Sara Butterworth's List: Cool Sites

If you truly want to see how good or bad your skills are about places in the world, try this site. It is an interactive site that tests your traveler IQ. You can locate flags of the world, photos of the world, even locate cities and capitals in the United States. You can even save your scores and play from your favorite social networking site. The closer you get to the correct location the more points you receive. Also, the quicker, the better. I need to travel more!

An interactive map of the US states (expect for Hawaii and Alaska). I use it with my third graders. They love it because they have to race against the timer to put the name of the state in the correct place, and if they do not do it in the given amount of time it tells them they fail 3rd grade. \n\nIt is also fun as an adult to test your knowledge, give it a try and see how many states you know.

Focuses on music trivia questions, but allows the students to do those completely unconnected games: kick the soccer ball to score a goal against George Bush, shoot baskets, or make a teacher walk the plank. Even though the games themselves do nothing within themselves to advance any music knowledge, the graphics are fun and the questions to be able to play the games help my students learn their music facts and apply these basic facts to more difficult types of problem solving.

This site is an interactive music video that lets the user click on different parts of the video and change what is happening. I found this site a couple of weeks ago on Twitter and found myself showing lots of people this animation. The goal of the artist was to make something visually appealing and that was accomplished. I went to find this site again and sat through the video three more times playing with its interactivity.

Physics games online is an awesome site to explore concepts related to physics. You won't explicitly learn physics, but a teacher can have students play them for a while and then use them as examples to explicitly teach the concepts. Then, armed with the new knowledge, students can try to improve on scores.

Power Up is an interactive game in which your city has certain power requirements. Depending on the amount of power required, the impact on the environment, and the funds available, you choose the best combination of energy sources to supply your city with power. Each round you select one of three power options. Not all power options are available each round and an incorrect combination may cause you to run out of money or have too great of an environmental impact. If this happens, you will need start over again.

It involves finding the given numbers using only the keys that are available on the "broken calculator". \n\nThis cool site also has a timer, which increases motivation through friendly competition amongst the students. Students can also compete against themselves by trying to improve their own times. There are different levels, which provides opportunities for differentiation. Even though this site is not very flashy, I think it is very cool because it helps students to become more proficient in math, while having fun at the same time!!

Starfall is a great website for younger students learning their letters, sounds and beginning to read. There are various levels for students who are at different levels. This is directed at the Learning to Read group. Each stage has an interactive game and book for the students to play, as well as a video to watch. When reading the book, it will help you sound out a word and reinforces the letter sound when you turn the page. Then when students click on the picture, it is animated.

Math Strategy Game

This website may really engage young students in learning different aspects of classical music. From learning about classical composers in interactive flash games to listening samples of actual instruments and many other interactive activities in between. Very clear and simple graphical interface makes a website easy to navigate. The website is cool because users can spend a lot time learning while having fun at the same time.

A cool way to get links to any song, anywhere in the world. With the links, you can then share the songs with the social network site of your choice.
You literally just type in a song title or singer and tinysong uses an app called Grooveshark to search. You can even play the song even if you don't want the link. Perfect for those times when you just need to listen to songs during the day.

NASA Kids' Club has educational games and educational activities to be used with students in Grades K-4. The games are developed to align with national education standards in math, science and technology. The different skill levels in each game provide students the choice to find games that are best suited to their abilities. Games include factual and animated images and the text is written for appropriate grade levels. I especially like this site because it provides a real connection to the solar system and the space program in a way that makes learning about it fun.

Go! Animate is a free animation program that can be used with students (mostly middle and high school) to create characters, backgrounds, and pretty much animate any type of story. One of the cool features is that members can use and share each other’s videos and leave each other feedback. Once an animation is complete, users can share it on the site, post it on Facebook, MySpace, Digg, or Delcious and pretty much e-mail it to anyone.

Edheads is a non-profit organization that provides free high quality educational activities on the Web at no cost to students or teachers. Edheads creates unique, educational Web experiences designed to make hard-to-teach concepts understandable.

I've used this site for a couple of years for indoor recess, etc. It is a great multimedia experience where kids can perform, in animated form, a variety of surgeries. The site started off with hip and knee replacement. Now there is deep brain stimulation and hip resurfacing. They've also added a few other activites, science related, on different topics. Try the knee replacement surgery.

It is interactive and it involves the journey of an immigrant from Europe to Ellis Island. It begins with a video introducing the differences of life in 1916 and today. The participant then creates an immigrant with a passport, chooses three belongings to take on the journey to New York, watches the ship sail across the Atlantic, follows the inspection through Ellis Island, and then sets up life in a tenement. Throughout each of these steps in the journey, Victoria Confino has a video explanation with advice. The final phase of the journey includes creating a postcard to send via e-card to Victoria describing life in America. The site is very informative, creative and the interactive activities make it fun!

A fun colorful website with animation and games introducing touch typing to children aged 7 to 11.

My particular favorite of course has to do with music, it's found under the KneeBouncers selection and MusicGame.

It has many interactive activities that demonstrate abstract concepts in a very concrete way. For example, when explaining the concept of using a convex or concave lens to adjust vision in glasses, it literally shows how the image changes with the lens in place using the slide bar at the bottom of the screen. That is under the physics category in the Eye Defects lesson. There are many other valuable interactive activities as well.

For those students who just seem to struggle with math facts or decimals or fractions, or those advanced kids who need the brain benders, or even the average joe's who just want something cool that deals with math, www.coolmath4kids.com is the answer. The website has tons of games that deal with whatever math subject you would like. Not only is there a wide range of math skills from tesselations to cool things, there are also flash cards, pre-algebra lessons and even age 3-5 games and activities. Definitely a fun interactive site that keeps students motivated in learning.