GSD Link of the Week

Link of the Week

Level Up! -- A standards-based STEM site that helps students develop 21st century skills by learning to design their own video games.

Memidex -- Millions of word definitions, etymologies, and audio pronunciations.

Academic Skill Builders -- A set of free online web-based video games that help students practice basic math, language arts, vocabulary, and thinking skills.

Financial Football -- A new video game designed to help students learn to manage their money. Designed for high school and college students. Released by New York Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli.

You Are Here -- A site by the Federal Trade Commission that helps students becom esmarter consumers. Provides lessons on advertising, marketing, recognizing scams, protecting personal information, an dother concumer concepts.

College InSight -- a resource that provides comparative data on college costs, diversity, and graduation rates. The site provides user-friendly profiles with detailed information for more than 4,000 U.S. colleges and universities.

Google for Teachers -- a free guide to help teachers use Google Maps, Docs, Books, and more in the classroom.

Wolfram Alpha -- a free research web site powered by a computational knowledge engine that generates answers to questions in real time by doing computations on its own vast internal knowledge base. Type your question or information in the box at the top of the page and see what results it generates.

Homework Day with Wolfram Alpha -- Wolfram Alpha held a live event on Oct. 21, 2009 to promote the use of the Wolfram Alpha computational knowledge engine for educational purposes.

Picturing the 1930s--A new educational web site created by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in collaboration with the University of Virginia that allows teachers and students to explore the 1930s through paintings, artist memorbilia, historical documents, newsreels, period photographs, music, and video. Visitors can select images, write text, and record narration in the style of a documentary filmmaker. They can then screen their video in a virtual theater. The site has numerous other features.

YOUniversity--Offers prospective college students an unbiased, third-party source of information about hundreds of schools in an interactive, social environment.

CareerForward--A free online learning program from Microsoft designed to help middle and high school students thinkabout careers they might like to pursue and the skills necessary to attain those careers.

Dweeber-- A collaborative networking site for students and teachers. Students or teachers can set up study groups or work on projects collaboratively. Everyone has the opportunity to collaborate, ask questions, seek help from a guru on the topic, and establish a homework help hub. The site helps students and teachers find useful sites tht will expand their learning.

Plagiarism.org--This site provides resources and information on plagiarism education and prevention.

Academic Earth--Thousands of video lectures from the world's top scholars

Under the Microscope--This site celebrates the achievements of women in science and encourages women to pursue science careers

Career Voyages--A great career site where you can do research on individual jobs. You view videos of what a person in a particular career would actually be doing.

National Jukebox Project -- a collection of more than 3 million music and spoken-word recordings for online public streaming. Many of these have historical significance.

Books Should be Free -- many books from Project Gutenberg in audio book and EPUB format. Available formats include iPod, iPad, mp3, Kindle, EPUB, HTML, etc.

Digital Literacy and Citizenship in a Connected Culture -- and updated site from Common Sense Media that provides free digital citizenship resources for students, teachers, and parents.

Kennedy Administration Primary Source Documents -- In a move that will make primary-source documents more accessible to students, the Kennedy Library has unveiled the first online presidential archive.

Brainshark -- Create free online video presentations. Add voice to Power Point, provide a guided tour of web albums, narrate a document, create a podcast, and more.

Evernote -- A web-based, cross-platform program. The free version allows users to make individual or multiple note pages for tracking tasks or to-do lists; to save hotos, PDF files and snapshots of web pages; as well as to record voice notes. Evernote collects the information you upload from any web browser or portabl edevice and synchronizes it for any device on which you have Evernote installed.

NASA Images -- Get all of NASA's multimedia content in one free, searchable collection. Users can search for material by keyword or theme, or they can browse through several featured collections. An interactive timeline on space flight shows images and video from the 1959 launch of Explorer 1 to the Mars Rovers and International Space Station.

Media Education Program for Parents -- Common Sense Media has introduced a free media-education curriculum designed for parents. The program offers resources that address parents' questions and concerns about television, movies, the internet, gaming, and more.

Internet Safety and You -- The Virginia Department of Education has teamed up with the Professor Garfield Foundation and the Office of Attorney General of Virginia to provide guidance for students, teachers, and parents to help protect themselves online.

Photobie -- Photobie is free image editing software that combines features amateurs can use with advanced tools professionals will appreciate. Includes links to several tutorials to help you get started using the software.

