Floorplanner.com Beta

Looking for a way to rearrange your room, without moving all the desks just to realize that you like what you had the first time? Not everyone was born to be an interior designer, architect, or I guess you can say a classroom specialist. What I'm trying to get to is that floorplanner.com is a free website (that is currently in it's beta stage) that lets you design your room and set it up different ways BEFORE you move everything. Now I'm not saying that thing is 100% fool proof, but it is saving you time, and a big headache.

Floorplanner says it is the easiest, quickest, and best looking way to create and share interactive floorplans. Using point-and-click, drag-and-drop tools, you can make your floor plan in minutes, and rearrange it as often as you want. Then you can save, send, and print your designs to share them, or place them on your own website. So go ahead and be crazy! Hey even incorporate this into your classroom somehow...it's easy for me, I'm a drafting teacher.

ididwork.com

So if you're like me, you want to know what your students are doing each day. Especially in a situation like myself, where I'm in a computer lab with 28 computers, and a list of assignments due throughout each week. Anyways...the best thing I have found to use to keep students on their toes is a website called ididwork.com. It's a free way for your students to keep a log on what they accomplish each week. It also allows them to email you their daily, weekly, monthly, etc. etc. production. So this can be used on projects, everyday worksheets, and pretty much anything else you could give out. It also has an option of getting in contact with other peers and see what kind of work they are doing, so say you're doing a group project, instead of the awkward phone call to see what Johnny is doing, just go on to ididwork and check out his progress, then give him that attitude because he waited last minute to finish the project!

Fantastic Contraption

We all know that Physics is a pretty hard class, and the number of students in high school that actually take it, and well, understand it, is even a smaller number. Well developer Colin Northway has created a free online game called Fantastic Contraption. It's a fun Physics based puzzle game. The main object of the game is to create your machine in a given area and push your pink wheel into the pink box. Each level has basic parts you can build with. Each level gets harder and harder, with a total of 20 free levels to play from. If you like the game so much, you can put up $10 and get the full game, which then allows you save games and build levels. I'd much rather have kids go online and play this game rather than find proxy servers and try to get on their mySpace.