CK-12 Launches a New Collection of Elementary School Math Resources

CK-12 has long offered tutorials and practice exercises for middle school and high school science and math students. Today, CK-12 unveiled a new collection for resources for elementary school mathematics. The collection is organized by grade level (grades 1 through 5) and skill. The resources are a mix of videos and online practice exercises.

While the CK-12 elementary school mathematics collection offers a lot of skills sections (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, clock reading, measurement) each section appears to be fairly limited in its offerings. I checked five skill sections, one in each grade, and each was limited to one video and one exercise. That said, if you sign-in on CK-12 you can add your own resources to a section.

Applications for Education
CK-12's new elementary school mathematics resources collection could be helpful to parents who are trying to reinforce what their children have learned in a mathematics lesson in your classroom.

Quizzity - Another Fun Geography Game

There is not a shortage of geography games on the Internet, but that doesn't mean I'll stop trying new ones that come out. Quizzity is the latest online geography game that I've tried. The concept behind Quizzity is a familiar one. Quizzity presents you with the name of a city and you have to click on the map where you think that city is in the world.

Quizzity quizzes you on cities all over the world. To increase the accuracy of your guesses you should zoom-in on a region before clicking the map. Each round of Quizzity presents you with six city names. Points are awarded for accuracy and speed.

If Quizzity isn't for you, six other geography games can be found here.

Create Your Own Geography Game

Russel Tarr's Mission Map Quest allows you to build your own geography games. Mission Map Quest is a map-based tool for creating virtual treasure hunts. The concept is simple, you create a series of clues that your students need to follow to identify places around the world. You can add as few or as many clues to your Map Quest as you like. When you're ready to have students try your Quest just give them the web address of the challenge or have them scan the QR code assigned to your Quest.

H/T to Maps Mania for the Quizzity information. 

How a Dog's Nose Works and How Dogs Observe the World

Morrison and Max sniffing their
way around the world. 

If you read this blog regularly, you've probably picked up that I love dogs. So of course I was excited to watch the new TED Ed lesson about how dogs "see" with their noses. How Do Dogs "See" With Their Noses? provides a great explanation of how dogs noses work. The most interesting part of the video is the explanation of how dogs' senses of smell allow them to identify friends, foes, and potential threats. The video is embedded below. You can find the full lesson here.


Click here for more resources for teaching lessons about dogs.

What Snot Color Says About Your Health - An Infographic

This post will rival my post about Who Pooped? for grossest topic I've covered on FreeTech4Teachers.com. The Cleveland Clinic offers and infographic titled The Color of Snot. The infographic breaks-down what the color of your nasal mucus indicates about your health. The infographic might be of interest to health teachers and school nurses to print and post for students to read. You can read more about the infographic on the Cleveland Clinic's website or grab the PDF of the infographic here.

H/T to Lifehacker.

How to Create Online Collaborative Whiteboards

Stoodle is a free online collaborative whiteboard tool hosted by CK12. On Stoodle you can create a whiteboard space and invite others to use it with you. Registration is not required in order to use Stoodle. In the video embedded below I demonstrate the features of Stoodle.


Applications for Education
One of the best features of Stoodle is the option to import files from a wide variety of sources including Dropbox, Google Drive, and Evernote. Students could use Stoodle to import a file, highlight portions of it, draw on it, and chat about it in real-time as part of peer editing exercise. Stoodle could also be used for peer tutoring sessions on math problems as the whiteboard allows free hand drawing on iPads.