Seven ClassTools Templates to Try This Year
ClassTools has long been a favorite resource of mine for creating all kinds of fun, online activities for social studies classes. As the new school year approaches it’s a good time to take a look at seven of my favorite ClassTools games and activities templates. Play Your Dates Right is one of the templates that […]
Try the Pairs Math Game in Your Library or Classroom

The Pairs Math Game is a free game developed by Phil Shapiro. Phil is a teacher and librarian who developed the game to be played in many settings including libraries and classrooms. The Pairs Math Game is a game that you print for students to play. To help you do that, Phil provides PDF versions […]
Can You Spot an AI-generated Image?

Google Arts & Culture has a lot of fun, interesting, and educational games for students. A couple of weeks ago I shared Return of the Cat Mummy from Google Arts & Culture. Last week, thanks to Tony Vincent, I learned about another fun game from Google Arts & Culture. Odd One Out is a fun […]
Return of the Cat Mummy – A New Google Arts and Culture Game

Return of the Cat Mummy is a new game from Google Arts and Culture. The game is set in the animated backdrop of ancient Egypt. In the game you control a cat mummy to collect items for a pharaoh to take to the afterlife. Return of the Cat Mummy has five levels. In each level […]
Online Spelling Games

About once a week I get a spammy email from someone trying to sell me domain names related to online spelling games and spelling apps. I got another one of those this morning. I took it as a sign that I should put together a new post about online spelling games and spelling apps. Here […]
EconEdLink’s Most Popular Economics Games of the Year

Over the years I’ve referenced hundreds of EconEdLink’s resources for teachers. That’s because EconEdLink is a great resource for any teacher who needs ideas, lesson plans, games, and other resources for teaching economics lessons. On the site you’ll find resources for everything from teaching basic personal finance lessons to elementary students through resources for teaching […]
Play Your Dates Right – A History Timeline Game

ClassTools.net has many great online game templates for history teachers to use. Play Your Dates Right is one of the templates that I like to use to create a game that is focused on helping students recall the sequence of historical events. In the video embedded below I demonstrate how to create a simple timeline-based […]
Fun Games for Learning About Space

NASA Kids’ Club is a collection games, interactive activities, and images for students in Kindergarten through fourth grade. At the center of the NASA Kids’ Club is a set of games and interactive activities arranged on five skill levels. The activities range from simple things like guessing numbers in “Airplane High Low” to more difficult […]
How to Create Your Own Online Connecto Game

Connecto is one of the many online game creation templates that Flippity offers. Flippity calls it Connecto, but the style of game is exactly like the classic Connect 4 board game (I’m sure that for trademark reasons Flippity can’t use that name for their Connecto game template). In a Connecto game students see a question […]
How to Create Your Own Online Memory Games

A few years ago one of my students created a memory game app with the MIT App Inventor. It was a great exercise through which she learned about all of the variables and parts of the app that need to be designed. If you’re a little more pressed for time than my student was and […]
Three Tools for Building Your Own Online Games That Aren’t Kahoot-like

Earlier today I fielded a question from a reader who was looking for some suggestions for tools he could use to create some online games for his students to play. Specifically, he was looking for some alternatives to the typical suggestions of Kahoot, Quizizz, and Gimkit. There are a lot of options that I could […]
Physical Phonics Games

I have been a fan of the online learning game called Teach Your Monster to Read for many years. The game is designed to help students improve the speed and accuracy with which they recognize letters and sounds. The game gets its name from the friendly monster avatars that students use in the game. Teach Your […]
Create a Snowman Word Game

Earlier today when I picked up my daughter from preschool she proudly showed me the snowman artwork that she had made during art class. A picture of her artwork is the featured image of this blog post. Seeing my daughter’s snowman art reminded me of the snowman word game template offered by Flippity. Flippity’s Snowman word game […]
Students Can Create Their Own Video Games With Construct 3

Construct 3 is a video game creation platform that students can use to develop their own games. The games students can create with Construct 3 aren’t simple quiz-based games like many other platforms offer. Instead Construct 3 offers students an opportunity to create games that might remind you of some classic video games like Mario […]
Best of 2022 – Game Templates in Canva

