There are synomyns, two different words with the same meaning. Antonyms are words that means the opposite of each other. Contronyms, however, are words that are their own opposite.

For example, an alarm can go off, meaning it’s on. Or an alarm can be off, meaning it’s not on. Either way the alarm is off.

To have your student play with this cool part of English, this site explains 55 contronyms. I think it’s fun and essential to play with language if we’re going to appreciate it, use it, and develop it, and a site like this provides definite fodder for playing.

Hunting for cool typing games for a colleague, I found this site yesterday: Free Typing Games. This site has a lot of games. I tried a couple yesterday and found them fairly challenging. My current favorite is a Space Invaders variant where you shoot down ships by typing the words under them. Each level, of course, gets faster. Very fun.

The Museum of Retro Technology is a really cool little site. It’s one of those neat little areas of the Net that shows you the world that was, or actually the world as people hoped it might be.

The site features a lot of interesting inventions that never really caught on. It’s neat for Social Studies classes to see first hand how the world might have turned out, and how people thought the world should develop.

For Science classes this site presents a neat opportunity to analyze the scientific mistakes of past years. Why didn’t certain technology work? Would it have been better if it had actually caught on? After all, the technology that gets adopted isn’t always the most technologically advanced choice.

I’ve been playing with wikis lately. They’re a wonderful tool for putting things up on the Internet while not really knowing how to make a webpage. They’re a nice collaborative tool that allows a group to collectively build a website. Wikipedia, probably the world’s most developed wiki, is a great example of this.

My most commonly used wiki is one called PHPWiki which I run on some of my personal webspace. I use it primarily for the students to review material they’ve studied. If I give them a list of key terms, each one will make a page that defines their term or terms, and then link to the other pages where appropriate. For example, if I were doing a Bible test on Genesis, a page on Abraham might have a link to a page on Sarah, his wife. With PHPWiki this is done by putting the title of the page to be linked to (Sarah) in square brackets, like this [Sarah].  Pretty easy, huh?

If you’re not into making your own wiki, there’s plenty of places to get them for free, like Jotspot (just acquired by Google, so they’re not taking new members right now), PBWiki (a favorite of educators because it will let teachers use the free version without ads), Wikispaces, and my new favorite, Wikidot (which currently has no ads).

I’m hoping to start a project with one of my classes to gather war stories from older members of the community. We’ll compile these on a wiki because it’s really easy for the kids to do, and, since I’m switching schools next fall, really easy for other non-techie teachers to continue.

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, allows you to take some of the important headings off of one site and display them on another. This can be handy if you have an RSS feed from a newspaper and you put that on your website. It means everytime the kids go to your site, they get a smattering of the latest news. Without even meaning to, you’re keeping them up to date and educated.

For this little tool you need to be a bit of a web geek, but not a really big web geek. FeedoStyle allows you to put news or other events on your site. The free version updates about once an hour, but you can pay for upgrades if you find it important for the students who have more up to date headlines.

If you have a bit of a knowledge of HTML and webpage making, it’s not hard to put a FeedoStyle RSS feed onto your website. You can adjust the size of the box, the speed that messages scroll by, and several other things. Even if it’s a bit geeky, it’s a fun little toy that’s even educational.