Useful+Elementary+Websites

Useful Elementary Websites
Using [|Google Reader], I subscribe to many blogs that relate to technology and education. [|Kevin Jarret] from NCS-Tech, Cool Cat Teacher [|Vicki Davis], [|Will Richardson], [|David Warlick]and [|Wes Fryer]are just some of the techies that I follow online. Many of their articles have great resources for elementary education. Browse the links below and feel free to add sites that you may find useful as well.

English / Language Arts:
Taken from Free Technology for Teachers website: Shape Poems is a simple poem generation template hosted by Read Write Think. Shape Poems provides a template for writing poems in the shape of an object, about that object. Shape templates can be selected from one of four themes including sports, school, nature, and celebrations. Students then select a shape and identify words that they associate with their chosen shape. When completed, students can hear their poems read to them and or print their poems.

Taken from Free Technology for Teachers website:

WordAhead, a vocabulary video and vocabulary practice website that I reviewed in April, has launched a new service for teachers. WordAhead now gives teachers the ability to create custom playlists of vocabulary videos. The playlists can be shared via email, a posted link on a blog, or by posting a vocabulary video widget on a blog or website. The teacher section of WordAhead also offers advice for having students create their own vocabulary videos.

Reading Logs is a site that allows teachers and students to create reading logs, vocabulary cards, and practice spelling skills. Parents can also access Reading Logs to check on their students' progress. It appears that there is also a platform for school librarians in development, but it did not appear to be functioning when I visited the site.

Teachers can upload reading goals, vocabulary lists, and spelling words for students to practice. After their teacher has uploaded the goals and lists students can log-in to reading assignments and practice vocabulary words. To practice spelling words, students can use the Listen & Spell practice system which reads each word aloud. Students can submit completed assignments online or print out their completed assignments. Teachers and parents can track the progress of their students.

**Applications for Education** Reading Logs could be a good system for reading teachers and parents to monitor the progress of their students.

In our third grade lesson, we are using the ReadWriteThink Printing Press, but my curiosity got the better of me and in a couple of mouse clicks, I ended up on the main “Student Materials” resource list: @http://readwritethink.org/student_mat/index.asp. Holy cow! Tons of ideas and tools presented there. It looked familiar though, and sure enough, I found I’d written a post two years ago on it. Oh well, it’s so good, it’s worth another post!"
 * Essay Map - Step by Step Help Constructing Essays - Taken from Kevin Jarret's Blog - "It’s very slick! Flash-powered and easy to use, it generates a full page worksheet with whatever the kids enter. You can’t save it, but you can navigate forward and back until it’s just right, and then print the entire thing in a very nice full-page format, suitable for rewriting into a final draft! If you just want the worksheet, click here!
 * Myths and Legends Story Creator 2.” This site offers a completely free, extremely visual, incredibly simple, multi-media rich digital storytelling development environment that is perfect for students of all ages. Its intuitive user interface is packed with features.
 * [|Spelling City] is a great website that allows students, teachers or parents to create spelling lists that convert into review activities, games and crossword puzzles easily.
 * [|Tumblebooks] - online storybooks and activities

ESL / ELL:
Taken from Free Technology for Teachers website:
 * Many Things is a website offering ESL students and teachers an extensive collection of games, quizzes, and other online learning activities. Visitors to Many Things will find materials appropriate for beginning through advanced ESL students. In addition to games and quizzes, visitors will find listening activities made possible through the use of MP3 recordings. Many Things also offers visitors video lessons on speaking and writing English.
 * The Spanish-English Sentence Database
 * My English Images - Resources for ESL/ELL Teachers
 * ESL Printables - Worksheets and Lesson Plans

My English Images is a collection of drawings demonstrating words, phrases, and parts of speech. The drawings are intended to provide visual aids for students that are beginning to learn English. The images are organized into collections for conversation, grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary. In addition to the images teachers can find worksheets and games on My English Images.

**Applications for Education** My English Images could be an excellent resource for anyone that works with ESL/ ELL students. You could use the images as explanations for words or phrases. You could also use the images as a model for having students create their own images of English words.

