Vocabulary / Phonics Games

Vocabulary.co.il  is a site that offers several free vocabulary and phonics games including short vowel sounds, word scramble, word maker, and very fun hangman game.  These would be great to use in an elementary setting.  While this site has several advertisements on the page, none are too distracting from the learning games themselves.

Synonym Finder

Synonym Finder is a free dictionary of synonyms online and does exactly what it says – finds synonyms of a word.

Sendoid

Sendoid is  a new file transfer system that lets you share files as large as 1 GB.  Because Sendoid is a link-based service, your files are only passed directly between parties. Simply load the file you wish to share, and once it is uploaded use the unique one time link that is created to send to someone else to open and download your shared file.
 There’s no software to install for this use, but for files larger than 1 GB, you'll need to download the free desktop app. Once you download the app, and you no longer have any limitations on the size of file you can transfer.

View Pure

View Pure is a free and simple site that strips way all of the distractions of YouTube.
 With this site, you can watch YouTube videos without comments, suggestions, or promoted videos on YouTube. To use View Pure just copy the link of a video into the "purifier," click purify, and your video will be displayed on a blank white background.

Minus

Minus is a free file sharing service and supports all file types (pictures, documents, music, videos, etc). Once you create an account, drag and drop files from your desktop and folders directly to your browser to share the files. There are also desktop and mobile apps to use and a Chrome extension and web app.  There is a maximum file size of 25MB and you can only put 50 items in a gallery (folder). But, there is no limit to the number of galleries you can create.  There is even a way to share files as a guest without an account which could be useful for students who want to share a file with a teacher. 
Thanks to Jonathon Wylie and David Andrade for posting on this service.

If it Were My Home

If It Were My Home – This is a great site for social studies teachers.  At this site, you can compare your own country to some other country, you can find out what your life would be like if you were born in that other country as it compares the various aspects of two countries.

Joukuu

Joukuu is a free download for Windows that allows you to manage your cloud based files in one file manager. It will manage Google Docs, Dropbox, and Box.net files all in one window on your desktop.

It syncs Google Docs and Box.net files to your desktop and allows you to even edit them using Office or OpenOffice. It gives you a nicer interface for managing your Dropbox files.

You can even manage folders for each account through the desktop interface.

Maths Starter of the Day

Maths Starter of the Day is a free site that offers a starting point for every math lesson for students between the ages of 8 - 16.  Click on the date in the calendar below for the Starter Of The Day.

You can even jump ahead or find a starter by topic.  This site would be great to use with an interactive whiteboard.

Diagram.ly

 Diagram.ly is a free site that offers a drag and drop interface for creating diagrams using clip art and pre-drawn shapes. There is no registration and you can save your work to your computer in either a xml, png, jpg, or svg format. 

Gudli

Gudli is a free PreK-second grade educational site that offers activities in math, language arts, reading, and social studies.  The interface is very appealing to young students, including a cute way of scrolling through the available activities by using a rainbow colored squirrel to "barrel roll" through the menu.

Super Teacher Tools

Super Teacher Tools is a site that allows for the creation of Flash-based games and other tools for classroom management. These include:

• Classroom Jeopardy
• Speed Match Quiz Maker
• Who Wants to be a Millionaire
• Board game
• Seating Chart Maker
• Group Maker
• Random Name Generator
• Splitflap Counter
• and other fun tools, too!

DOGO News

DOGO News is a site that with current event articles that students can read and discuss. Teachers can sign up to access lesson plan resources. 

Instapaper

Instapaper is a free service that allows you to save web pages that you would like to read for later.  It has a "Read Later" bookmark that you click. Then you come back to the site later to read them or print them out, or read on your iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch.

Compflight

Compfight is a photo search engine website that looks for images from Flikr. With Compfight, type in your search query and you can select whether you want to search for that word in the tags of photos or their text descriptions. You can also choose whether you want creative commons images. 

Vocaroo

Vocaroo is a free site that makes voice recordings without any hassle (no registration, no software download, etc.).  Simple choose the "click to record" icon, record your voice, and then choose from the option of downloading your recording or using an embedded code for use on a blog or web page.