These online resources provide plenty of great ways for students to stay on top of their math skills, or to build on them, over the summer.

This is the kind of thing I really love about the Internet - easy to access and use sites and tools, many of which are free, focused on a specific need. The need in this case is the desire to keep student math skills from deteriorating over the summer months. These resources can also be leveraged to enable students to build on their skills sets and get ahead of the curve for the material they’ll be tackling in the fall.

Free Online Educational Game Sites
Most kids love playing online games – what a great way to entice your children to work on their math skills while having some fun! There are so many game sites on the ‘Net, and many of them are free. In this post last year, I provided links and information about 10 of these free site. Here’s a few games sites that have math-specific sections (each of these sites also has games covering different academic areas as well):

• Funbrain’s Math Arcade (Grades K through 8): This popular site from Pearson Education features 25 different math games, customized to your skills level (grade).
• FunSchool Kaboose Math Games (Pre-K through Grade 6): 33 Math Games here. Click on over and check out Action Fraction, Farm Addition, Fishing for Numbers, Monster Numbers, and more.
• Sheppard Software’s Math Games (Grades K through 8): A couple dozen games here, grouped into 8 sections including: Basic Operations, Fractions, Telling Time, and Pre-Algebra.

Free Online Video Tutoring
There seem to be countless free video tutorials on the Internet, for just about any subject you can think of – a quick Google Search will generate a slew of results to investigate. I hope I’ve saved you some time by providing these three sites that are all about education and are loaded with math tutorials:

• Free math tutorials from Brightstorm.com: Hundreds of well produced videos, delivered with a highly functional interface. Categories include: Algebra, Algebra 2, Calculus, Geometry, Pre-Calc, and Trigonometry.
• The Khan Academy (1000+ free tutorial videos): Salman Khan has earned engineering, computer science, and math degrees, and he could be pulling in a sweet salary from gainful employment in the corporate world, but instead he quit his day job in Sept 2009 to record educational videos for his self-started Kahn Academy. His non-profit organization has a mission of providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere (I wrote this post in march about Mr. Khan’s impressive work). To view tutorial math videos, just scroll down the home page for a subject of interest – these include very advanced topics such as Linear Algebra and Differential Equations.
• WatchKnow’s Math Videos: There’s over 2500 math tutorial videos on this site, grouped into hundreds of subcategories, ranging from ”For Youngest Learners” to Calculus (86 Calculus videos). Learn more about Watchknow.org in this post, or just click through and check it out for yourself.

Online Math Help & Tutoring Resources
I wrote an article listing 15 Online Math Help and Tutoring Resources in December of 2009, including 9 paid resources and 6 free ones. If you’re willing to invest a little money in staying sharp this summer, click over to the article and check out the great sites listed there. For free help, here’s some of the free resources cited in the article:

• CliffNotes.com: The Cliff Notes web site provides free study help in many math areas, including advanced topics.
• Coolmath.com: This colorful site provides lessons for arithmetic, pre-algebra, and algebra.
• Math.com: There really is a Math.com? Yes, there is. This site provides some free practice and review resources. They have a lot of ads, but that’s often the “price” of free.
• Onlinemathlearning.com: This site provides helpful explanations and illustrations of math concepts in a wide range of math subjects. Some of their help pages include instructional videos.
• Webmath.com: This site allows you to enter equations and have it solve them and show you the solution! The automated problem solver may include some irrelevant information, but the sophistication of the site, at no charge, is pretty cool. The site covers a wide range of math subjects. I used it with some of my son’s 7th grade algebra homework, and it was spot on.

A great way to have some fun and reinforce learning in the classroom (or at home).

Over the long holiday weekend, I made it a point to have some fun with my kids, and the idea came to me to search online to see if I could find a Jeopardy game that would allow me to create my own categories and questions. I found the documents below on the James Madison University web site (thanks JMU!), which let me easily create a Jeopardy game using PowerPoint.

It took a little time to come up with 50 answers and enter them in the templates, but the result (playing the game!) was a lot of fun. It’s easy to envision this being useful and fun in a classroom setting, for students old enough to be comfortable with the “answer and question” format (probably grades 4 – 12+). 

Some considerations to keep in mind would include:

• Be a little creative about breaking out of the three-player structure, to let everyone enjoy the fun, or create small groups to create and play their own games.
• Plan how you will simulate the “buzzer” - that is, how you will decide which player gets to respond to each clue first (we went with the first to put up their hand after the question was asked, but there was a fair amount of squabbling over who was first each time, and whether someone put up their hand before the question was finished, etc.).
• Presenting this through a projector would be nice, or on an Interactive Whiteboard.
• Be sure to have a Final Jeopardy question prepared (there is no template for this).