Learn English Kids is a project sponsored by the British Council. Learn English is designed to help young ESL students. Students can visit the website to play educational games, listen and read along with short stories, or listen to and sing along with English songs. Learn English Kids also has a number of activities designed to help students practice writing in English.

**Applications for Educators** Learn English Kids has many activities that students can do individually which is great for differentiated instruction. Learn English Kids also has a long list of activities and lessons that teachers can do with a whole class. The teacher section of Learn English Kids has some articles and reports that will be of interest to ESL teachers.

Mathematics:
Manga High is a new site offering free mathematics games for K-12 students. There are four games and a quiz program that offer graduated activities. Students earn gold, silver, and bronze "coins" to track their progress. While the games and quiz program are free, the rest of Manga High is a fee-based service.

**Applications for Education** Manga High, like a lot of mathematics games sites, provides an intuitive and engaging platform for students to use to practice their mathematics skills. One of the benefits of Manga High is that it doesn't have the intrusive advertising that some mathematics game sites have.

Chart Go is a free service that allows users to quickly and easily create pie charts, area charts, bar graphs, and line graphs. Chart Go does not require any registration to use the service. To create your chart just select the chart style and chart dimensions. Then enter your y-axis and z-axis data. Chart Go generates your chart based on your specifications and data input. When your chart is done, you can save a copy to your computer or share it via a unique url assigned by Chart Go.
 * Calculation Nation - Math Games for K-12
 * Five Sources of Fun Mathematics Games
 * The Math Tool Chest - Math Games in Two
 * Math Worksheet Creator
 * [|www.mathplayground.com] - this is a great site given to me by Mary Kenny. Thanks Mary!

Social Studies:
Taken from Free Technology for Teachers website:

UMapper is a custom map creation tool that allows you to create maps from just about any JPG, PNG, or GIF file. Using UMapper is a simple process of uploading an image and selecting a map service (Google, Yahoo, Bing) as the basis for the map. The finished maps can be embedded into your blog or website.

Historic Maps in K-12 Classrooms, developed by The Newberry Library, offers resources for using historical maps to teach lessons on geographic and historic themes. In total there are eighteen lessons spanning six themes. Each historical map has a lesson plans designed for use at different grade levels. The grade levels are divided K-2, 3-5, 6-8, and 9-12. Each lesson plan comes with links to additional resources and images for enhancing and modifying the lessons to suit your needs.

**Applications for Education** Maps, in general, are great resources for the visual learners in your classroom. As my friend Jim Wells says, "maps provide a visual framework for learning." The historical maps and lesson plans provided by the Newberry Library could be good resources for providing a visual framework for history and geography lessons. History Animated is a great resource for US History teachers that I featured in a post last month. Today, History Animated announced the launch of two new animations just in time for the beginning of the new school year. History Animated now offers animations of the Saratoga and Philadelphia campaigns during the American Revolution.

**Applications for Education** The animations provided by History Animated could be great visual aids for students. The animations are a significant improvement over drawing or pointing to places on a map.

The internet doesn’t have to be a scary place for teachers to use in the classroom. There numerous sites out there that offer kids a chance to learn in a much more interactive and in-depth fashion about the world around them, both past and present. Here's a listing of the "Top 12" online resources that can help bring history and social studies alive for your students.


