A Great Online Dictionary and Thesaurus for Students

Wordsmyth and Lexipedia are a couple of great dictionary and thesaurus tools for students.  Wordsmyth offers a picture dictionary for younger students along with a full dictionary that will meet the needs of high school and tertiary students, Lexipedia makes using a thesaurus fun by providing a visual network of words, their base words, prefixes and suffixes.

Kidipede - Simple information for students

Kidipede is a kids' encyclopedia, online since 1996. A lot of kids use Kidipede for school reports or for homeschooling. You can find out about Ancient Greece or Ancient Egypt, or how to make yogurt, or about why fires need air to burn. Kidipede will tell you who invented algebra, and what happens in the Iliad, and what Confucius said. Click here to access it.

Algebra Equation Solving Tool

This is a great little tool that may save hours of homework for your students for no real gain except their free time but more importantly it is an excellent resource for teachers who want to explain step by step how to solve a difficult algebra equation but don't really know where to start.

Simply plug in an algebra equation and then by the magic of the interweb the answer is generated with a pretty detailed explanation of how it occurred.

There are also some excellent interactive lessons on algebra here.

Give the solver a go here.

2 Online Cloze Generators Worth Trying

We all know that cloze activities can be a little boring at times.  But just like learning the alphabet and times tables they are a useful learning process that can be of great use at times.

I found a couple of good cloze generators online that you might like to incorporate into your next lesson and tailor the content exactly to your needs.

Cloze Test is exactly what it states and allows you to make simple cloze tests online in minutes.  Very easy to work out but a little limited on features.

The Oxford University Press Cloze maker is a little bit heavier on the features and has templates to suit specific age groups and purposes.

Take a look at both of these and let me know if you use any other useful cloze generators.

Great Collection of Interactive Reading Activities

I came across E-reading worksheets today and will definitely be using it with my own class as it has a huge collection of reading activities for all major text types.

What are ereading worksheets?

ereading worksheets are Flash based online quizzes about reading skills. These quizzes give students practice with a variety with reading skills such as identifying figurative language, determining the narrator’s view point, recognizing the author’s purpose, understanding text structure and more.

How can I use ereading worksheets?

Students can print the results of their ereading worksheets. Because of this, teachers can assign students to complete ereading worksheets as extra credit, class assignments, or even homework depending on computer access within the community and school. The best part is that ereading worksheets are graded for you.

But, can’t a student just print 10 copies of their results?

Not that easily. Before taking the quiz, the student is prompted to enter their name. The name they enter will then be printed on their results page. If a student wants to change the name on the results page, they will have to retake the quiz. Because the answers shuffle each time the quiz is taken, completing the quiz for other people requires work.   Students will always be able to devise methods to game the system, but ereading worksheets will make them work for it.

Cool, anything else?

Yes. At the bottom of each ereading worksheet is a text field containing code. If you click on the text box and cut and paste the code into an html field on your blog or web page, the ereading worksheet should display on your page without ads. This is a great way to enhance your classroom blog or website. What, you don’t have a classroom blog? Get one free.  And don’t forget to check out the ereading worksheets.

AudioExpert - Free & Simple online audio editor

AudioExpert is a free and simple online audio editor, file converter and sound recorder. All the standard functionality of an audio editor provides you with an easy way to create a ringtone for your cell phone. You will find AudioExpert useful also as a powerful audio file converter which will allow you to modify the file format of your files, their bit rate, frequency, etc. If your computer is equipped with a camera and microphone, you can use AudioExpert to record your sounds.

Main Features:

• Make use of it to analyse audio files and extract detailed information about the format.
  
  
• Cut or crop audio files in just a few clicks.
  
  
• Merge multiple files into a single audio track.
  
  
• Convert files between all of the popular audio formats (WAV, MP3, OGG, M4A, AAC, FLAC, AU, AMR, WMA, MKA).
  
  
• Record audio off a microphone or another sound device and save it directly to WAV, MP3, WMA, OGG, etc.
  
  
• Convert multiple files at once by means of batch processing.

SCREENSHOTS :

Online Spelling Bee Challenges your students will love

I have a couple of students in my grade that are really great spellers and are keen to partake in a spelling bee to test out their ability.  I have found a few online sites for them to try to sharpen their skills that you might like to try with your own students.

Interactives Spelling bee has challenges for all year levels and is a great starting point.

The Times Spelling Bee Challenge is a bit of a step up in difficulty and will even challenge English Teachers.

Spelling Bee the Game - Based on the movie and is a great interactive challenge for the kids.  This is for your freakishly good spellers only.

Anyhow Good luck and let me know if you come across any others.

How Fast are your Fingers - Great Touch Typing Test for Students

Your Students will love this one..With the speed test you can test your typing speed. You will not get a real feel of how fast you are. Try the typing test again and again, and with time you will get faster. By the way the words that you need to type, are the most frequently used words of the English language. The faster you can type these words, the faster you will also type ordinary texts. After the evaluation you can include your results in your blog or whereever you want, so your friends can see how fast you type. Access the test here