As I do at this time every year, I’m taking the week off to ski and play with my kids, shovel snow, and generally not think about work. I have some of the most popular posts of the year scheduled to republish this week. New posts will resume in the new year. Last week I […]
How to Create an Image Revealing Effect in Google Slides

About a week ago a reader reached to me to ask for a suggestion on how to create an image revealing effect without the use of proprietary interactive whiteboard software. My first thought was to give TinyTap a try because that platform does include a feature called “Houdini Mode” that can be used to hide […]
An Overview of Five Fun Geography Games for Students

Today is the first day of Geography Awareness Week. In the following videos I provide an overview of five map-based geography games that your students can play this week or any other time they need to practice identifying places around the world. All five games are featured in this compilation video. Read on for descriptions […]
GeoQuiz History Edition – A Fun and Challenging Geography Game

The start of Geography Awareness Week is nine days away. It’s probably my favorite academically-themed week of the year. (Yes, that’s my social studies teacher background coming through). Over the next week or so I’ll be sharing a bunch of great resources for teaching and learning about geography. To start things off I have a […]
One Last Round-up of Halloween Resources

As my daughters have reminded me about 1,000 times in the last week, tomorrow is Halloween. If you have elementary school students who are equally excited about Halloween and you want to include a little Halloween-themed activity into your day tomorrow, take a look through this round-up of resources that I’ve previously shared throughout the […]
Trick O’ Treat Safety Review Games

Halloween is just eight days away. If you’re an elementary school teacher, you might be planning to do some trick o’ treating safety reviews with your students. Playing Kahoot games is a fun way to review almost anything including Halloween safety. That’s why a few years ago I made the following video to demonstrate how to find and modify […]
The Descent of the Serpent – A New Google Arts and Culture Game

This week Google Arts and Culture released a new game for students. The game is called The Descent of the Serpent and it’s available to play in your web browser or in the Google Arts and Culture apps for Android and iOS. The Descent of the Serpent is a game through which students can learn […]
Turn Any Quiz Into a Game With Quizalize Games

Disclosure: Quizalize is an advertiser on FreeTech4Teachers.com. Last week I published a blog post about the new games feature of Quizalize. That feature enables you to take any quiz that you’ve written or any of the premade quizzes in Quizalize and turn it into one of six arcade-style games for your students to play individually […]
Quizalize Games – Turn Any Quiz Into an Epic Game

Disclosure: Quizalize is an advertiser on FreeTech4Teachers.com. Quizalize is a great teaching tool that I’ve used and written about since 2015 when it differentiated itself from the market by being the first classroom quiz game tool that offered an option to have your students play your quiz game as an in-classroom group activity or at-home […]
Learning How to Tell Time on Analog Clocks and Watches

My oldest daughter got a little analog wristwatch for her birthday a few days ago. So far she loves wearing it (she wanted to wear it to bed last night) and is rather quickly learning how to tell time with it. As you might expect, the watch has prompted a few questions including “how does […]
Elinor’s Nature Adventure and Hands-on Learning Activities

As I mentioned last week, my daughters have started to enjoy Elinor Wonders Why on PBS Kids. While they were watching an episode this morning I went on the PBS Kids website to search for some Elinor-themed learning activities. I wasn’t disappointed with what I found. The parents page for Elinor Wonders Why is full […]
Flap to the Future to Learn About Dinosaurs and Birds

As I mentioned yesterday, my daughters are currently obsessed with Elinor Wonders Why and the question in its theme song, “why do birds sing and how do they fly?” Answering the question about how birds fly led me to The Cornell Lab of Ornithology and its online game called Flap to the Future. Flap to […]
Arts, Culture, and Geography Games to Share in Google Classroom

One of Larry Ferlazzo’s recent blog posts about Ideas That Changed the World prompted me to spend time playing around with some of the games on the Google Arts & Culture site this morning. Play with Arts & Culture offers more than a dozen interactive games for students to play to test their knowledge and […]
Geo Artwork – A Fun Game About Geography and Art

