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Building Circuits

This Flash animation is a great way to teach electrical circuits to elementary school students. It will help students make the link between components of actual circuits and electrical symbols. After learning what each symbol means, the student can then draw circuit diagrams by dragging symbols of components. It is very simple, but exactly what is needed for elementary school students.

Interactive Autopsy

Be careful, this site is not for everyone and should only be used with mature students. Interactive Autopsy is a step-by-step demonstration of what happens during an autopsy procedure. In the first step, the student will do the external examination to then move to the internal examination. Then the student will look at the internal organs by removing them. Then it is time for removing the brain and weighing all the organs. Then to finish the autopsy, it is time to return the organs to the body and sewing it up. All the steps are done interactively by dragging and clicking with the mouse. This site is easy to understand and great for students with interest in forensic science or who are big fans of CSI.

Mr. Picasso Head

If you have artistic students who like to draw faces, Mr. Picasso Head will be a great tool to let them explore their creativity. This flash application is very simple. You get to choose a face, eyes, nose, lips, ears, eyebrows and hair and you drag them and move them to give your face a unique look. Each element of the drawing can be rotated, flipped, scaled up and down, and coloured. As with any good graphic application, there are layers that can be used to decide what will be in the foreground and background.

Biology Questions

Here is a nice resource for any high school biology teachers: biology questions. This website contains more than 1800 biology questions with the answers. Questions are classified in different categories such as biochemistry, cell biology, microbiology, embryology, genetics, evolution, ecology and zoology. This site was specially written and organized to make Biology learning easier. It can be used as a reference or as a study tool. It could also become a "question of the day" in your classroom. Students can even send a question to the website and they may get an answer added to the site. Here are a few questions you can find answer on this site: What are the main types of lipids? Which are the plant tissues responsible for the supporting of the plant? What is the name of the molecule that transports oxygen in red blood cells?

States of Matter

This simple Flash animation about the states of matter will help the student visualize particles, as the temperature is increase. The temperature vs. time graph helps the student visualize the "plateau" when there is a change of phase (at the melting point and the boiling point). There are also arrows to show how changes of phase are called (melting, freezing, boiling and condensing). Unfortunately, sublimation is missing.

Small Skeleton

This is a great way for elementary school students to discover some of the main bones of the skeleton. The student can see the person without the bones or see the person with the bones. The student then drags the name of each bone in the appropriate box. Once the bones have been named, the student can check his or her answers and print the skeleton. This activity is way too simple for high school, but great for younger children in elementary school.

That Quiz

Here is another great resource to give a chance to your students to get a little bit more practice in math, language or geography: That Quiz! The tool is totally free to use. It includes a series of randomize quizzes in arithmetic, about fractions, probability, time, money, measure, place value, graphs and geometry. Most quizzes can be configured to increase or decrease the level of difficulty and students get immediate feedback. When it comes to languages, students can practice English, Spanish, French and German. The language quizzes include definitions, translations and verbs. In geography, the students can get quizzes for the Americas, Africa, Europe and Asia. The quizzes include countries, rivers and capitals all with an actual map of the continent. It is an excellent way for your students to get unlimited practice when studying. It is perfect for parents who want some "extra work" to do with their children. I hope you like this site.

Food Chains

This nice Flash animation about food chains will enhance your ecology lessons. At first, the student is presented with information about energy, producers and consumers. Then the student can complete three food chains: one for woodland, another for a river and finally one for seashore. The animation is offered for free by Crickweb from the UK.

YouTube Edu

In the past few months, I presented many video sharing website that looked and worked like YouTube, but that were dedicated to education rather than general video. It seems that YouTube has decided to do that by itself by now offering a section on YouTube with videos from colleges and universities called YouTube Edu. The videos are mostly professionally produced and although some are mostly promotional about programs offered at these colleges and universities, some of them have good educational value. Many of these videos could be used in high school as a way for students to explore careers and post-secondary education.

Positive and Negative Numbers

If you are looking for a great slide show to help your students understand positive and negative numbers, I found a great one on Docstop. The slideshow is composed of 29 slides and is based on a number line. It also includes real life examples to help students better understand the difference between positive and negative numbers. The slide show also includes explanations on how to add integers. By registering with the Docstop website, you can also download the document on your computer.

Study Stack

Today, this resource is a little treasure for your students who need some help with studying. Both students and teachers can use it. Study Stack is a website that lets you enter data that you need to memorize for a test (or just because you want to remember it). Once the data is entered, you can easily produce flashcards, study stack, study table, matching exercise, hangman game, crossword, word search game, unscramble game, fill in the blank and a bug match game. The best thing is that you can even export the data and games for various portable devices such as the iPhone or the iPod. You can also get embed code of the flashcards to include them on your website. Your Study Stacks are available to other users and you can access the Study Stacks produced by other users. You need to create an account to produce your own data, but the site is compatible with Facebook connect. Students can access your content without creating an account. On the picture to the left, I created a Study Stack about the Canadian provinces capital.

