Online Spelling Bees

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.



Online Visual Dictionary for teachers and students

The Visual Dictionary is designed to help you find the right word at a glance. Filled with stunning illustrations labeled with accurate terminology in up to six languages, it is the ideal language-learning and vocabulary dictionary for use at school, at home or at work.

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When you know what something looks like but not what it’s called, or when you know the word but can’t picture the object, The Visual Dictionary has the answer. In a quick look, you can match the word to the image.

The Visual Dictionary is more than a reliable resource of meticulously labeled images—it innovates by combining dictionary-scale definitions with exceptional illustrations, making it the most complete dictionary.

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The Visual Dictionary is an indispensable visual reference that goes beyond object identification to answer questions about function, significance and purpose. Ideal for teachers, parents, writers, translators and students of all skill levels, it helps the user understand a phenomenon and quickly grasp the meaning of a term, the characteristics of an object or simply learn something new.

Access it here

Create your own online quizzes

Last year I came across Proprof's Brain Games maker which was a brilliant resource that allowed you to create brain games and embed them into a blog or web space.

This year Proprof's have continued to add to their stable of high quality  and totally free educational products with their new quiz school.

Quiz School is the quiz maker of choice for many. It offers the many cutting-edge industry features such as statistics, analytics, geographic user identification, flexible result types, style customizations and seamless integration with other websites. Quiz school also supports a wide variety of quiz question styles so you can choose the right ones for your quiz. It is like "YouTube Of Quizzes", where online quizzes can be easily created, tagged, discussed and shared across the web, much like YouTube allows for videos.

ProProfs Quiz School creates a social environment around online quizzes for "fun" as well as "learning". With a focus on flexibility, the many features within the site can be combined so that you can make your own quiz for a wide variety of applications like exams, recruitment, online tests, training or just plain fun quizzes. You can use Quiz School to create a free quiz for your classroom, company, blog or friends.

There are many different styles of quiz available and below is a a presentation displaying what ProProf's offers.  Check it out here.

Create online Picture Storybooks

What is it: Bookr Is a tool to create picture story books using images from Flickr.  Simply find images from Flickr through their search engine located on the same screen as the book editor.  It is extremely simple to use and would be a better option for junior school students as you can not add large amounts of text to each page.  No sign up required.  Very Simple to use.

The finished books are presented as animated flash Files that look gret on an interactive whiteboard.

How can I use this in the classroom? Show your your students the layout of bookr and how to search for images.  read them a picture story book and explain to them that the pictures tell a large amount of the actual story and emphasise that words should be used with a minimalist approach.

Also talk to your students about the best placement of text.

find a theme or topic that your students will have a large range of photos of and are comfortable in writing about.   A perfect example would be "A day at the Zoo."

I would love hear from anyone else eho has tried Bookr.  Check it out here.

Great site for teachers and students to create an online wordsearch

Ultimate Wordsearch maker is a great little tool for you or your students to create word searches of their own and import them into their blog as an interactive task.  They are dead easy to put together and require no messing around registering to create one.  If you don't have a blog or a website you can simply link back to their website and do it from there.

It is dead easy to play simply click on the first letter of the word you have found and drag it over the rest of it.  Here is one I have prepared earlier in all of 5 minutes.

This would be a great literacy activity or extension task for any subject area you have been studying.  The website is available here.