Category: Reviews

Every Friday, I share a website or app that I’ve heard about, checked into, and/or gotten excited to use. This one is an all-in-one textbook provider. I love any website that makes necessary chores easier–and this one does. If you’ve never heard of Chegg, ask your college-age children or relatives. Or look for the orange boxes in college dorms. Everyone in higher education knows about Chegg.

Age:

5th-college

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Every Friday, I’ll send you a wonderful website (or more) that my classes and my parents love. I think you’ll find they’ll be a favorite of your students as they are of mine.

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Every Friday, I share a website (or app) that I’ve heard about, checked into, been excited to use. This one is a math app. Since ‘math’ is by far the most popular search term of readers who seek out my blog, I know you’re going to enjoy this review.

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Every Friday, I’ll send you a wonderful website (or more) that my classes and my parents love. I think you’ll find they’ll be a favorite of your students as they are of mine.

Here’s a long list of Language Arts and Word Study websites for 3rd grade. I’m sure they’re fine for 4th and 5th, also. You decide, depending upon what your students are working on (check for updates).

1. BBC Phonics
2. BiteSize—Reading, Writing, Grammar
3. Blends
4. Common/Proper Noun Basketball
5. Contraction Games
6. Contraction Crossword
7. Contraction Practice
8. Create a picture with words
9. Feast of Homonyms
10. Flamingo Suffixes
11. Funny Poetry
12. Glossary of Poetry Terms
13. Grammar Gorillas
14. Grammaropolis
15. Instant Poetry—fill in the blanks
16. Jelly Fish
17. Katie’s Clubhouse
18. Opposites Train Game
19. Parts of speech poetry
20. The Patchworker
21. Pick a Word
22. Plural Nouns
23. Poetry with a Porpoise
24. Poetry Engine
25. Prefix Catch
26. Prefix Match
27. Prefix Suffix Balloon Game
28. Punctuation and Capitalization
29. Punctuation Games
30. Sam’s Lab
31. Shaped Poems–fun
32. Short Vowels
33. Suffix Match
34. Synonym or Antonym?
35. Third Grade Poems
36. Vocabulary Flood
37. Vocabulary Pinball
38. Web-based Mad Libs
39. Word Balloons
40. Word Family Sort
41. Word Magnets
42. Word Play
43. Word Pond

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When the nice people at MindMaple contacted me about reviewing their product, I was intrigued. I like finding tools that enhance education for students and improve a teacher’s ability to communicate ideas. Plus, ‘mind mapping’–a visual approach to thinking and sharing–is quite popular in education so I agreed to take a look. Though MindMaple is for business and education, I’ll review it only from the educator’s point of view.

In education, mind mapping is used to organize lesson plans, dig into complicated ideas, and brainstorm. It allows you to sort ideas and concepts through topic boxes that spill into myriad layers of subtopics. Think of an organizational chart, but for ideas, not people. Mind maps are created by brainstorming as a group or an individual. They begin with a central idea and expand outward to more in-depth sub-topics that can cover any level of minutiae. Unlike organization charts, mind maps use colors, images, icons, as well as words to get ideas across to others.

A program called Inspiration is the most popular mind map resource for educators, but I personally couldn’t get comfortable using it. I took so long figuring out how to use the tools (most likely because I didn’t use it often enough) that I lost track of my brainstorming. I like the idea of visually presenting thoughts. I see its merits in the classroom so I was excited to look at an alternative.

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Every Friday I’ll send you a wonderful website that my classes and my parents love. I think you’ll find they’ll be a favorite of your students as they are of mine.

Blackle.com is a search engine. It’s pretty much like Google–in fact, it’s run by Google–but you notice right away you’re not at Google.com or Yahoo or any other search engine you’ve every used. Why?

The background is black.

That itty bitty change in surfing saves energy. In fact, Blackle had saved 2,440,165.420 Watt hours as of the hour I checked. (more…)

As webmaster and an active tech teacher, I am sometimes asked to review products for my readers. Since

I don’t work for the company doing the asking and receive no compensation (other than the product), I am able to provide an unbiased review of my experiences and conclusions based on the 400 students I teach.

Recently, I had the opportunity to review Learning Resource’s Luna™ Interactive Projection Camera. I don’t have a document camera in my classroom and there are times when I would trade all the chocolate in my snack drawer for the ability to share a 3D object or picture with students. So, when Learning Resource’s marketing group asked, I quickly agreed. The box arrived containing the projection camera, a CD with the Easi-View software, and a few pages of documentation (very very brief).

The projection camera is a lightweight, gooseneck contraption exactly like the inset shows. It has a sturdy base that includes a snapshot button, a light and the microphone, and a wide head that holds the camera. I wanted to test the intuitiveness of installation so rather than read the directions, I just jumped in. The cord was obviously for a USB port, so I popped that into my computer, loaded the CD and started. Easy-view installed quickly with no hitches. Here’s a screen shot:

My school was in the middle of accreditation (which went well), so I didn’t have a lot of time to play. I decided to experiment as the need arose. In most cases, the process was easy to figure out, and worked as I hoped it would. Here’s a run down of how I used the Luna during the first two weeks:

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Every Friday I’ll send you a wonderful website that my classes and my parents love. I think you’ll find they’ll be a favorite of your students as they are of mine.

Age:

1st Grade

Topic:

Architecture, structures

Review:

Three projects over six weeks and your students will learn about blueprints, room layout, dimensions. Plus, they’ll understand how to think about a three-dimensional object and then spatially lay it out on paper. This is challenging, but fun for first graders.

Spend two weeks on each projects. Incorporate a discussion of spaces, neighborhoods, communities one week. Practice the drawing, then do the final project which students can save and print. Kids will love this unit.

• First, draw a picture in KidPix of the child’s home using the KidPix architecture tools (use TuxPaint if you don’t have KidPix–it’s free). Have kids think about their house, walk through it. They’ll have to think in three dimensions and will soon realize they can’t draw a two-story house. In that case, allow them to pick which rooms they wish to include and concentrate on what’s in the room. Use the ‘stamps’ tool (in KidPix) to find items.

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Every Friday I’ll send you a wonderful website that my classes and my parents love. I think you’ll find they’ll be a favorite of your students as they are of mine.

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Every Friday I’ll send you a wonderful website that my classes and my parents love. I think you’ll find they’ll be a favorite of your students as they are of mine.

Age:

3rd-5th

Topic:

Landforms

Review:

If you want to spice up a unit on landforms, have students look into surviving these unique natural habitats. To get out with their lives, they’ll have to understand the flora and fauna, dangers and helpers. Here are some websites they can visit to improve their survival toolkit:

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