If you’re writing poetry and can’t find a good rhyme, Rhyme Zone may be the place for you. It provides rhymes (including many obscure ones) to all kinds of words. It’s quite a useful tool.

Rhyme Zone does have its limitations meaning you need to use it intelliently. For example, there was no perfect rhyme for happiness. Yet if you search for rhymes for happy you end up with scrappy. Is it just mean, or couldn’t you use a word like scrappiness to rhyme with happiness?

Okay, this is a game I discovered on Saturday that I’d just love to use in a physics class. It wonderfully illustrates the properties of velocity and momentum, and, to top it off, it’s fun. For Line Rider you draw a line, either simple or elaborate, and when you press play your little man rides it on some trike-like vehicle.

Naturally, if your track is well designed, Line Rider goes for a very long and happy ride. If your track is poorly designed, Line Rider crashes and you can start over. If you want to see how the game works, check the videos on You Tube. The game has become something of a cult classic and literally thousands of videos of people’s games have been posted. Some of them are very, very cool.

If you’re a physics teacher, this is worth a look. If you’re just someone who likes to have fun, this is still worth a look.

Whenever the experts tell you the best way to use the Internet in your classes, they always tell you to create a webpage with the sites you want to use. This way the students’ research is focussed and they don’t wander off to sites that contain innappropriate material.

Yet if you’re teaching the kids how to use the Internet, teaching them to search is also part of the package. So how do you make sure that if they search they don’t spend endless amounts of time searching inappropriate sites?

Google Coop to the rescue! The Google Coop program allows you to create a search engine that will only search the sites you tell it to. If there’s two sites that your students should be looking at, only enter those two. If there’s fifty sites, well, enter all of those.

Creating the search engine is fairly simple. If  you can browse the web, you can probably do it. However, you do need to register with Google and create a Google ID. If you have a Gmail account, you’ve alreay got your ID and are good to go.

The time of segregation was not a pretty one in American history. The Remember Segregation site does an excellent job of portraying that.

Starting with actual “white” and “colored” entrances to the site, you are exposed to stirring images from the age of segregation, both uplifting and disturbing ones. While much of the site is merely a tribute to Martin Luther King, there are also great soundclips of King’s speeches, a timeline of civil rights events, and the text of some of King’s speeches.

Are your students (or you) too busy or too disorganized to read the classics? You know, what I mean, those great old books on which the copyright has expired. If you can’t find the time, or can’t figure out where you put the book DailyLit may be the answer.

DailyLit will e-mail you a small part of a book each day from what must be a couple of hundred different titles. It takes you only a few minutes to read it on your computer, or you can print it out if you like. If you’re gripped by the story you’re reading but are disappointed that the selection is too short, don’t despair because you can request the next section be sent to you immediately.

This might be an easy way to get people reading the classics or their own or as a supplement to a class assignment. The number of parts to read ranges from a couple of dozen to several hundred depending on the title and layout of the section so that means there’s quite a few possibilities for how to use the site.