Avairy -- A free tool that has image editing, screen capture, audio editing, logo creating, etc.

Alice -- An educational software that teaches students Computer Programming in a 3D environmnet. Different levels of the software are available for different grade levels. Provided through Carnegie Melon University in collaboration with Sun Microsystems.

eGFI-Engineering: Go For It -- a free site from the American Society for Engineering in Education that is intended to inspire middle and high school students to consider engineering careers. The site features examples of engineering innovations that are transforming society as well as descriptions of the most popular engineering career paths and disciplines.

Digital Citizenship -- a free Microsoft curriculum that encourages students to be good 'digital citizens'.

YouTube EDU -- a gateway to free educational video content. This site contains hundreds of free video clips from various college and university YouTube channels, including lectures by well-known professors and scholars on a variety of subjects.

NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) Online Games -- A collection of games that will help studnets learn about a wide variety of topics including estuaries, recycling, nautical terminology, and others.

Smithsonian Cultural Heritage Tours -- The Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies is offering a series of free online tours that invite educators, families, and students to learn about America's diverse cultural heritage.

PageFlakes -- Pageflakes is a free web-based start page tool. You can use it to aggregate all kinds of resources and tools on your web-based desktop (to create a personal learning environment). All "flakes" are editable and deletable, and there are thousands of flakes that can be added, e.g. wikipedia flake, calendar, bookmarks, and so on. You can also RSS feeds. And you can share your page with others. There is a special Pageflakes for Students version too!

PDFescape -- PDFescape is a free, online PDF reader, editor, form filler, & form designer. PDFescape is a new way to open PDF files and escape from the typical software requirements for using the de facto document file format.

Natonal Public Radio (NPR) -- News and indepth reporting. Includes podcasts, tools, newsletters, streaming audio, and links to some of NPRs most well popular shows.

Birthday Calendar -- Enter your birthday and find out lots of interesting, although probably useless, information related to the day you were borm.

Format Factory--A free multifunctional media converter--available for download and install. Converts numerous types of video and audio files from one format to another.

JayCut.com--This is a website that enables you to upload video, audio, and more in order to create mixes or movies. You can create your own profile page and groups of friends who can view your mixes or you can make them public. Users can add movies, photos, titles, transitions, and effects.

Chess Online--Play chess or learn to play chess

Virtual Worlds Almanac--The handy guide to exploring virtual worlds

Know Your Stuff Home Inventory -- Free, secure, online storage of your home inventory. This software makes updating and managing your home inventory very easy.

Test Your Computer for the Conficker Virus--You can use this site as a test to see if your computer is possibly infected with the virus.

The Civil War Reporter -- National Park Service "reporter" tweets coverage of the Civil War -- From politics to eyewitenss accounts this site exposes visitors to a unique method of learning about the Civil War.

The Center on Congress at Indiana University -- Developed for students as well as the general public, these interactive learning activities are designed to give you a fresh perspective on how the United States Congress works, your role in the process, and peoples' perceptions about Congress.

Free historical maps for teachers and students -- In ETC's collection of historic maps. you will find over 5,000 maps representing many different time periods. A friendly license allows teachers and students to use up to 25 maps in non-commercial school projects without further permission. All maps are available as GIF or JPEG files for screen display as well as in PDF for printing.

iCivics -- A web-based education project designed to teach students civics and inspire them to be active participants in our democracy. iCivics is the vision of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who is concerned that students are not getting the information and tools they need for civic participation, and that civics teachers need better materials and support.

Planet Orange -- A site designed to teach students in grades 1-6 about personal finance and responsibility. The site has a teacher materials and a parent center.

A Study of the Executive Branch -- A series of videos and worksheets from Discovery Education.

JetPunk Geography Quizes -- A collection of world wide geography quizes. How much do you know about Geography? Test you knowledge and compare your results against the averages.

GeoGebra -- Free math software that helps students from elementary to college. Free, multi-platform mathematics software program for all levels of education that joins geometry, algebra, tables, graphic, statics, and calculus in one easy-to-use package. Created and supported by an international team. The GeoGebra website also has a wiki that contains a free pool of teaching materials to support use of the software in the classroom. The application itself is not web based and must be installed on the computer.

