Readworks – Reading Comprehension
Levelled reading comprehension activities for all levels of reading ability. Readworks is authentic and engaging wtih automatic grading and tracking of student progress.
Young Men’s Health
The male companion to the young women’s site, Young Men’s Health, is just as robust, but is geared to boys. The resource includes general health, sexual health, medical conditions, nutrition and fitness and emotional health. The site has updated their information to be current for the covid-19 quaranting and includes questions and answers that young people may have about this virus.
As students do not log in to the site, there are no privacy considerations we need to be privy to.
Center for Young Women’s Health
The Center for Young Women’s Health is a robust resource filled with topics impacting female youth. It includes general health, sexual health, gynecology, nutrition & fitness, emotional health and medical conditions.
Since the quarantine was announced, they have updated their site to include the experience of quarantine as well as resources to help young people understand this situation.
As students do not log in to this site, there are no privacy considerations needed.
1,000 Free Audio Books
Open Culture offers thousands of resources that are free of copyright, and can be used by anyone. Their list of classic books informs users where the free resources are to be found, and in the case of the audio books, it specifies if the file can be downloaded from Audible (free app for iphone and android), iTunes, Spotify and other MP3 options.
This is a great site for high school English students to peruse should they need or want audio support for their novel study portions of their classes.
Gapminder
Explore world views with Gapminder. The site contains interactive tools and many videos on a broad range of topics.
Adobe Spark for Graphics and Video
Adobe Spark is a phenomenal resource for teachers. Spark allows you to quickly and efficiently create a beautiful graphic using a template, your own photos and royalty-free photos. You can also create from scratch to build your own unique images.
Further, Adobe Spark has the capacity to create and edit videos.
Adobe’s privacy policy is not suited to students, so this is not recommended as an application to be used with students.
Silk – Interactive, Generative Art
Silk is a really cool interactive, generative art site. It does not require a login, but has a camera icon in the top left corner for artists to take a photo of their creations.
Beyond art, this site would offer some fun learning about symmetry in math.
Play & Learn – French, Spanish or German
Literacy Center offers a few online games to assist with second language teaching and learning.
PhET Interactive Simulations
Many of the scientific simulations on the PhET site (from the University of Colorado, Boulder) are now able to be utilized on Chromebooks. They are no longer flash-based simulations.
PhET offers simulations from elementary level through to university.
Bomomo
Bomomo is an art site where adults and kids can experiment with art, colours and textures in an animated and engaging way.
NaNoWriMo for Young People
National Novel Writing Month is a fun, empowering approach to creative writing. The challenge: draft an entire novel in just one month. For 30 wild, exciting, surprising days, you get to lock away your inner editor, let your imagination take over, and just create!
NaNoWriMo only collects first names of student users and birthdates (for the purposes of protection and security) and NEVER asks for last names. Students use a screen (user) name and can upload an avatar to personalize their experience.
Help Teaching
Help Teaching is a website where teachers can create printables for their classroom. The free version will allow you to make a test or quiz of up to 10 questions. There is content for all subjects and all grades on this site.
We Video – Online Video Editor
We Video is a free online video editor. To access it for free, there are a couple of limitations. The application will limit videos to 5:00 in length, which generally speaking is more than enough for any class project. If needed, a student could separate their video into parts and submit it in segments for grading.
The free We Video also limits users to 1GB of storage.
Finally, We Video will put a watermark on videos that were created using their free utility, but the brain tunes that out quickly.
Free inspirational Movie Clips
Did you know there are online resources out there that offer just the movie moments you may be looking to use in your classroom? Clips you may not have known about, clips you may have forgotten about, or other just plain good uses for movie clips. Wing Clips is one such site. Though it appears that its backbone is through a religious organization, there are still many resources to consider.
Another site is ClipShout. This site is only free for 14 days, but also contains a large library of potentially useful movie clips for teachers.
Free Math, LA, Science Resource
The CK-12 Foundation is a California-based non-profit organization whose stated mission is to reduce the cost of, and increase access to, K-12 education in the United States and abroad. CK-12 provides free and customizable K-12 open educational resources aligned to state curriculum standards. The resource they have assembled online is phenomenal.
Their service comes up anytime one googles “online textbook”, and as such, teachers are likely to find some excellent content to overhaul or extend exsiting assignments and textbooks already being used.