Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Great Website! or two....well, three!

After looking through all of the Web 2.0 tools (many of which are great), I narrowed it down to a couple that I use quite regularly.

The first is Rubistar. This is a great FREE website that allows the user to search for or create Rubrics that assist is evaluations. If you register on the site, you can actually save your rubrics for later use, edit them to fit another project, and access them at home or school. There are premade templates to assist you in creating the rubric -- or you can edit and fill in the areas to fit your own specific needs. It's a great tool to have at your fingertips.

The second website that I have used in the past is Create-A-Graph. I use this site every year in grades 3-5. One of the skills that students are tested on is reading and interpretting graph data. What better way to know how to READ a graph than by learning how to MAKE one. This is a very user-friendly tool and allows the user to customize his/her graph for their specific needs. It's a great introduction to creating graphs in Excel!

Lastly - FreePlayMusic is one of my MOST favorite sites for finding and downloading royalty free music for use in podcasts, slideshows, or movies. The database is organized by "style" of music and there are various lengths of music clips that can be downloaded in .mp3 or .aac format.