Mathematics and Science Simulations -- from the University of Colorado at Bolder PhET Simulations project. Lots of great simulations to help understand a variety of concepts. Users can manipulate parameters and observe the effect. Check the left menu column for subject specific simulations.

Mathtrain.tv--A free educational "kids teaching kids" project from sixth-grade math teacher Eric Marcos and his students at Lincoln Middle School in Santa Monica, CA. Lincoln students create math video lessons that are used for classroom instruction.

Master the Basics -- A series of videos on basic mathematics from Discovery Education.

National Library of Virtual Manipulatives (NLVM)--Utah State University's National Library of Virtual Manipulatives offers hundreds of multi-sensory games, illustrations, exercises and puzzles for K-12 students that explore numerical operations, algebra, geometry, measurement, and data analysis.

Lure of the Labyrinth--Online Math Game -- Maryland Public Television, in collaboration with MIT's Education Arcade and educational media produce FableVision, has applied the latest research in game theory and design to produce a free learning tool to help all students learn pre-algebra concepts regardless of their math ability.

Kahn Academy--Videos to help with mathematics from arithmetic through calculus

Middle School Chemistry -- From the American Chemical Society -- a free, online middle school chemistry curriculum that correlates with national standards. All of the experiments offer simple activities that teach the most important-and some of the most abstract-concepts of chemistry. Includes short, useable video segments.

Interactive Universe-- Take a journey through the universe and explore planets, nebulas, black holes, comets and more. Brought to you by History.com.

Terapixel -- A joint project between Microsoft and NASA that allows users to explore the cosmos from thier PC.

8 Wonders of the Solar System -- A Scientific American interactive feature about the solar system. In 8 Wonders of the Solar System viewers explore the sites that future "space tourists" will want to view. The sites are depicted through the artist Ron Miller's drawings. The tour includes audio and video commentary about the featured sites. One of my favorite stops on the tour is the Peaks of Eternal Light on the Moon. The Peaks of Eternal Light are one of the few places in the solar system on which the sun never sets.

Astronomy Media Player -- From the planets to various interstellar bodies, learning about astronomy can be fun and engaging. One way to learn about such matters is via podcasts, and this website is committed to finding the best astronomy podcasts from various places around the world. Users can get started by looking at one the following sections: "General", "Observing", "Courses", "Your Questions", "Observations", and "Top Ten".

Science Nation -- A free, weekly online magazine from the National Science Foundation that looks at discoveries with the potential to transform our world. Each week, Science Nation takes a dynamic, entertaining look at research--and the researchers--that will change our lives.

Master the Basics -- A series of science videos from Discovery Education.

We Choose the Moon -- A web site from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum that aims to inspire members of the Internet Generation 40 years after the first lunar landing. The website recreates the Apollo 11 mission online in real time.

The League of Scientists -- A series of engaging online science games designed to help excite students about science and stem the tide of apathy toward science. The games are offered free to students in grades three through five and are constructed around a standards-based science curriculum.

Build an Atom -- A great visual representation of varous atoms and their structure.

Ask It! -- Launched by the National academy of Sciences, this site has a moderated forum and free online resources designed to model the scientific process.

Periodic Table of Videos--A video version of the Periodic Table of the Elements. While there are many ways to parse out the information found within the periodic table of elements, the University of Nottingham has gone above and beyond with their own novel version. Their version happens to have a short video about each element, and visitors will find each short clip interesting, informative, and fun.

Siemens Science Day--Provides standards based videos and hands on activities for science

Science Fair Central--This Web site is dedicated to helping students, parents, educators, and coordinators prepare science fair projects

Read.gov -- Library of Congress online portal of free reading resources for children, teens, and adults. It features online versions of several out-of-copyright books as well as writing contests, suggested booklists, teaching resources, and more. The site also p[rovides webcasts from selected authors.

World Digital Library -- National libraries from more than a dozen countries, in coordination with the United Nations' education aagency, put some of humanitie's earliest written works online with the launch of their World Digital Library. Among these are a 1562 map of the New World along with other rare and interesting items.

Improving Writing, Mechanics, and Grammar -- A series of instructional videos from Discovery Education.

Thinkfinity Literacy Network--Thinkfinity Literacy Network delivers free, top-quality online educational resources for literacy instruction and lifelong learning for adults and family literacy programs. The content on TLN strengthens literacy development, creativity and critical thinking skills for success in the 21st Century

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Link of the Week