Best Educational Software and Technology
My youngest daughter learned phonics and reading skills on my lap at the age of three, then went on to read every book and encyclopedia in the house. We had to go to yard sales, just to keep up with her voracious appetite for learning. I was hesitant to turn her loose on computers, because I didn't want to stifle her natural creativity. I still believe that the best educational technology is a regular download directly from YOU or your child's teacher, but there are some pretty cool educational software and online services that can help the learning process along...
Educational Software Options
Discovery Education, part of the Discovery television and broadcast network, is a great website for parents, teachers and students in search of educational software reviews, study tools and homeschooling resources. They analyze software, games, and other products through hands-on testing with real children and their parents, and highlight products that stand out as superior. The Discovery School reviews and categorizes software by age groups (1-3, 3,6, 6-9, 9+) as well as subject matter. You can find an abundance of options in areas such as:
Some of their top picks for kids in the 6-9 age group include:
Learning and Teaching Resources
The New York Times Learning Network, created for students and teachers in grades 3 through 12, is a free news service that provides news summaries, quizzes, and even daily lesson plans.
AskEric for Online Lesson Plans. More than 2000 unique lesson plans which have been written and submitted to AskERIC (now called the Educator's Reference Desk) by teachers. If you have a great lesson plan you would like to share with educators all over the world, send it in. A wonderful online resource since 1992.
HOMEWORK SPOT is a free homework information portal that features the very best K-12 homework-related sites. With the help of students, parents and teachers, their team of educators, librarians and journalists has scoured the Web to bring you the best resources for English, math, science, history, art, music, technology, foreign language, college prep, health, life skills, extracurricular
activities and much more.
LIBRARY SPOT has convenient links to popular online Almanacs, Calculators, Dictionaries, Directories, Encyclopedias, Historic Documents, Quotations, Statistics, and Thesauri.
SURFING THE NET WITH KIDS, run by a syndicated newspaper columnist and mother, is Barbara Feldman's vision of what's wonderful and educational on the Web for kids. She welcomes parents, kids, teens, grandparents, K-12 teachers, librarians and the incurably curious.
Online Courses
And of course there are other kinds of interactive learning opportunities. One exciting new educational media is the evolution of what has been called EduCasting. This is the use of audio (and soon video) files made by teachers and posted online for students to use at their own pace. These systems are catching on because they allow students and parents to learn together from real classroom materials, whether a child has a learning deficiency or is gifted and wants to learn more than can be covered in the traditional classroom setting.
MIT's OpenCourseWare is a free educational resource for teachers and older students. You can view actual MIT course materials (syllabi, lecture notes, lab notes, assignments, study materials) for over 1600 classes in Aeronautics, Biology, Chemistry, Civil Engineering, Computer Science, Economics, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, Mechanical Engineering, Physics and other disciplines. You can't earn college credit or access the MIT faculty, but for motivated self-learners, it's a fantastic resource.
In a similar vein, Stanford on iTunes allows you to download faculty lectures (both audio and video) that you can play on your computer, iPod, or burn to a CD.
Got a favorite site for educational software or online learning? Post your comments below.
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Posted by Bob Rankin on January 28, 2006 01:47 AM
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Article information: AskBobRankin -- Best Educational Software and Technology (Posted: January 28, 2006 01:47 AM)
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Copyright © 2005 - Bob Rankin - All Rights Reserved
Most recent comments on "Best Educational Software and Technology"
Posted by:
Gregg Courtwright
20 Feb 2006
Bob, as a teacher I appreciate your reading to your daughter. Too many come unprepared to school. Mostly the poor and ESL. If I could give credit to older siblings reading to younger, I would. Much time is spent on remedial education rather than on basic ed.
Posted by:
Richard
28 Sep 2006
Why not check out 'gcompris' as a pretty good free suite of software for children upto 10. It's at gcompris.net and it's for Linux so even the underlying O/S is free.
Teachers/parents can set up profiles that limit the activities of students to suitable activities and it includes maths, letters, computer skills, art, logic and puzzle solving.
Posted by:
anom
02 Sep 2007
I hear nothing mentioned of peerguardian2 if you want to keep yourself reasonably safe,this is the tool,but again downloading copyright material is illegal.