 * 1)  **__Clickable Mummy__** **:** Kids are very often interested in mummies and using this interactive site they can learn about the process of mummification.
 * 2)  **__50 States__** **:** Learning geography can be a little more interactive with this site that lists tons of facts about each of the states.
 * 3)  **__Maps.com__** **:** Not only can you find regular old maps here to use in class, students can also engage with map games to make learning a little more fun.
 * 4)  **__CIA World Factbook__** **:** From maps to flags, this site will help kids learn about every country in the world.
 * 5)  **__EyeWitness to History__** **:** Get a more personal perspective on history through this site that engages kids with first-hand accounts of historical events, photos, audio and more.
 * 6)  **__Countries of the World__** **:** Use this site to find out information about countries around the world from studies done by the U.S. government.
 * 7)  **__Visible Earth__** **:** Take advantage of these NASA images to show kids what the world looks like from an elevated perspective. They’ll be able to see a wide range of geographic features.
 * 8)  **__Today in History__** **:** Put in any day in the year and find out what major events happened on it through this helpful tool.
 * 9)  **__The History Beat__** **:** Need a timeline? This site is chock full of them.
 * 10)  **__LOC American Memory__** **:** This site is loaded with photos, primary documents, audio clips and in-depth information that can be a valuable tool to helping students understand American history.
 * 11)  **__History Games and Animations__** **:** Check out this list of resources to find tools that will help you teach your students about everything historical from ancient times to the present day.
 * 12)  **__The Biography Maker__** **:** Elementary age children will appreciate this site that helps them to understand just what a biography is and get a little help on jazzing up boring facts into something fun and exciting to read.
 * @http://playinghistory.org/ is a site that aggregates games about history as submitted by people all over the web. A tag cloud is featured prominently as a the main interface for locating games but you can also search.
 * 20,000+ Historical Maps - Many on Google Earth/ Maps
 * New York Then and Now - Interactive Map & Images
 * This Day in History Videos

Science:

 * [] This amazing collection of simulations will educate while it entertains. We used the weather activity earlier this year and it was fantastic – did exactly what we needed it to as a culminating activity, loaded quickly, was simple to understand and apply. The Teacher’s Guide (also available in .PDF format) has helpful tips about using the site as well as pre- and post-tests and state (Ohio) / national science standards included. The animation quality is particularly excellent, with vivid drawings, great use of sound and dialog, and kooky characters kids will love.
 * The Simple Machines activity is also excellent, particularly for elementary kids, as it does a great job explaining how simple machines are part of everyday life. It’s not all fun and point-n-click games though – the Crash Scene activity is extremely detailed and realistic (perhaps too much so, there are actual crash scene photos included.) Some of the other activities are also a little too realistic – the Virtual Hip Replacement activity has actual photos too – ugh! Definitely spend some time reviewing this site before using it with your kids.
 * Learn about the Scientific Method, from this site that uses videos, text and other visuals.
 * Taken from Kevin Jarret's blog: "Today’s featured site is an “oldie but a goodie!” A fellow teacher came by yesterday and asked if I’d ever seen a site that allows you to create your own animals by blending parts together. I immediately thought of two sites - BuildYourWildSelf.com (which I blogged about in January 2008) and the Switcheroo Zoo, which I thought I’d mentioned here, but apparently haven’t! So, here goes!"
 * WorldWide Telescope - a Microsoft tool, similar to Google Earth.
 * Taken from Kevin Jarret's blog - I’ve written before about the research behind animal reports, but today I want to talk about a tool that kids can use to assemble a finished product after their data gathering is complete (or just use for fun!). It’s called National Geographic Wildlife Filmmaker and I heard about it from K-5 tech teacher extraordinaire Nedra Isenberg."
 * Taken from Kevin Jarret's blog - "My 4th grade teachers spend a lot of time on human body systems. Though we have some favorite websites, many are cartoonish or game-like. That changed when I recently discovered The Visible Body, a magnificent, powerful, free, fully realistic 3D model of the human body and all its internal systems."

Multimedia Tools / Educational Games
> Just think: millions of great short videos, and other watchable media, explaining every topic taught in schools, in every major language on Earth. Finally, imagine them all deeply and usefully categorized according to subject, education level, and placed in the order in which topics are typically taught. WatchKnow—as in, "You watch, you know"—has started building this resource."
 * [|Learn computer animation with Domo!]
 * [|AudioMixing Software-]
 * []: "The Internet is full of useful information, but it's disorganized and often unreliable. Despite its problems, the potential of the Internet for education is especially huge. Imagine tapping into that potential. Imagine collecting all the best free educational videos made for children, and making them findable and watchable on one website. Then imagine creating many, many more such videos.

