Word Clouds by Tagul

There are many Word Cloud sites such as Wordle, TagCrowd, Wispy (based on Twitter or Facebook feeds), ABCya  (for kids), Word Cloud by Jason Davies, HTML5 Word Cloud, and finally Semantic Word Cloud. Thanks Nathan Hall.  I tried Tagul the other day and what I find great about it is that you can put the word you want into a picture/clip art.  They have some stock clip art (hearts, stars, etc.) but they allow you to add clip art.  I wanted to put all of the last names of  my sons hockey team in a cloud that was a hockey player.  I was able to do that.  When I was done I went to the print button and then before printing I screen shot it and put it in paint.  I then cropped it and put it in word and was able to put a nice title and a few other things around it.  To see the website click here.

Smarthistory is an online alternative to art history books.  It includes many videos.  Smarthistory has many resources that students can browse either by artists name, theme, style of work or time period.  

To see the website click here.

Youngzine

If you teach current events, this site has current news, sports and entertainment articles.   It is published weekly.  To see the website click here.

Digital Dialects

The games and activities found on Digital Dialects are educational and are meant for students learning a new language.  At the time of this post they have 77 languages.  For French teachers here is a screen shot of the French page.

To go to the website click here.

Mathbits

This math site has many resources.  The one I really liked for a review of the year was the math caching.  You have to answer some questions then the answers are put in a link to bring you to another page.  If you made a mistake you will get a dead link.  If you did your math correct you get to go to another page and so on.  After 10 pages you get to the certificate page.  To see the website click here.

VideoAnt - Online video annotation and commenting

If you have a video that you would like to easily annotate then videoAnt might just work for you.  Better yet with this service if you share the link with your students you can have them make comments to the video at any point easily as guests and they do not have to login.  So you could share the link with Schoology,  To see a quick primer on videoAnt by Nathan Hall click here.  To see the videoAnt website click here.

Too Much Sugar

If you teach Health, Physical Education or Foods you might want to look at these sites/videos that Richard Byrne posted.  They all deal with sugar and our bodies.  The first one is Rethink Your Drink which is a pdf document dealing with how much sugar is in most drinks and lists alternatives.  To see the website click here.  The next two were videos.  The first is a TED ED lesson called How Sugar Effects the Brain and is embedded below.

Untamed Science offers another similar video on why we crave sugar and is embedded below.

Sugar Stacks is a great site to visualize how much sugar is in what we consume.

To see their website click here.

Some Were Neighbors

If you are teaching World War II and in particular the Holocaust you might want to look at the site Some Were Neighbors.  It is a powerful yet nontraditional look at the Holocaust through the eyes of onlookers.  There is an Educators section with a lesson plan and other resources.  To see the website click here.

Centre For Writers

I know many teachers and students use the Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) but you might want to look at the resources available at the University of Alberta Centre for Writers by clicking here.

PhET - Interactive Science and Math Simulator

From the University of Colorado at Boulder, PhET is an interactive science simulator.  It animates what is invisible to the human eye and is interactive using sliders, click and drag, and radio buttons.  Check it out by clicking here.

Random Spinning Wheel of Names

Do you need to randomly pick a student to do something in your classroom?  You could roll dice etc but our friends at ClassTools.net have a spinning wheel that you can put all your students names on.  How cool.   If they are selected you have a choice of removing their name or not.  You can save the class list.  To see the website click here.