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So you think you are an expert at the child’s game Tic Tac Toe?  Now try it in 3D at MathsNet Interactive!  This game was designed in 3D to prevent the first player from always winning.  Instead of connecting three in a row to win, you have to connect two rows that meet at a right angle to form an “L”.  You are the blue marbles, and the computer plays the part of the red.  By clicking and dragging the 3D shape, you can rotate and spin the cube so that you can see your game board from all angles.  Check it out!  This would be a great follow-up activity to teaching about 3D solids in Geometry, not to mention it would also work well with an Interactive Whiteboard.

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Mandala Maker Perfect for Math Concepts

Division: Visual Representations Online

Online Math Manipulatives and Activities

Math Help Step-by-Step

Interactive Whiteboard Links

Games for the Interactive Whiteboard

Kids and Cookies: Fun Division for Kids

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If you have an interactive whiteboard (Promethean, SMART, or Polyvision), it’s always nice to know where you can find websites that work especially well with your board.  A site that may not be suitable to use with your class in the computer lab could be very valuable once you use it with your interactive whiteboard in a whole group instructional setting.

As I was searching for interactive whiteboard links, I came across this site by ETTC (Educational Technology Training Center).  The site has tons of links suitable for your interactive whiteboard.  But the best part of the site is that the links are broken down by elementary sites, middle school sites, and high school sites.  ETTC also separates the links by subject area: math, language arts, science, social studies, music, PE, art, software, tutorials, and other.

It’s the best list I have seen to date.  I looked at about 70% of the sites under “elementary” and was astonished that the sites were of high quality.   There is nothing worse than a hotlist of sites that suck.

RELATED POSTS:

GAMES FOR THE INTERACTIVE WHITEBOARD

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Virtual worlds like Second Life have exploded with the rise of the Internet. Interacting in a virtual world means you need to have an avatar, a virtual representation of YOU.  But how many people actually make their “virtual” selves look similar to their real selves?  I dare you to compare! 

Hair down, hair up.  Let’s look at the avatars now.

This is my avatar from a manga avatar maker. (see above)

Here is my South Park avatar. (see above)

Try as I might, it was impossible to look good as a Simpson’s avatar. (see above)

And finally, my avatar in Second Life.  (see above)

Given the chance, would you try to improve on your real self or try to make your avatar really look like you?  One person on Second Life who tries to make his avatar look like himself is David Warlick. 

What would YOU do?

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Welcome, Fall!  October is here! 

To get into the Halloween spirit, why not carve a pumpkin online?  There are two sites that I have found that are fun. 

 The first one located at theoworlds has the most options for your pumpkin.  It gives you to option to cut “freeform” or with straight lines only. When you connect the lines of your cut, then the piece automatically falls out of your pumpkin.  You can change the background picture, add your own message, print your pumpkin, save it to view later, or send it to your friends in an email.  Don’t forget you can turn on and off the spooky background music! As you can see from the picture above, the pumpkin is realistic instead of a cartoon.  I like it!

The second pumkpin site is called the “Pumpkin Simulator“.  You have a cartoon pumpkin to carve on, and when you are finished, you click, “done”.  At that time, a lit candle is added to your pumpkin and spooky music plays.  It doesn’t have any of the other options as the first pumpkin site, but it still provides entertainment!  Happy Halloween!

At Poll Daddy, you can create polls that embed into your blog, website, social networking website, wiki, or others. Once a person responds to the poll, the results show automatically on their screen.  Polls can be embedded by copying and pasting the HTML code that they provide you at the end of making your poll.  You paste this HTML code exactly as it appears into your HTML editor or into “embed widget” on wikispaces.com.  Think of how much fun a warm-up or a student station could be with Poll Daddy! 

  What technology tool do you use the most in the classroom?
( surveys)

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Remember the boring Periodic Table from Chemistry class in high school?  Now there is a better way to learn about the elements.

The Periodic Table of Videos

The Periodic Table of Videos has an educational video on every element on the table.  Click your element and a YouTube video will launch telling you all about it.  The nice feature is that if your school system blocks YouTube, you can view the videos on an alternate server.

Tom Lehrer’s “The Elements” 

Tom Lehrer’s “The Elements” is a sing along song created in Flash of all of the elements on the Periodic Table.  It’s oddly addicting.

