When teaching kids about what effect they can have on the larger world, there’s three websites that come to mind. Free Rice is a simple little vocab game that lets you pick the correct definition for a fairly obscure word. For every correct guess, 10 grains of rice are donated to the UN World Food Program. In addition to English vocabulary drill, you can do words in German, Italian, French and Spanish as well as math.
New to the charity scene is Free Poverty which donates up to ten cups of water for every place you can locate in its geography quiz. The further you are from the site, the fewer glasses of water donated. At the moment it’s not clear who the donations are being funnelled through since Free Poverty seems to be “between” collaborating organizations.
Good Search is also a great place to go to make a difference. You choose the registered charity you want to support – it appears to be only American ones – and then using Yahoo! Search you hunt for whatever you’re after. Each search seems to donate about 1 cent to your charity. That may not seem like much, but imagine if 100 people in your school used this search service once per day for 200 school days per year. That would be a nifty $200 donation simply for searching the Internet. Good Search also shows you how to install their search box into your web browser (replacing the default box) and thereby makes it incredibly easy to donate money as you search.