Taken from Free Technology for Teachers website: > **Applications for Education** > Simple polls like those possible with Vorbeo can be useful for collecting informal feedback from your students. I like to run polls on my course blog about a week before a test. I use these polls to gauge how my students are feeling about the course content and what we may need to spend more time studying.
 * [[image:http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_TkhlSyyP58U/St0YYeDl72I/AAAAAAAAE_M/0ZaTKuYEDgw/s400/vorbeo width="179" height="86" link="@http://vorbeo.com/"]]Vorbeo is a free service for creating polls for your blog or website. To use Vorbeo just type your question, enter your answer choices, select a background color, and specify the width of your polling widget. Then copy the embed code provided by Vorbeo and paste it into the html editor of your blog or website.

Memoov is a free service for creating animated videos. Without downloading any software or having any special skills, Memoov allows users to create animated videos up to five minutes in length. Creating an animated video with Memoov can be as simple as selecting a setting image(s), selecting a character or characters, and adding dialogue.
 * http://cooltoolsforschools.wikispaces.com/ is a compilation of great Web 2.0 tools for the classroom. This page is awesome and updated often!
 * Big Green Rabbit was listed on the Fall 2009 Parent’s Choice Award Winner websites. This site is for the PreK – 2 grades and has value in teaching fine motor skills / mouse control, music, dance, and more!
 * Utah Education Network’s collection of interactive sites for students in grades K-2, 3-6, and 7-12.!
 * GameClassroom.com - excellent resource of interactive games for k-6 students!

Some readers may have seen my Tweet about this earlier this evening. Screenr is a very simple, easy-to-use tool for creating screencast videos. You do not need to register in order to use Screenr, but if you want to save your recordings you do need a Twitter account. Screenr uses your Twitter ID to save your recording and publish it to Twitter (you can opt not to publish to Twitter). The recordings you make using Screenr can also be published to YouTube or you can download your recordings.

To use Screenr simply go to the site, click the "record" link, drag a box around the area of your screen that you want to record and then press the red "record" button. Screenr will record for up to five minutes. When you're done recording, click publish and you're done. It really takes just a few minutes to create a screencast video using Screenr.

Smarty Games is a new website designed for pre-K and elementary school students. Smarty Games features games for developing basic mathematics and reading skills. There are six mathematics games covering basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. The reading section has two alphabet games and nine animated stories. In addition to the mathematics and reading activities, Smarty Games offers activities for learning to read a clock, puzzles, mazes, coloring activities. The site could be navigated by elementary school students while pre-K students would need some help getting started before using the activities on their own.

**Applications for Education** Smarty Games could be a good site on which students can practice and develop mathematics and reading skills.


 * Have you been to TVOKids.com recently? It’s a fantastic interactive learning website for kids aged 3-10 produced by TVO, essentially the Canadian equivalent of PBS.
 * My StoryMaker is a free, easy-to-use, Flash-based interactive story development platform developed by The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, with the generous support of Carnegie Mellon University and The Grable Foundation. The basic idea is that you start by selecting characters and a goal:
 * GCompris is a MULTI-LINGUAL collection of over 80 high quality interactive activities, games, puzzles and learning challenges that span math, science, geography, art, logic, reading and more. The high-quality imagery and simple user interface make it ideal for learners from PreK (or younger) right up through upper elementary school.
 * Pete’s PowerPoint Station is a well organized listing of PowerPoints on a variety of topics
 * Sheppard Software offers a huge, free, original and diverse collection of high-quality interactives for elementary students.
 * Fun4theBrain.com is a terrific collection of totally free, original, high-quality, flash-based interactives for K-6 students studying Math, Science and English
 * Check out ToyTheater.com when you have a chance - it’s worth a look...loaded with fun, cross-curricular activities.
 * Jeopardy Labs! - Create your own Jeopardy game...great for use with Interactive Whiteboards
 * Jeeparty PowerPoint template of Jeopardy...again, great for use with Interactive Whiteboards
 * @http://arcademicskillbuilders.com/ - skill building games
 * @http://tutpup.com/ - skill building games