The Problem Site isn’t really a problem at all. It is a great site filled with fun word games, math games and puzzles. You’ll also find links to other really nice educational sites that are perfect for the kids!
Google has announced an option for users to purchase extra storage space at a greatly reduced price. Google has always offered a generous amount of free storage for your Gmail and Picasa photos. And they’ve always offered extra storage for a price. But now, Google is getting extremely generous! You can now purchase an extra 20GB for only $5 a year. That’s enough for about 10,000 photos – depending on megapixels, resolution, and all that stuff. But it translates to a lot of storage for a little bit of money. And you can buy more…all the way up to 16 terabytes. To read the full notice from Google, check out the Official Google Gmail Blog.
Just 17 days till turkey time, so it is definitely not too early to start looking for good Thanksgiving activities for the classroom. And I’ll start you off with a link to one of my favorite sites – Teaching Learners with Multiple Special Needs. In this post, you’ll find links to more than 20 activities. These links include entire Thanksgiving units, stories, crafts, games, jokes and riddles, and more. And some of the links are to activities that are good with touch screens, switches, and Boardmaker.
50states.com is a great resource for the social studies class. If your kids need to do research on any state, they will find all the basic info on this site. Each state listing will include historical information, size, state bird, state flower, city guides, geographical info, colleges and universities, etc, etc. And if you are teaching about a state, you’ll get all the info you need plus some nice photos to print of the state flag, maps, and more.
That is their motto at Inkless Tales. A great little site with games, coloring pages, stories, downloads and more. Check them out! I especially like the Animated Alphabet!! 
Need a quick set of worksheets customized to the exact type of problem your students are practicing? Visit SuperKids and check out the Math Worksheet Creator. Very quick creation of addition, subtraction, greater than or less than, odd or even, and more.
Many of the web sites I’ve shared with teachers contain holiday resources. But here are a couple more that I’ve not shared and they have some great Halloween goodies.
The games and jigsaw puzzles on Teachers Love SMART Boards work great for all teachers and are lots of fun for kids during their free time or as a reward for a job well done.
Also, The Teachers Corner has enough Halloween activities and lesson plans to keep a classroom busy all the way to Halloween, 2010!
Check out both sites for lots of fun stuff.
This is just a simple online tool that allows you to create a practice page for students. Much like our “abc” fonts, these practice pages use large letters with all the guidelines on the page. The limitation is that you can only include one word/phrase per page…all the practice is a repetition of that word or phrase. But you can choose whether to have your page in traditional or modern print styles.
Books and audiobooks can get expensive. Fortunately, there are numerous web sites compiling hundreds of books that can be read and/or downloaded and listened to for free! These are mostly older books in the public domain, but that doesn’t stop them from being valuable resources for the classroom.
Here are a few to check out…
Free Classic Audio Books offers more than 50 audio books that are free to download. Most of the books have human narration, but some are high quality text-to-speech narration. Titles include Swiss Family Robinson, Legend of Sleep Hollow, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and A Christmas Carol. The site also has a great offer of 200 classic books on one DVD for just $9.95. All 200 are human narration. And all are mp3 format that can be listened to on the DVD, copied to your computer for listening, or moved to an iPod.
Children’s Storybooks Online currently has 35 illustrated storybooks that can be read online. The books are divided into Books for Young Children, Books for Older Children, and Books for Young adults.
Biblomania offers more than 2000 classic texts including books, poems, short stories and plays. All of these are available for reading online along with support options for research and discussion.
Our final resource today is LibriVox. The goal of LibriVox is to make all public domain books available as free audiobooks. At this point, their catalog has more than 2300 audio books available. You can listen online or download the mp3 to your computer for listening, burning to CD, or moving to your iPod.
Just over two weeks ago, I pointed you in the direction of 101 Historical Moments You Can Relive On YouTube. Today I want to share another great list of YouTube videos for teachers. This list – 100 Best YouTube Videos for Teachers – originated on the SmartTeaching.org website, but has been re-posted in numerous locations.
This list of 100 videos is divided into history, science, language, arts, inspiration, classroom management, how-to guides, technology and humor. Some of these are more geared for higher education than the first list, but many are still excellent videos.
So for schools that have not blocked YouTube, this brings us to more than 200 outstanding videos for teachers to enjoy.
