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Freeplaymusic.com has a library of copyright-free music spanning all genres, available for download either on-line or through a portable hard-drive. Music is organized by style, feel, and volume and features many classical composers, indie artists, and various sound effects. If students are making a video for a project, they will definitely want to check out this site!

Science and Math interactive learning activities (Gizmos) for student learning.

I've used these in the past. I agree that they're good. Do we still have a license?

@ Bill: We do still have some licenses. I've used Gizmos this year. I would ask Christine about getting your kids on (?).

This site has games and activities that can be easily adapted for older ELL. Notetaking worksheets for beginning and advanced vocab development. It offers a lot of ideas useful for students who get bored or frustrated with their normal language arts worksheets.

This site interesting science ans social studies videos, blogs, articles, photos, etc. for middle/high schoolers. I like it because it presents information and articles in a way that is attention-grabbing for older students.

Games to support learning in all subjects, mostly elementary age. I use mostly the math games. They have a few for younger students that are obviously games, but require the student to figure out the answer first and not just guess blindly. There are also a number of printable worksheets.

This site allows you to create your own flashcards, create an online study group, and play your own study games. There is also tons of already made material, so it is likely you won't need to create your own. Quizlet really useful for students that are struggling in a certain area or that need help with their study skills. You have to create a login, but the service is free. I like this resource because it can be used and modified for any age or skill level.

A reading website for students. The best part is, students don't realize they are reading. They are too busy having fun!

A website designed to promote reading using phonics for prekindergarten to second grade. Students can practice skills through the use of songs, stories and videos.

This site offers free interactive reading activities that I've found very useful for kindergarten and beginning ELL students. The activities are formatted as games to engage the students, and they include sound features to encourage understanding of phonics and phonemic awareness. Beginning with ABCs and moving on to reading stories, this site lets students have fun while improving basic reading skills.

My students enjoy the surveys/polls on this site.

Times for Kids is great for social studies classes and is super easy to adapt articles for different reading and grade levels. The site also has a teacher's section with related items for download that would be easily integrated into a lesson plan for a comprehension check or group activity. The site layout and topics make current events a little more grasp-able for the younger students.

Tons of graphic organizers are available at this site, also many links to other activities on a variety of topics. Very easy to find printouts, visual aids, notetaking resources, and activities for younger students. The site also includes templates for various items, including homework coupons and other reward and recognition ideas.

This site, like many PBS websites, has tons of ideas and activities to incorporate into science or tech ed lessons. There are excellent nonliguistic elements including interactive "labs" and other online activities. It also does a nice job of connecting the lesson ideas to real life. The site includes extensive lesson plan ideas and extra resources, although the videos are not free.

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.

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."

This site was created by GE to teach students about the science, technology, math, and history of light. This would work very well in our science unit about heat and light. There are areas that students can read about light, hands on activities, and experiments. For my second graders, many of the readings would need to be done together, but there are also some interactive timelines and animations that students could check out on their own. The hands on activities and experiments would also be fun to bring in to the classroom, and are probably what I would use the most. The only downfall of this site is that the link to the "school lighting challenge" is currently not working. I'd be interested in checking this out if it gets up and running.

nice site to reference from, we cover light in media when we introduce cameras, so its nice to have some visuals as well

This is a cool website that will allow you to convert a file into another type of file. It has the capability to convert audio, video, image, document, ebook, archive or hash files into anything else! The audio file conversion tool could be particularly helpful in band. Many students like to download music on iTunes, but then can only play those songs on iTunes. Students could convert the file and then play it on any other type of music player. This would allow the music to be portable if they don't have an ipod. Students would be able to hear their music and practice their parts mentally from anywhere!

this loooks like a very useful site, with all the new audio and video formats out there, this would be nice to be able to utilize the various files without purchasing software that has a short shelf life

This is a great website for kindergarten through fourth grade. Students use "magnetic" tiles to create sentences, stories or poems. Depending on what type of project the student chooses, he/she either drags words or phrases to the storyboard. This website also gives students practice on clicking and dragging with the mouse

A fun site. . . I can see using this with my students to find their sight words and to create simple sentences!

I think it's a very fun site. I would like to have my 7th grade students write a poem about on-line safety... I think we will be utilizing this site. Thanks Laurie!

I like this website because although it doesn't specifically offer Family and Consumer Ed. curriculum lesson plans; I am excited to try "Architects in Action" This lesson will not only help build my Careers Unit but also be a catlyst for adding cross-curricular activities in Family and Consumer Ed.

We used United Streaming at a previous school district I worked at. There were some great video resources. It was pretty expensive, but well used. I do however think that there are so many free sites out there that we can find some great information and videos to enhance our curriculums as well.

"TED is a nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. " This is a great site to research ideas from others' perspectives and apply that information to your projects. I think middle school and high school teachers can use this with their students and search a topic and have one of the speakers help to apply or review the knowledge the teacher is covering. I plan on using the technology perspectives with my eighth graders of a great example of how to communicate with your audience.

Beyond the fact that some of these are great resources for teaching (Have you seen the one on Marshmallow towers? Undersea Astonishments?), many of these are good pick-me-ups, either because they are inspiring, or funny, or just get 'ya going.

There are some very interesting and enlightening talks here. I do like that many of the talks are related to where the world is heading and how we can better prespare our students for the future that they will inhabit.

Middle School students would love this site. Students will be able to apply the knowledge they have on an assigned topic and create a game for classmates to play to review that information.

My F/CE students would love this! They often ask if they can play a game but the ones I have are a little silly for 8th graders. I know with theirr computer skills, my students could easily make games that are more appropriate for thier age!

I wish I would have known about the site a few weeks ago! My students are taking turns teaching my reading class some vocabulary words and they are playing games with the students to help reinforce what they are teaching. This site would be great to help my students remember and apply what they are learning.

This website allows students and teachers to create imaginary Facebook pages for study purposes. Within the site you can choose from historical people such as Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill or Queen Elizabeth. Students can create a profile for their person and choose their "friends." They can also add posts and comments to their person's Fakebook page. This website can be used for book reports, character plots from novels, historical moments and many more educational purposes.

I just checked this out. It actually seems much more user friendly than myfakewall. Thanks for the resource, Erin. I'm going to use this with my classes for the next novel that we read.

Very cool. Like Greg, I've seen myfakewall, but not this one. This will be a great thing for us to do in my 7th grade classes when we talk about cyberbullying and online safety. The students will love it!

This sites boasts of 50 different educational games on its site. It also recommends trying a new one everyday. The games do actually cover a wide variety of topics: comparing decimals, making sentences, and confusing words to name a few. I played the Making Sentences game, which can be played by students of all ages to reinforce the essential elements of a sentence. I did get all 10 correct if anyone feels up to the challenge:)

The BBC Skillswise website is very well organized and has a wide variety of games, activities, and worksheets especially for mathematics and language arts. They have a Quick Read section where you can download the first few chapters of "bite-sized" books by best-sellling authors. Students can also practice their scanning skills through many formats from online activities to worksheets. One game called "Who Killed Angela Spelling" is a fun way for students to test their ability to scan text for specific information. This might be a good activity prior to doing research. The site also offer a wealth of resources for students to practice pretty much any area of mathematics.

This is a really neat website. I am always looking for games that my students can practice on and review new concepts, skills and strategies. In looking through the games I was impressed by how challenging some of them were. A lot of the games that I have found on previous sites are pretty easy but these are challenging. I tried playing the Apostrophes game, Beat the Clock on fast speed and I couldn't beat the clock!