Math Vids

MathVids.com is a website dedicated to providing high quality, instructional, free math videos to middle school, high school, and college students who need math help. There are videos about various subjects including basic math, algebra, statistics, trigonometry, geometry, differential equations, linear algebra and calculus. There is also a section with videos "Just for fun" presenting concept that are not necessarily part of the curriculum but are still interesting for any math enthusiast. Videos are produced by teachers across the country. You can even become a contributor to the site. Videos are reviewed by users as well as by the staff with a star rating system. You have very limited access to the videos if you don't sign up to the site. Signing-up is free and gives you access to watch unlimited videos. If you prefer to have access to download the videos to watch them off-line and if you want to see them in full screen, then you need to get a premium membership. However, if ads don't bother you, the free version works very well. Videos are added on a daily basis.

SuperKids Math Worksheet Creator

You are a parent or a teacher and you need worksheets to give some drill to your child or student. It takes you a while to try to prepare random ones in your favourite word processor? Well you won't need to do that anymore with SuperKids Math Worksheet Creator. With this free online worksheet creator, you can quickly print a sheet to practice addition, subtraction, multiplication, fraction, order of operations, percentages, rounding, averages, exponents, factorials, prime numbers and many more. The great thing is that you can configure the worksheet the way you want. As an example, you can mix addition and subtraction, you can choose minimum and maximum numbers, you can choose to have only integers or to have decimals, you can choose whether you want common denominator or not, etc. And the best thing, you can also print the answer key!

The Common Craft Show

If you are trying to teach modern computer science concepts to your students, especially those that have to do with web 2.0 in your computer science classroom, you will probably like The Common Craft Show. It is a series of videos produced with a white board and a few drawings on paper. But the simplicity works well as it makes concepts that are somewhat complex easier to understand. The videos are said to be in plain English so even your grandma could understand concepts like social media, twitter, web search strategy, phishing scams, podcasting, online photo sharing or blogs. The free versions of the videos are for "non-commercial" use, meaning that commerical organizations can't display the videos without their permission. However, if you need to use them for commercial use, there is a video store where you can purchase a license. I hope you will like these little videos... I do!

The visual dictionary

This resource is a little treasure for all teachers and their students! The visual dictionary is now available on-line and is entirely free! It is not an imitation here. It is the real one published by Merriam-Webster and that is also available on paper and on CD-ROM. I already own the version on CD-ROM of this dictionary and I find it very difficult to always have to reinstall it when I reformat my computer or when I switch computer. Now, all I have to do is to bookmark the visual dictionary and it is available from any computer.

This is a very useful tool for students, especially those who better understand when looking at a picture. The dictionary is also useful when we can think mentally of an object, but we have no idea how to call it. As it is the case for the CD-ROM version, the dictionary is divided in 15 major themes such as plant kingdom, animal kingdom, house, food, science, arts, etc. The dictionary also include the audio version of each word, which is very useful for students who don't have English as their first language. I hope you will add a shortcut to this site on your computer desktop on in your web browser.

Calorielab

It is usually easy to calculate calories and nutritional values from food bought at the supermarket since all the packages include a nutritional chart. When you are eating out, it is much harder to know. When teaching nutrition, keeping track of calorie intake is often part of the assignment, so you may want to recommend « Calorielab » to your students, as they will find the nutritional value of food served at most chain restaurants. They can also find nutritional value of tons of food avaiable on the market. It is a great calorie counter.

Tip of the Tongue

"Tip of My Tongue" is a cool project that helps students and teachers looking for a word with incomplete information to find it. If you now what it starts with, or what it ends with or you have an idea of the length of the word, but you can't find it, this application will be very useful. Sometimes, you just have a word on the tip of your tongue. The dictionary that runs this website is not complete, but it contains enough words that you usually find what you are looking for. The project is under development, so it can only get better as time goes by.

Volcanoes webcams

Did you know that many volcanoes have webcams capturing their activity 24 hours a day, every single day? If you are studying volcanoes with your students, they might find very interesting to watch some live shot of volcanoes on the surface of the earth. It may even me more amazing if you can a volcano on a webcam while it is active. Here is a list of websites where you can catch their activity on-line :

• The Live Panorama of Halema 'uma'u, Kilauea Volcana in Hawai - webcam 2, webcam 3
  
• The Alaska Volcano Observatory
  
• The Mount St. Helens VolcanoCams
  

EduTube : The YouTube of Education

If you use YouTube to look for educational videos to use in your classroom, you might be interested in using EduTube. It is like YouTube, without all the cut cate videos or teenagers doing dangerous stunts. Videos are not hosted by EduTube, but are categorized and filtered by this site. Original videos are hosted by video sharing websites like Youtube. It is an excellent way to find resources for teachers and students. You can also use it as a way for your students to search videos ensuring they only have access to quality educational videos. It is also possible to contribute to the website by recommending videos or links to educational videos. The interface is available in various languages.

iSign

If you work with special education students who are deaf and you need to learn sign language, you may want to get an iPod Touch or an iPhone, because there is a great application to learn sign language: iSign. You can use it to learn the language or you can use it as a phrase book to communicate sporadically with deaf students. The phrase book is animated and comes with close to 300 words. It is well worth the price of $3.99 on the App Store.

