T N.

Not as good as the books, but still entertaining, the Freakonomics blog at the NYTimes offers some little tidbits and insights into the phenomena of our times, in behavioral economic terms. Unfortunately there isn't enough of a Steven Levitt presence and the articles are too short for me to pay attention for long.

When my good friend Judy and I were tweeners, we used to play this game where we would pit two male friends (also tweeners) against each other, in elimination rounds, to see who would be the ultimate "funny guy", "cute guy", "best hair guy", "future husband guy" and so on. We did Kitten Wars and Hot or Not style warfare before they even existed (http://bit.ly/dm74oX), but our kittens were prepubescent boys whose voices cracked uncomfortably whenever they tried to sing Boys II Men songs.

Okay, anyway, let's cut to the chase. The concept of All Our Ideas is similar, except the questions are more like, "What do you think is our most important national priority?", with answers like, "Expand funding for stem cell research", "Capital finance reform", "Provide quality healthcare for all", etc. Not as fun as Kitten Wars or my and Judy's childhood game but still an interesting use of open source technology to gather the opinions of thousands of strangers on serious or frivolous issues of relevance to you.

Science Daily is terribly designed, but the articles / summaries are short and easy enough for a layman like myself to understand. I subscribe to the weekly science and health updates, so Sunday mornings are always a thrill as I wade through tons of headlines to find ones relevant to my work.

On this website, I was able to find a video on the battle between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex in the teenage brain. It was the exact thing that I needed for my class, and the video was appropriately short for the teenage attention span.

Here's a useful place to look for clean, crisp stock image photos. The website also suggests similar photos and allows you to choose the size of the images as well as parts of the image (so useful).

A website full of free and simple worksheets for topics from math to reading to science and social studies. This site is really a jewel for our teachers who need simple, distraction free websites with big print and few problems per page. Working with children with special needs, we've found that super teacher worksheets allows us to accommodate to our students very easily!

Starfall is a wonderful free resource for pre-reading and basic reading skills. It has a kind of Sesame Street, commercially feel but it actually is fairly well-developed and easy to access.

Reading is Fundamental (http://www.rif.org) is a really nicely organized site with resources for educators, parents and children. There are plenty of free resources, such as ready made packets, depending on grade levels and themes. The best part is that there is a fairly ample section in Spanish, making it more accessible for our school in Guatemala.

My friend Jessica linked me to this, and I left it sitting there for an hour before I actually tried it. The concept is this - pick one of the moods that are available (from "feel like crying" to "driving route 66" to "sunday morning"), and there's a couple of hundred tracks playlist right there at your eardrums. There's a very decent selection of indie, electronic and non-top 40 tracks. All in all, I was impressed although I can't help but think that this may have been developed by a group of folks with a tremendous collection of music and Itunes's "Genius" button.

Yes, there's a bias towards indie and electronic, but that's A-OK with me, especially the Indie part. An obsession with Hot Chip's Made in the Dark stripped down version actually made me sign up for this Hype Machine business, and boy, was it worth it. Endless listens to remixes and barebones versions of my favorite tracks, for an obsessive personality like myself, is too good to be true.

My friend Ario tweeted this. I thought I'd give it some more exposure. http://www.behance.net/Gallery/Make-Something-Cool-Every-Day-2009/*******
This guy made something "cool", interesting, rather, everyday.

When you get tired of your regular websites or have exhausted all they have to offer, but are looking for something along the same lines, insuggest.com is a fairly decent tool to use to find websites similar to your favorites. It seems to still have a limited range as I end up getting the same recommendations but is a neat idea nonetheless.

Trailermash is similar to Fanedit, the website that Chris O. Reviewed, but I think the Fanedit folks have more time on their hands. Trailermash collects edited and mashed up trailers. Good stuff.

Attitude Mag online is a nice website for parents and professionals who are new to learning about and living/working with children/adults with attention deficits and learning disabilities. It offers easy to access articles and tips for life, school and work. You can find out more about treatments, medicine and behavioral interventions which are all pretty well-updated.

I really couldn't tell you what makes Stuff on my Cat so appealing to me. I love cats because they're easy-going enough to let you pile just about anything on top of them but they're also irritable enough to make sure you know they're not enjoying it. With almost 4000 posts, you can find cats covered by almost anything - remote controls (a popular one), beer cans, costumes, dishes, etc.

Raz-kids allows teachers to easily create homework and an incentive for reading. Linked to Readingatoz.com (they share some of the same books also), Raz-kids allows you and students to see/hear the book read out loud, to record yourself reading (with vocabulary and pronunciation help), to print some worksheets linked to the book and to take an online quiz. As a teacher, you can see your students' progress charts, quiz scores, etc. When the students complete all their tasks, they get points which can be used to "buy" things for their "raz rocket".

Assigning the work can be tricky, as there's a lot of clicking around to be done (you choose the sequence, which can be time-consuming if you individualize instruction like we do). And at about $80 a year, this is also expensive but worth it if you want to encourage reading and help kids learn that homework can be fun too.

Reading A to Z is a pretty indispensable website that helps teachers plan their reading lessons. The website has hundreds of leveled reading books and phonics lessons (which I have used successfully). Each book comes with the whole set of lesson plans, making it super easy for a teacher to plan and implement reading classes. The subscription price is $80 per year, which sounds pricey but may be worth it, especially if you are lacking real books in your school. Reading A to Z has a bunch of sister websites too (Vocabulary A to Z, Science A to Z, etc.) but each comes with its own price, so that can get expensive.

Edhelper is full of ready-made worksheets, mini-books, activities, whole units etc. for levels from pre-k to high school. Teachers love Edhelper because they can supplement their activities and create homework easily. The subscription is $20 a year and $40 a year for all levels, up to high school. It's pretty worthwhile. I only wish the website was better presented (cleaner, better organized).

The speech therapy section of the Minnesota State University website (http://www.mnsu.edu/comdis/kuster2/sptherapy.html) has a more than extensive list of speech and language therapy ideas. The list is so extensive that it can be overwhelming at times, but it covers every area of speech and language therapy of that you can think of: articulation, fluency, speech sounds, prosody, etc. It provides websites for more information about various speech/language difficulties, activities and interactive websites that can support your interventions. Really nice collection of sites that just could be organized to make it more manageable for teachers and therapists.

Zamzar's a great place to convert documents from one application to another. I don't have Publisher on my computer so when I received a document with the *. Pub extension, I used Zamzar to convert it into a word document. The problem was the formatting, but at least I was able to retrieve the content.