Time Zone Experiences

If you are looking for a project to do with your class around time zones and times of years, this would be a good place to start. Time Zone Experiences is the name of the wiki. Students follow other classes in other parts of the world to compare what they are doing with students in other time zones. Schools that are participating are encouraged to write each month to the wiki to say what they are doing in school and what is happening in their area.

Ideas to Inspire Web Site

I found this website, Ideas to Inspire through a recommendation of a friend. It is a collection of collaborative presentations that have been made by many teachers. They are all done in a powerpoint fashion using Google Tools. I found the curriculum ideas about writing and math to be really full of great links that I might use. This site was done in Great Britain so it gives links which often don't show up as quickly in our web searches - and they are really great. I recommend you spend some time poking around this web site.

Game Classroom http://www.gameclassroom.com/

This website Game Classroom features many different types of educational games. The webmaster takes good games he has found from other places and puts them all on one web page. The great part about this web site is once your student is here and plays the game, it takes them back to Game Classroom. It is much harder to get off of this site by accident than a lot of the other sites. The games can be sorted by grade level or by content. It is a good site to have bookmarked for your class. There is also a nice homework helper component to this web site. I recommend highly. You will probably see it being used in this classroom sometime this year!

Typing game online

I found out about this game while reading another blog and decided to try it. It is certainly NOT a substitute for teaching typing, but if you want a fun way to get the students to think about knowing where keys are located on the keyboard, this is it. I spent quite a bit of time with Pacman Typing! The actual name of the game is Keyman and if you start from the home page of typing games, you can customize it to either just work with home keys or random keys. I plan on putting this link on the school web page when I work on that again. Try it and find out how difficult it really is!

Great Source for Math Games

I found this site I Play Mathgames.com and thought it was something that teachers might want to know about. All of the games are in .pdf format, they are not computer games, but the site has a well organized way to find good paper games to play with the students. These games are all from different types of workbooks that could be purchased, but I think that there are enough games on the site to make it worth your while to check it out!

Article about why to use Open Office and how to set it up!

I found this great article on another blog. This is written by Solveig Haugland, an author of a blog I follow that is called Open Office .org Training. It has great ideas for how to install Open Office and how to use templates in Open Office. If you are really interested in using Open Office, this is a good place to start.