The web page with the templates and simple instructions is here: http://www.jmu.edu/madison/teacher/jeopardy/jeopardy.htm. PowerPoint Templates are provided for the ‘regular’ Jeopardy round and for the ‘double Jeopardy’ round, along with some supportive documents.

Go ahead – take a couple minutes to give it a look, and consider trying it in your classroom, it could be fun!

Be sure to stop back early next week as I work to wrap up my series of posts learning about Interactive Whiteboards for the classroom.

These free sites provide students an opportunity to learn in a fun, interactive environment.

I searched out and visited a bunch of sites with free educational games and selected the ten I thought were most useful and appropriate to education. In addition to a brief overview of each site, I have also attempted to define the grade range that each site is applicable to. I made my own judgement for most sites since it often wasn’t indicated (feel free to weigh in if you think I’m off target on any of these).

Most of the sites listed here are geared towards K-12 (with many leaning towards K-6 or so), but some do have fun games that will challenge the Higher Ed student and adults as well. Take one for a spin today!

Funbrain (Grades K through 8): This popular site from Pearson Education features ‘Arcades’ specific to Math and Reading, along with the ‘Classic Funbrain’ games such as Math Baseball and Grammer Gorillas. Funbrain also has resources specifically for teachers, organized on this Teacher’s home page.  

Discovery.com’s Games (Grades 3 and up): Dozens of activities, organized into 4 categories: Games, Quizzes, Puzzles, and Interactives. This is a high quality site, and it was recommended by several instructors in my children’s classes. I enjoyed trying out some of these games, and the site is part of the overall Discovery.com site, which is rich with informative and fun content.

Sheppard Software (All Ages): This site provides a wealth of free games, puzzles, quizzes, and more. An impressive, rich resource of fun educational games and activities. No registration required. I have to say that I personally enjoyed this site quite a bit, partaking in quizzes, completing puzzles, and checking out the many resources there. 

FunSchool (pre-K through Grade 6): If you go to the Parents & Teachers section on this site, the games are grouped by Preschool, Kindergarten & 1st Grade, 2nd & 3rd, and 4th and 5th. The site offers more than 300 interactive games and activities that are fun and easy to use. Activities include matching numbers and shapes for preschoolers and geography, math and history for third through sixth graders.

National Geographic Channel’s Games Site (Grades 3 and up): This site features a variety of games and interactives and leans towards various science and history based adventures and activities, rather than the traditional subjects-specific types of games on many other sites. There’s a lot of cool stuff here, like Fossil Hunts, Journey to the Edge, Rhino Rescue, Monster Fish of the Congo, Earth in Balance, and How Taboo are You?

PrimaryGames (Grades K through 6): Lots of fun games here, covering common subjects like Math, Language Arts, Social Studies, Science, and more.

Educational Games on NobelPrize.org (Grades 6 and up + Higher Ed): As stated on the site, “These games and simulations, based on Nobel Prize-awarded achievements, will teach and inspire you while you’re having FUN!” This is one of the more high end sites in terms of the level of content. Challenging fun for middle school students, high schoolers, college students, and adults.

Prongo (pre-K through middle school): The games here are divided by age level (3-6, 6-9, 9-12). This is a fun site with a dozen or more games in each category.

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Click here for a PDF file version of this article (provides a nice clean copy for printing, and another way to distribute this to colleagues)
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Childtopia (pre-K to 6): This site has versions in 5 languages, and 9 categories of activities, including Games, Learn to Draw, Listen and Reading Comprehension, Learn to Draw the Numbers, and so on. It appears to be predominantly Spanish based on the ads that surround the playing area. There is a premium version that eliminates ads and provides a full screen interface for just $12/year.

Karooba (Grades 3 and up) : Karooba is a “social and gaming site that is focused on education”, featuring canned and custom developed Quizzes, Trivia and more. You really have to register to get the most out of it.

I hope readers find some of these sites useful, and have a little fun checking them out!

Related Posts (if the above topic is of interest, you might want to check these out):
PowerPoint Jeopardy in the Classroom
Fun tool for the classroom – simple Crossword Puzzle maker!
The Khan Academy (offering 1100+ free tutorial videos)

This week’s mid week post is a little lighthearted – this is a fun little tool I came across (thanks to Buzz Garwood and his blog at thisweekinedtech.blogspot.com). This tool will allow you to create a simple crossword puzzle by plugging in a bunch of words and clues. The result isn’t exactly NY Times worthy, but it works, and you might find this to be a fun tool to create a topic-specific crossword for your students, or to let them create one.

Create your own simple Crossword Puzzle at: http://www.armoredpenguin.com/crossword/

I’m sure this isn’t the only such tool on the Internet – comments about others you may have used are welcome. Thanks!