If you and or your students enjoy online geography games like GeoGuessr, you need to try Geo Artwork from Google Arts & Culture. Geo Artwork is a game in which you view an image of an artwork and then have to guess where in the world that artwork belongs. There are categories for visual arts, sculpture, […]
Two Ways to Make Your Own Wordle-style Games

Last week I wrote about Strive Math’s new Custom Wordle game creator. That little tool can be used to create Wordle-style games based on words of any length. Flippity.net also offers a free template for making your own Wordle-style games for students to play online. Both are easy to use and don’t require registration in […]
Five Fun Science Games for Kids

I’m taking my daughters to a science museum today. Thinking about the museum and the interactive displays that they have got me thinking about some of the science games that I’ve reviewed over the years. I went into my archives and pulled out five fun science games for elementary school students. Peep and the Big […]
Games for Students to Play to Improve Their Typing Skills

A few days ago I published a short video about an interesting way to improve your typing skills while reading classic literature. That video prompted one reader to send me an email this morning to ask if I had suggestions for typing practice sites for elementary school students. The following are the things that I […]
Paper, Programming, and Games – The Week in Review

Good morning from Maine where it feels like spring this morning. The wind is blowing away the clouds of yesterday and it should be a sunny day to play outside. We’re going to put on our boots and go for a little hike this today. I hope that you do something fun outside today too. […]
A Huge Collection of Resources for Fun Phys Ed Activities

OPEN Phys Ed is an organization that hosts tons of great resources for physical education teachers. Additionally, OPEN organizes initiatives to encourage students to participate in physical education activities. One of those initiatives is National Field Day. OPEN National Field Day is an initiative that runs through May and June. It has a social media […]
Plays.org – Educational Games Your Students Will Love to Play

Disclosure: Plays.org is an advertiser on FreeTech4Teachers.comPlays.org is a new website that offers hundreds of games for students to play online. Students can play all of the games for free without the need to register or give away any personal details. And unlike many other online games websites, Plays.org doesn’t display advertisements and doesn’t use […]
Creating and Marketing Online Courses With TinyTap

Disclosure: TinyTap is currently an advertiser on FreeTech4Teachers.com In last week’s post about using TinyTap to create your own online courses I mentioned that there is an option to sell your courses for use beyond your classroom. That’s what today’s post is all about. In this post I’ll outline why you would want to create […]
Use TinyTap to Create Online Courses Featuring Your Favorite Games

Disclosure: TinyTap is currently an advertiser on FreeTech4Teachers.com For the last couple of months I’ve highlighted all of the ways that you can create online games and activities for your students to play on TinyTap. All of those games and activities can be shared individually in a variety of ways including embedding them into your […]
Try the Game Templates in Canva

Last week I was recording a demo of how to use existing slides to make video lessons when I came across a neat slide template in Canva. That template was for a game called This or That. The game is a simple icebreaker type of game that gets people talking to each other. The reason […]
Create TinyTap Educational Games With Houdini Effects, Videos, and More

Disclosure: TinyTap is currently an advertiser on FreeTech4Teachers.com TinyTap is an educational game creation tool that I’ve been using and writing about since its launch as a free iPad app many years ago. In my recent series about creating games with TinyTap I’ve focused on using the web-based game creation tools. Today, I’m going to […]
Use TinyTap to Create Interactive Lessons and Games With Soundboards

Disclosure: TinyTap is currently an advertiser on FreeTech4Teachers.com Over the last four weeks I’ve highlighted different ways to use TinyTap to create educational games for your students. This week I’m going to take a slightly different approach and share ideas for using TinyTap’s soundboard option to make interactive lessons and games. What is a TinyTap […]
Map Puzzle – Test Your Knowledge of World Geography

MapPuzzle is a simple online geography game that I recently learned about through the Maps Mania blog. The game is based on the premise of political boundaries being the lines in a jigsaw puzzle. You have to drag the countries, states, or provinces into their proper places on the map. MapPuzzle offers a dozen puzzles […]
Build Talk or Type Educational Games on TinyTap

Disclosure: TinyTap is currently an advertiser on FreeTech4Teachers.com Throughout January I wrote about creating your own educational games with TinyTap’s web-based game creation tool. I’ve covered creating a basic identification game, making your games look good, and making puzzle games. To end the month, I’m going to dive into making a game that doesn’t rely […]
Wiki History Game – A Fun Timeline Game