The Visual Elements Periodic Table

The Visual Elements Periodic Table displays a real photograph depicting each element.  Scrolling over the pictures shows the element name and abbreviation.  If you click the element, a separate window appears with basic information about the element.

Interactives: The Periodic Table

Interactives: The Periodic Table takes a unique approach to the periodic table. First, there are a series of tutorials for the student followed by 5 different interactive games to reinforce knowledge: Name that Atom, Building Elements, Which One of These Elements Doesn’t Belong?, Isotopes Quiz, and Ionic Bonding.

In addition, Interactive’s home page contains many interactive games to support learning in science, history, math, language arts, and the arts that are geared for middle and high school students.

While Google Mars is not as exciting as Google Earth, it is still worth a visit.  You can tour the planet by elevation, infrared, or visible surface.  Zoom in or out of the planet and search by plains, ridges, craters, mountains, canyons, dunes, spacecraft landings, etc.  Once you search for a specific place, often Google Mars will link to an article that you can read for more information.

On the “About Google Mars” page, Google provides this introduction, “This map of Mars, published by Percival Lowell in 1895, was the result of many years spent carefully studying the Red Planet through his telescope. Now you can do the same through your web browser. In collaboration with NASA researchers at Arizona State University, we’ve created some of the most detailed scientific maps of Mars ever made.”

I enjoyed it!  Imagine being able to explore Mars from the comfort of your classroom.  Take a virtual field trip today!

Again, I found a few more art websites by navigating my network in my delicious account. I think you will find them as fun as I did.

One Million Masterpieces

This is a collaborative art project that allows the user to submit an art piece, no matter how small, to be a part of the “biggest collaborative art project in the world.”

Scribbler

Scribbler is an interactive site where you draw a simple scribble or doodle.  When you are finished, you click “start scribbler” and the site makes an interpretive scribble of your carefully created doodle.  Interesting!  Experiment with changing the colors as scribbler makes your piece for added beauty.

BRUSHster: National Gallery of Art

BRUSHster is an online painting canvas with different brush sizes and shapes as well as a variety of colors.  The only thing I didn’t like was that I could only click “undo” and step back one time. 

Collage Machine: National Gallery of Art

The collage machine makes collages (surprise!) with different shaped pieces of papers in a select number of colors.  However, by changing the transparency of the pieces, you can make more of the limited choices you have.

Mondrian Machine

The Mondrian Machine is inspired by the art of Piet Mondrian, which consists of perpendicular black lines that subdivide his canvas colored with primary colors.  This site is probably the most primitive of the bunch listed here, but could still serve a purpose in art class if you are studying this topic.

Surreal Painter

Create surreal art with the help of pre-made backgrounds and objects!  After you create your masterpiece, you can share it with your friends.  It will look like you spent hours in a high-tech art program when really it only took you a few minutes using this site.  Be cool among your artistic friends! 

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Planet Science is a site from the UK, which sometimes causes educators in the USA to pass it by.  I don’t know why – many of the interactive, educational sites worth visiting come from the UK.  Ok, so they spell things a little differently and use the metric system (like everywhere else but here)!  Their sites still rock! 

Planet Science has interactive games for K-12 students.  I played a few of them and have enjoyed ALL of them so far.  The first one I tried was the Smoothie maker.  You can choose the ingredients to add to a blender to make your own smoothie.  When you’re done, start the blender!  The site will tell you how nutricious your smoothie is complete with how many grams of sugar and how many carbs you just drank in your smoothie.  The best part is the “Smoothie” song the site plays as it mixes your drink.  So much fun!

Next I tried Planet 10: World Builder (because Earth can’t last forever).  The student creates a new planet by choosing many, many different things such as: size, orbit, atmosphere, shape, moons, terrain, organisms, distance from sun, etc.  After you make all of your choices, you launch your planet into the atmosphere and see if it “survives” in space.  After a lot of careful planning, I managed to burn up all the living organisms, evaporated my atmosphere, and got hit by a comet.  Disaster.  But so much fun!

Planet 10: Solar System is also a nice resource.  Students can zoom into different planets to learn more about them.  Fun!  It has better graphics than Google Sky, but I’m not sure if the information is as detailed as Google Sky.

The site also has a list of science games on the Internet that are worth looking into as well as a parent page to get them involved. I love this site! Thumbs up from me!