Mallory Burton's List: Something to Use on Monday

Best geography games I've seen. These are excellent tutorials and games that would work well on the SMARTBoard. The Canadian Geography activites are particularly good. For example, in the Province Names tutorial, you click on each province and its name appears on the map along with a sidebar containing information about the province. In other games, you drag the province into place on the map. World geography quizzes galore - over 250 fun online map games teach capitals, country locations, and more. Also info on the culture, history, and much more.

This is a toy for generating colourful and interesting word clouds from text. This text can be typed, copied and pasted from another source, or imported directly from a blog url or rss feed. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, colours, and layouts. Take a screen shot to save your creation as there isn't a way to export as a jpeg. Wordles would make great title pages or slides and could be a fun class brainstorming activity or a way for kids to practice writing their spelling words. Kids could create a wordle of adjectives to describe themselves or a character in a novel. They could also be used to analyze student writing for repetitious words or to get the gist of an article. See my wordle tag or WebSlide list of sites with ideas for using Wordle in the classroom.

This is a very nice word-search game on the tags associated with Flikr photos. Just type in a word (you don't need a Flikr name unless you only want to restrict the use to only your own photos) and the puzzle is created instantly. The clues to the words are the pictures around the puzzle, and the words are generated from the picture tags. For more info see Paul Hamilton's review.

Amazing spelling site recommended by James Hollis (Teachers Love SMARTBoards). Definitely instant implementation. Input a list of spelling words and click test me, teach me, or play a game. The test me section gives the word orally , uses it in a sentence, and the student spells it and gets feedback. The teach me section spells the word orally and uses it in a sentence. The play a game section instantly generates games such as word search, crosswords, hangman using the spelling words. The games work great on a smartboard.

Brain Boosters offers online activities for your kids including educational games and brain teasers. These brain boosters are organized by type: categorization, spatial, lateral thinking, reasoning, etc. Suitable for high school or gifted intermediate.

New feature: hover over word to get a definition. Great visuals and ideal for theme study. Enter a word to look up or just explore by theme. The definitions are constructed as pages with a small amount of text and labeled drawings on which the labels are also clickable links. This would be a great "multiple means of representation" resource more suitable for intermediate students studying particular themes.

Ideas for importing text to wordle and using that text in a lesson where students examine the vocabulary to discover the "gist" of an article or poem.

June 20, 2008 post. Several ideas for using wordle. Students create wordles about themselves listing their name and characteristics, hobbies, etc. Students create wordles describing a character in a novel for a character study. It would be fun to create these without the names and then have students guess who the wordle refers to.

An article about using Daily Quotations in the Classroom.

Give free rice to hungry people by playing a simple word game. This would be a fun activity for intermediate and high school students. if the words are too difficult for students, they can start back at level 1 with words like "penny" and "pony". You can also change the subject at the top of the screen to practice grammar, geography, time tables, and other skills. Warning...it's completely addictive.

This subscription site allows you to look up a limited number of words per day for free. After you type in a word, related words are displayed in a concept-type web. You can then click on any of those words to display their related words.

Great visual, especially on the Smartboard. Shows the type of connection between words with a variety of shapes and colours which would be great for some students and overwhelming for others. Hovering over a word gives its definition. Personally, I like this very much but wish there was a way to pare down the number of connections.

Instant Implementation Idea for teaching figures of speech! When you first open the site you get a caption such as "Gimme some skin" and the site invites you to guess what that might mean (gives you 4 choices) while the image is loading. Kids could discuss or write their responses. After you click one of the choices, the photo is revealed and you have a chance to change your answer.

This is a version of Glogster designed especially for educational use. Great, because this removes one of the reservations teachers might have about letting students use Glogster because students might run across innapropriate content. Glogster.com - Poster yourself - Make your interactive poster easily and share it with friends. It is fantastic!

Poster site reviewed by Paul Hamilton Nov 2008. Upload your own photo or use one of theirs, add a title, and save your creation to Flickr or your computer. Very nice, simple site and easy to use. I was able to tab around on this site to select a picture, add a title and text, preview and save so I believe it is accessible.

NIEHS Kids Brainteasers, Rebus Pages, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, to introduce kids to science and research interests.

The Plenary Circle can be done as a high or low-tech activity. It lends itself well to differentiation as students can all participate in the same activity at a variety of levels.