Wiki History Game is a free timeline game based on Wikipedia entries. I discovered it on Product Hunt last week and immediately lost about 30 minutes of my day playing the game. The game is a simple one, but an addictive one for history buffs. The premise of the game is to sort events into […]
How to Create Your Own Educational Games With TinyTap – Getting Started

Disclosure: This is sponsored content. TinyTap is a great platform that I’ve been sharing with teachers since 2012, a full decade this fall. In that time I’ve seen it evolve from an iPad app for creating simple games to a full suite of tools for creating educational games to play on iPads, on Android devices, […]
Best of 2021 – 700+ Free Typing Games for Kids

As I do every year, I’m taking this week as a break from publishing new blog posts and will be republishing some of the most popular posts of the year. Here’s one from September. TypeTastic is a site that offers more than 700 free typing games for students of all ages. I first reviewed TypeTastic a […]
Best of 2021 – Fling the Teacher!

As I do every year, I’m taking this week as a break from publishing new blog posts and will be republishing some of the most popular posts of the year. Here’s one about a fun game created by Russel Tarr. Fling the Teacher is a game that I mentioned briefly in this week’s Practical Ed […]
Germ Science Investigation – A Game About Stopping the Spread of COVID-19

Germ Science Investigation is a free online game that is designed to help students understand how to stop the transmission of COVID-19. The game has four “missions” for students to complete. Students complete the missions by answering a series of scenario-based questions. Students are given instant feedback after answering each question. If they answer a […]
TinyTap – Create Your Own Educational Games in Your Browser
TinyTap is a company that is best known for its iPad app that lets teachers create educational games to share with their students. I’ve used it and written about it for almost a decade. Recently, TinyTap made a fantastic update. You can now use TinyTap to create your own educational games in the web browser […]
A Good Source of Last-minute Halloween Games

I mentioned this in the list of Halloween-themed resources that I shared a few weeks ago, but I thought it would be worth reminding you that Kahoot has a huge gallery of Halloween-themed games. You can find those games by clicking the “Discover” tab in your Kahoot dashboard and then entering the search term “Halloween” […]
City Guesser 3.0 – More Maps and More Modes

About six months ago City Guesser 2.0 was released. The big news then was a switch from being based on street-level imagery to street-level video clips. Now City Guesser 3.0 is out and it still uses street-level video clips but now offers more games and more game modes than before. City Guesser 3.0 is played […]
Create Your Own Breakout EDU Games

Disclosure: Breakout EDU is currently an advertiser on FreeTech4Teachers.com A week ago I shared a handful of fun Breakout EDU games for in-person and online classrooms. A couple of those games were actually designed, built, and shared by teachers and not by Breakout EDU staff. In fact, Breakout EDU encourages teachers to create a Breakout […]
Five Fun Breakout Games for Online and In-person Classrooms

Disclosure: Breakout EDU is an advertiser on FreeTech4Teachers.com. Like a lot of teachers, one of my biggest challenges last year was building a sense of community in my classroom. Without having more than half of my students in my physical classroom for more than a few days before we went back to online or hybrid […]
700+ Free Typing Games for Kids

TypeTastic is a site that offers more than 700 free typing games for students of all ages. I first reviewed TypeTastic a few years ago shortly after it was launched and only offered thirteen games. Since then it has obviously added hundreds of more games and many more features. Just like when it launched a few […]
Five Good Tools for Making Your Own Educational Games and Practice Activities

Making online educational games used to be the domain of those with specialized coding and programming skills. Today, there are free tools that anyone can use to create their own educational games for students. Likewise, there are now some excellent free tools for creating online skills practice and knowledge recall activities to share with your […]
A Game and a Crash Course on Weathering and Erosion

The Crash Course for Kids YouTube channel offers overviews of various topics including weather. Weathering and Erosion is the topic of one of the more recent releases on Crash Course for Kids. In the video students will see a comparison of Cape Cod’s coastline in 1984 and 2014. That image combined with the commentary does a great […]
The Freshwater Access Game
Aquation is a free iOS, Android, and web game offered by the the Smithsonian Science Education Center. The game, designed for students in upper elementary school or middle school, teaches students about the distribution of clean water and what can be done to balance global water resources. In the game students select a region to […]
Five Sources of Summer Math Activities for Elementary School Students

If you’re like me and you still have another week or two until summer break, you might be looking for some resources to share with students and their parents to help prevent summer slide. In fact, a few readers emailed me this week looking for suggestions for math activities to share with parents of elementary school students. […]
A New Flippity Game Template – Connecto!

