "cool". What a fast and fun way to search for words!

What I really enjoyed about this website was the opportunity for incidental learning -- unexpected learning on the way. As I child, I always enjoyed the encyclopedia. As I paged to my favorite section "dogs" I would find other articles I never would searched before. With this visual thesaurus, the user can search for one word and find herself learning others.

Looking for an alternative way to search for images? Tag Galaxy is a site where you can type in a subject, such as "The Revolutionary War", and you'll be directed to a selection of photographs about the Revolutionary war. These are photographs that people have tagged, and many of the photos come with descriptions. This is a great site for visual learning.

this is a very useful site to find images, is there a way for students to copy or use these photos?

I was able to get back to the original Flickr page by clicking on the image (double click?). Once there, I found the ones I looked at to be "all rights reserved."

Using Quia, you can create your own or use other teacher's activities to provide students extra practice and extended learning time! There are activities in all subjects and levels and you can browse by category, activity type, or most popular activities. I found numerous Java games that were created to reinforce music skills. For example, my students could use the site to study for our upcoming terms, signs, and symbols quiz. There were free, online flashcards, matching, concentration, and word search games that reviewed all the terms I've been teaching. You can share all activities you create with other teachers and you can copy and modify other teacher's activities and contact them if you have a question. If you create a quiz in Quia, it will automatically grade it for you and track student's test scores throughout the year. You can also track how long a student spends on Quia activities. The site offers online surveys, activities in 100 languages and a calendar feature for communicating deadlines and assignments to students and parents.

This site has pretty much anything you could want to help students practice or review content. I checked out the math, biology, and art sections and found literally all kinds of interactive games, flashcards, and quizzes on a variety of topics. The site is very easy to use and find the topic you need; the search function allows you to search by category or textbook. If you make an account, you are able to create your own activities and quizzes and also view your students' results for the activities they have completed. I will definitely come back here.

You can do an advanced search on Google images to find public domain and creative commons that students are free to share and reuse.

I'm actually making a very conscious effort to make sure that our students do understand that not everything on the internet is "free" to be used as they see fit. This can be a very solid tool.

Dictionary. com is the largest and most trusted free, online dictionary. The site features a dictionary resource, thesaurus, flashcards, crosswords, and word games for homework practice and has an easy- to-use translator feature. When you look up a word, it not only gives you the definition but also an audio pronounciation, related searches, synonyms, nearby words, and information regarding the word's origin and history. As I approach my songwriting unit, I'm excited to have my students use this feature to find descriptive words as they write lyrics.

This website allows teachers to easily create word puzzles such as matching activities, flash cards, crossword puzzles, and word searches. Online versions of these same puzzles can also be used. It also has an online dictionary feature that provides the definition of a word as well as uses it in a sentence and provides different translations. Students can also choose from an extensive list, which dictionary they'd like to use. Some features do require the user to create an account, and there is also a premium account that users can pay a fee for. I'm sure this would open up even more resources, though I did not try this portion.

10 million downloadable images available by subscription.

Great resource for students to find images to help enhance their work.

Clip art is great for my 6th graders because it is easy for them to search in the different categories as opposed to searching Google images.

StumbleUpon, while blocked by our schools servers, might be helpful for teachers at home. After you create a free account, you can build your "profile". Your profile tells the website what you are interested in. There are numerous topics to check. After you have entered your interests, you click the "stumbleupon" button and the website will take you to a random web page that it things will interest you. You can either "like" or "dislike" each page that it takes you too, and the web site will learn more what you like. This site could be particularly helpful in finding activities for your students that you couldn't find by searching on Google. I just found out about this site from a friend, and so far I've found some pretty cool resources that I don't think I would have found otherwise.

Wow, I just signed up... that is very cool. I think middle school and high school students would really like it. It would be very fun to use at school with the kids, but by only having control of topics and not knowing what you're going to get for content, we need to be cafeful. I really like it and can see spending hours in there.

I submitted it for review. We'll see what happens.

Students can use this site to find data and statistics on almost any subject. For example, a student could enter "Wisconsin" in the search bar and find out anything from population to the lowest point in the state. I even typed in my name, and found that there are just over 888,000 Sarahs expected to be alive today. This site is informative as well as interesting!

That sounds like a fun website. Possibly a great website for those students who may need to be challenged more than the others. I bet some kids would really get into this site! Thanks for sharing, Sarah!

This is a really cool website for students and/or adult s who are either an ESL student, studying English as a foreign language or who just want to brush up on their English. This website offers everything from games to pronunciation to slang and idioms. This site can also be used in the classroom to help students studying specific components of English such as figurative language. Students can practice what they have learned by taking the quizzes or play a word game. While searching through this website I actually learned a few new things! This website really does have everything!

BadgerLink is a project of the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI), Division for Libraries, Technology, and Community Learning. Its goal is to provide access to quality online information resources for Wisconsin residents in cooperation with the state's public, school, academic, and special libraries and Internet Service Providers. (http://www.badgerlink.net?)

Madlibs, sudoku, web books, reading, math! It's all here and it's FUN!!!

My own kids like this site. It is a nice way for them to use technology in an educationally sound way. And yes, I have played some of these games as well. Fun!

A fun site for K-8 activities

Search for your next great read.

Part of the Newseum website, this link will give you access to the front pages of more than 800 different newspapers from around the world. You can search by name or region. You will even find several newspapers from Wisconsin! Copyright laws still apply.

Very cool. This gives me a great idea about how to show students that are major issues are not always viewed in the same way in different parts of the country. You have just helped me create a much stronger persuasive essay unit. Thanks,Greg.

Rubrics, 42,000 lesson plans, 9,000 printable worksheets! They also have resources for holidays and specials occasions for each month.

This is a pretty cool place. You really can search for any number of different activities.

A great game for the children to learn their letters and each others names!

A website that feature free educational videos that are organized by subject and theme. There are so many videos here. Any time that you need a short video for just about anything, this is the place to look. For example, do you need a video that explains the history of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day? Go to the Holidays link and find the link for MLK, Jr. Day. A great resource!

For educational purposes, I think this site is actually easier to use than youtube. The search and subcategories make it very simple to find good videos to fit what you are teaching.

This is a pretty sweet website! There are over 600 videos for music alone! Bill Nye the Science Guy has a 24 minute video about music that would be perfect for my music appreciation class next year.

This site has lots of interactive elements and many resources. There are phonics games for practice and review, and "alphabet organizers" where students can make their own alphabet books, using their own words. There are interactive poetry tutorials that allow the student to easily create and print his/her own poem. I like that the site has literacy activities and ideas for students in middle school -- I've never met an ELL student that likes to do second grade work.

This website offers many manipulatives to help students understand, practice and review math concepts. I particularly like the fraction manipulatives. Some of my students have difficulty perceiving fractions and I believe this will be an excellent tool for exploration, practice and review.

The idea behind this website is very interesting to me, and after playing with it a bit, I did find some of the manipulatives useful. However, many of them I found to be quite cumbersome. I was really excicited about the base ten blocks manipulatives for helping my students add and subtract, and once I figured it out, it was great. However, I had to read the help directions to get to that point. If I was able to spend the time showing my students how to use these, I think it'd be a wonderful tool. However, I was hoping I'd be able to simply direct my students and their parents to this site so they could use it for help at home. I'm afraid that many of the parents would not take the time to read the help area to figure it out, and I know my students wouldn't (or wouldn't understand them if they did). So while I was initially impressed with the idea of this site, I might search for something a bit more user friendly.