Make Your Own Font

This is a great site. Fontcapture will allow you to create your own font and use it in your writing. I would think this would be a neat way for students to practice their own handwriting and design their own font to use in any word processing program. All you need is to print out the sheet that is found on this site and fill it out using a fine black pen. Then you scan the sheet, upload it to the site and it will translate the information into a font that you can use on your computer.

Good Math Tool - Geogebra

I was hunting for new programs for the school year and came across Geogebra. It has apparently been around for a long time as it has won many awards, but this was the first time I have ever heard of it.
It is available for download on your computer for Windows, Macs and Linux. It has a great web site that accompanies it to show all the ways that you can use this program in your math classes. You can use it to show how to do something as similar as perimeters and area. (This is probably the main way I will use it.) Students can "play" with the graphs to see how changing the shape will impact the area and perimeter. You can also do much more, such as showing complex math formulas or playing with a Kaleidoscope in Geogebra. There are many examples from elementary school to college. I recommend you take a minute and download the program just to see what a good FREE program could do for your understanding of math.

Test of a Widget -

I found this widget and thought we might want to put it on the school pages for students to work with parts of speech. I thought I would test it on this blog first.

Recommended web site for Maps

I found this web site, recommended by a blog that I have been reading that I do think would add much to the student's understanding of history. The David Rumsey Map Collection has over 20,000 maps and other related images at their site. As far as I could tell, all of the maps could be downloaded to use. Some of these maps (now over 150) can be opened in Google Earth for further exploration. You can overlap maps of ancient globes or Civil War sites onto Google Earth.
A very different type of map is The Breathing Earth. This is a simulation that shows how many people are being born and die, the population of countries and the world and the CO2 emissions of each place. While it is just an approximation, it is very interesting.

Open Office School - Free

There is a great resource for anyone that wants to improve their spreadsheet skills and it is free.
It focuses on Open Office, but in actual fact, much of what is here could easily be used for Microsoft Office Excel as well. You can find the information here at OpenOfficeSchool. I really do think that for serious students of spreadsheets, this is the place to start. If you subscribe to the blog that accompanies this, you will be notified when they have posted another lesson. Right now, the course at Open Office School is only about their spreadsheet program, Calc.

Numbers Web Site - A break from Open Office/Word

I just found this site all about numbers. It has a lot of information in it, a good place for students to have a math dictionary with places to practice their math and it is able to be downloaded and placed on a computer so you are not dependent on a good internet connection. Numbers has many good features. If you are working on teaching students pictograms, you can go to the pictogram graph and have a wonderful interactive web site. At the bottom of the pictogram page, there is a farm animal pictograph link that would be good with a kindergarten or first grade.