Educational Internet Websites

By Peggy Steffens

Here are some outstanding educational tools available for teachers and students. 

Picnik – Cynthia Rolewski, Tech Coach from La Cima shared this online tool that allows you and your students to edit pictures. You don’t even have to sign-up to use the program, but registration is free for the basic package.  You have tools to resize, crop, rotate, alter the brightness and contrast, reduce redeye and more. You can draw on the picture and save the picture once you have made the changes.  So, if you or your students need to make changes to a picture and you don’t have Photoshop or photo editing software, try uploading your picture to Picnik.
http://www.picnik.com/ 

Interactives – Cris Robson, Tech Coach from IRHS, shared this exciting resource from Annenberg media. The site provides interactive tools for science, language arts, history, math and the arts. These interactive applets would be excellent for students with a SMART Board, or in the computer lab or one computer in the classroom.  The activities are engaging and can enhance and improve students' skills in a variety of curricular areas.
http://www.learner.org/interactives/  

Look, Cover, Write and Check – Heather Eldridge, 3rd grade teacher at Painted Sky, shared this website for practicing spelling.  The title says it all; students select a word bank, one word is displayed, students click the button to cover the word and the word is hidden, then the learner will type the word and click the Check button to see if they are correct.  The site has a variety of word lists to choose from, but the students can also type in their own list from their spelling or vocabulary list to practice.
http://www.amblesideprimary.com/ambleweb/lookcover/lookcover.html

Writing Fix – Kate Butler, middle school teacher at Coronado K-8, shared this writing website that she uses in her classroom. The site provides writing prompts, writing lessons, 6 trait lessons, classroom tools and more.  One example of the tools on this site is the Interactive Plot Creator that randomly selects setting, character & conflict.
http://www.writingfix.com/

Online Interactive Tests Preparation – Mitch Miller, Tech Coach at Walker Elementary School, shared this site that provides a variety of test preparation sites for grades 3-12.  The students take the tests online. http://www.edinformatics.com/testing/itest.htm  In addition, the IDEAL site also has AIMS practice tests in both online and PDF format at
https://www.ideal.azed.gov/aims/quick

Project Interactivate Assessment Toolkit – provides great resources for the one computer classroom, computer lab or SMART Board.  The site has more than fifty activities and quizzes primarily in the area of math.  Some of the quizzes can be modified by the user to select different problem types and the amount of time to solve the problem.
http://www.shodor.org/interactivate/assessments/