Fractions

Today, I would like to present a few online practice exercises about fractions for your students.

The first one is to help them better understand equivalent fractions.














The second one will help them compare fractions.

















The third one will help them understand that a fraction is a part of a whole.















Finally, the last one is a practice at naming fractions.

Kideas

Kideas is a great website if you are looking for ideas of for arts and craft projects. All the projects are simple and do not require complex material. In all, there are about 40 craft ideas. They all come with a pictures and a PDF giving all the material and instructions to do it.

There are also many colouring pages. For kids who prefer to be artistic with food, there is a "creative food" section. Finally, the parenting tools will be helpful for parents with tips and ideas such as how to make your own baby sling, how to prepare a weekly chore chart, a diaper and feeding chart of a homework log sheet and some lunch box notes!

A Kid's Photos

A Kid's Photos is a website that provides you pictures for you as a teacher or for your students. The photos are available in four main topics : animals, scenic, flowers and objects. They are not very high resolution, but for most student projects, they will be appropriate. The photos are taken by the two authors of the website and the terms of use state that you may use the photos in any of your projects under the provisions that you may not include the photos in another collection for distribution, you may not claim the photos as your own and you do not directly link to the photos. Even if the collection is not complete and will not answer all your needs for photos, it is a great resource and you may always opt for a membership at www.clipart.com if you need more.

The Brain for Top to Bottom

"The Brain from Top to Bottom" is a great site provided by McGill University and it will cater to high school students as well as college or university students. In fact, when reading an article, you get to choose at what level you want to read: beginner, intermediate or advanced. You can also start to read it at the beginner level and if you understood most of it, you can re-read it at the intermediate or advanced level.

In addition, when the site title says "From Top to Bottom", it also refers to the levels of organization. The reader can learn more about the brain at the molecular, cellular, neurological, psychological or social level. The website is useful for biology courses, but also for psychology and sociology courses as well.

The website is also divided by themes. Among the theme, you will find memory, pleasure and pain, emotions, evolution, movement, senses, mental disorders, development, language, sleep and dreams and consciousness. It is a gold mine of information in both French and English for high school teachers who refer to the brain in their classes.

WordChamp

WordChamp is a very incredible tool to let your students practice the vocabulary while learning a second language. In order to use this website, you will first need to register and create a class. Registering is totally free and I tried to find if they will charge you something at a later date, but I couldn’t find any mention of it. Wow! Registering is quick and easy. When creating a class, you need to indicate the main first language of the students and the language they want to learn. It is also possible to create more than one class with only one account if you teach students at different levels or if not all your classes are learning the same second language.

Once the class is created, there is an option to print and instruction sheet for the students so they know how to access the system. As a teacher, it is possible to create many vocabulary exercises and flashcards that may be used as homeworks and include a deadline as to when they need to be completed. You may create your own list of words or you may choose from the database included with the website. Homeworks created fall in two categories: vocabulary exercises and reading exercises. Vocabulary exercises include translation, listening comprehension, dictation, reading practice, flashcards and pronunciation. The interface not only include the written version or words but sometimes include some visuals as well as audio files to let the students hear how the word is pronounce in both languages.

WordChamp will also let the student visit a website published in his or her second language. Without providing a full translation, students will be able to mouse over some words and get a translation as well as an audio file to hear how it is pronounced. This site is produced by linguists and is truly amazing. You should register to discover its full potential. The site supports many languages including English, French, German, Spanish, Japanese and Mandarin as well as dozens of other languages such as Slovak, Swedish, Romanian or Flemish.

A very simple calculator

This is a quick and easy one. It is a very simple calculator. Obviously, it is not scientific or graphic, but it does the job in elementary school when students forget their own calculator.

Systole and diastole

This animation of the heart is a great way to teach your students how the heart acts as a pump. The students can visually see the systole and the diastole and the contraction of the ventricle. A graph pressure vs. time shows the pressure in different part of the heart at different time. There is also a graph of an electrocardiogram and of the heart sounds. It is a great resource for biology teachers.

Kids' Lab

The Kids' Lab present reading workouts that are designed for parents and teachers to work with students who need some practice with their reading skills.

They are designed to be done with an adult because the student can get confirmation when he or she is right and may be corrected when there is a misunderstanding. The reading workouts are available for these grade levels : kindergarten, first grade, second grade and third grade. The workouts put the emphasis on vocabulary development, phonics and phonemic awareness and reading comprehension. The workouts are not easy to find on the website at first. You need to use the "GO" menu in the top left corner of the screen.

QUIA - Physical or Chemical Change

Here is a great quiz to teach your students the difference between physical and chemical changes. The quiz contains 20 questions including examples such as breaking glass, a rusting bicycle, spoiling food, bleaching your hair and burning leaves. Very simple but efficient.