Sumdog Math Games and Read Write Think Online Interactive Graphic Organizers

The new technology resources we tried today:

Sumdog

I had seen lots of bloggers recommending Sumdog. I wanted to try it out.  I created an account awhile ago, but had not implemented it in my classroom yet.  My students love it!  They are begging to play at lunch and at recess.

With so many levels of Math, I like that I can differentiate this for my students.  After you add your students, class, and add a challenge.  Within the challenge, you can edit the skills by student.  I have some students working on 4th grade skills, some on 5th grade, and some on 6th grade.  They loved being able to earn coins, change their avatar, and play against each other.  They all want to be the top of the leader board.

Essay Organizer

I love Read Write Think.  Here is a link to all of their interactive graphic organizers.  There are 59 of them.  We tried two of them today.  Since we have computers, I am trying to find resources that they can use that help us achieve things we need to accomplish.  We are writing informative essays about the Olympic biographies we read.  We had tried organizing our 5 paragraph essays on paper with a graphic organizer I made. Some of my students understood it and some were not making much progress. I decided to try Read Write Think's Essay organizer.

Oh my gosh.  It made a world of difference for some.  The depth of clicking through the process seemed to help them a lot with the thought process.  Interactive made a huge difference for some of them. After they make the organizer, they can save it and even email it directly to the teacher.  So after they emailed it to me, I printed it out for them.

Story Cube

We read the first story from the 7 Habits for Happy Kids about being proactive.  Sammy the Squirrel has to learn how he can be proactive to take care of his own boredom.  We made the Story Cube for Sammy the Squirrel reviewing the character, setting, problem, resolution, theme, and favorite part of the story.

I made them answer in complete sentences.  They saved the story cubes and emailed them to me from the website.  I printed them out, and they made the cubes. One activity worked on story plot skills, understanding theme, web skills, writing in complete sentences, and the motor skills to actually cut, glue, and make the cube.

Overall, we had a great day!  How do you use Read Write Think?  Any other interactive graphic organizers you love?  Do you have any great suggestions for building online quizzes for short answer questions besides Google Docs?