Fun Forever

http://www.funforever.net/

Just when you think you have no time to spare, it’s time to give yourself a break. This fun website will enthrall you for hours and hours. However, there are lots of great examples for teachers to use in their classrooms to support their curricula.

I find myself checking back on this site when I just want something refreshingly unique.

Here are some favorites:

http://www.funforever.net/archives/custom-mailboxes/

http://www.funforever.net/archives/soap-art/

http://www.funforever.net/archives/money-faces/

Birth of the computer by George Dyson

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/278

A historian and philosopher of science, George Dyson takes a clear-eyed and deeply researched view of our recent scientific past -- while showing where it may lead us.

George Dyson tells stories from the birth of the modern computer -- from its 16th-century origins to the hilarious notebooks of some early computer engineers.

Tag Galaxy

http://taggalaxy.de/

It is Summer and time for some fun. This website will provide tons of visual fun. Enter a tag word that you might find on flickr, say.. Winter. Then sit back and watch as it displays (on a global ball) that tag category and related tags (categories) as satellites to that main tag. Click and drag uour mouse to rotate this globe or later screens.

Be prepared the fun starts now.

However, classroom teachers and librarians can use this tagging concept to help students develop effective search strategies.

Wordle.... a word cloud generator with cool results

Wordle ( http://wordle.net/ )is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.
Here is one that I created with my del.icio.us bookmarks.


Here is another one created by someone and saved to the gallery on Wordle's homepage.
Title: The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe


This tool will come in useful with many classroom tasks.