“Behold is a search engine that is designed to help you find the best Creative Commons licensed images for your blog, slideshow, or video project. Behold searches the catalog of more than one million Creative Commons licensed images on Flickr. What makes Behold different from just searching by using the license filter on Flickr itself is that Behold searches not just by image tag but also by the quality of the content of the images. When it works correctly if you used Behold to search for images of “buildings in New York City” you would not only be searching the tags people assigned to their images, but you would also be searching the actual content of the images.

Applications for Education
When students create multimedia projects in my classroom, I require them to use either Creative Commons or Public Domain images if they don’t create their own images. I do this to teach and reinforce the point that they cannot just grab and re-use images without regard for Copyright. Behold could help my students find quality images that meet my Creative Commons requirement.”

(via. FreeTech4Teachers)

“Spent is an online game designed to teach players about the challenges of living on minimum wage (or slightly higher) employment. Players begin by selecting a job which will provide the wages they have to survive on for a month. Then throughout the game players are confronted with challenges that they have to handle by making an “either or” choice. After each choice the player’s account balance is adjusted. In addition to the change in the player’s balance sheet, each choice is followed by an explanation of consequence of the choice made.

Applications for Education When I saw Spent it reminded me of a simulation activity called Life on Minimum Wage that I developed and have used for a couple of years now. Both activities are useful for teaching students about the difficult decisions that some people have to make just to take care of the basic necessities.”

(Via FreeTech4Teachers.)

NY Times – Inside the Olympic Action:

“The New York Times has good collection of videos and audio slideshows designed to take you ‘inside the action‘ of Winter Olympic events. The videos will take you down a luge run at 90mph, through a snowboard half pipe, and down the men’s downhill ski course. Along the way athletes and coaches explain intricacies of each event and how the athletes maneuver through their events.

Applications for Education

Inside the Action could be a good resource for learning about Olympic events from an ‘insider’s perspective.’ You might want to use these videos in conjunction with a Google Maps Street View tour of the Winter Olympics.”

(Via FreeTech4Teachers.com.)

“Yesterday, while exploring Time’s website I came across this timeline featuring the key decisions made by President Roosevelt during World War II. The World at War is an interactive timeline in which you can click on any of the key decisions listed to learn more about those decisions. The decisions interspersed amongst other key events of WWII. None of the events are terribly detailed, but the timeline does provide a nice general overview.

Applications for Education

The World at War could be a good introductory resource or review resource for US History teachers and their students. Teachers could have each student in a class select an item from the timeline to research and teach to their classmates. ”

(Via FreeTech4Teachers.)

TIME Magazine Interactive World at War Timeline

Defend your space station from incoming meteors by solving multiplication problems or drag race your friends through division. AcademicSkillBuilders.com has a number of great math games covering Multiplication, Division, Fractions, Addition, Subtraction, and Integers. The games run great under any web browser and are quick to start and easy to play. All of the games are research based, and aligned to state standards.

Theres also a selection of language arts games focusing on spelling, vowels, verbs and Social Studies games focusing on State Capitals and countries. Now I better close the window so I can get some work done…

“Last night most of us in the US turned our clocks back by one hour. Why did we do this? The CBS Fast Draw team explains why in the video below.

Applications for Education

This video provides a succinct explanation of the rationale for Daylight Saving Time. If you don’t plan to show the video to your students, it’s still worth watching as a refresher for yourself. “

(Via FreeTech4Teachers.)

Playing History: Your Source for Historical Games: ”

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Looking for a way to spice up your social studies or history class? Check this out! Way back in July, Richard Byrne blogged about this site: ‘Playing History.’ I loved it and tagged it, knowing I’d want to share it here. Finally had a chance to check it out, and yep – it’s worth a closer look!

Basically, http://playinghistory.org/ is a site that aggregates games about history as submitted by people all over the web. A tag cloud is featured prominently as a the main interface for locating games but you can also search. Here’s a shot of the American History collection:

A handy rating system allows you to quickly see which of these games were popular (or not).  Then you are only two mouse clicks away from the actual game, located somewhere on the Internet. Drilling into the listing yields a detail page with lots of helpful information:

Quality of the games can vary widely, however. I started playing ‘Do I Have a Right?’ and couldn’t stop! It was terrific! A few others I clicked on were more like interactive websites than games, but, it’s easy to make those determinations.

I like this site because it’s easy to use and helps you locate engaging activities tied to your curriculum. And, of course, the site itself and the games located are free!”

(Via NCS-Tech.)

Learn About The Nobel Prize:

“As you’ve probably heard by now, the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 has been awarded to President Barack Obama. This announcement will undoubtedly create good conversation in current events classes. Your students will probably have questions about the Nobel Peace Prize. The Nobel Foundation has created a Nobel Peace Prize fact sheet to help visitors learn more about the history of the prize and to address some frequently asked questions. The Nobel Peace Prize website also offers videos of lectures given by past recipients of the prize.

The Nobel Foundation has an educational games site designed to help students learn about the work of past Nobel Prize recipients from a variety of fields. For example, there is a game for learning about Pavlov’s dogs.”

(Via FreeTech4Teachers.)

“The video is believed to contain the only film images of Anne Frank. The video was uploaded to YouTube by the Anne Frank Museum.

Applications for Education

The video could be valuable for anyone teaching lessons on WWII and the Holocaust. The film, recorded in 1941 according to the Guardian, represents the time in Frank’s life before going into hiding. One simple activity you could do with this video is ask students why recording this film wouldn’t have been possible later in Frank’s life.”

(Via FreeTech4Teachers.)