Flippity recently published a new game template for Google Sheets users. The new template is called Connecto. Connecto is probably best described as a digital version of the classic Connect Four game. Connecto lets you create a game board as large as forty-two cells (7×6) and as small as nine cells (3×3). The game template […]
Games, Maps, and Pictures – The Month in Review

Good morning from Maine where we’re ending the month with a cold and rainy day. It’s so chilly and damp that we have the heat on! Last week it was over 90F and I was turning getting all of our air conditioners out of winter storage. Such is life in northern New England. This month […]
Twelve Good Tools for End-of-Year Review and Practice

The end of the school year is quickly approaching. At this time of the year I start to get a lot of requests for suggestions for tools to create review activities. I shared some ideas in this week’s Practical Ed Tech Newsletter including what I’m doing in my classes. If you’re looking for some more […]
Fling the Teacher! – A Fun Review Game

Fling the Teacher is a game that I mentioned briefly in this week’s Practical Ed Tech newsletter. If you’re not subscribed, here’s a recap of what Fling the Teacher is. Fling the Teacher lets students fling or slingshot their teachers across the screen for up to sixty seconds after they correctly answer fifteen consecutive multiple choice […]
Three Good Ways to Make Online Word Games

As we get toward the end of the school year many of us will be looking for some fun activities for our students to do to review key terms and concepts of the last year or semester. I shared a handful of ideas for doing that in this week’s Practical Ed Tech newsletter. Another idea […]
12 Fun, Challenging, and Interesting Geography Games for Students

Last year I published a list of geography games for students. Since then I’ve come across a few more interesting geography games and one that I used for years has disappeared. Here’s my updated list of fun, challenging, and interesting geography games for students. Map Quiz is exactly what its name implies. It’s a quiz game […]
Games, Transcripts, and Copyright – The Month in Review

Good evening from Maine where it was a beautiful day for bike ride after school. Jumping on my bicycle after school on a sunny spring day always makes me feel like a kid again. I hope that you also have an activity in your life that makes you feel like a kid again. As the […]
MathQuiz.io – A Simple Game to Practice Math Skills

MathQuiz.io is a new math game developed by a student. It’s a relatively simple site that presents you with a series of math problems to solve in your head then enter an answer. The problems are presented in sets of ten consecutive questions. You can play in an “easy” mode which is mostly simple addition, […]
City Guesser 2.0 – Guess City Locations from Video Clips

For years City Guesser has been a popular geography game in which players have to guess the identity and location of a city based on Google Street View imagery. The new version of City Guesser replaces Google Street View imagery with street level video clips. In City Guesser 2.0 players are shown video clips (silent […]
How to Display Kahoot Questions and Answer Choices on the Same Screen

Last week Kahoot added a feature that teachers and students have been waiting years to see. That feature is the option to have game questions and answer choices displayed on the same screen. This means that students no longer have to look up at a screen in your room or a screen in Zoom then […]
Kahoot Now Displays Questions and Answers on the Same Screen – Finally!
For years teachers and students have wanted to be able to see Kahoot questions and answer choices on the same screen. This week Kahoot finally made that possible! Now when you launch a live Kahoot game for in-person or online play you can choose to enable an option to show questions and answer choices on […]
GeoQuiz – How Many Countries Can You Identify?

GeoQuiz is a new geography game website that was featured on Product Hunt a couple of days ago. GeoQuiz is a simple game that just asks you to try to name as many countries as you can in fifteen minutes. As soon as you enter a country’s name the globe on the screen spins to […]
How to Create Your Own Online Memory Games

As I do every year, I’m taking this week off from writing new blog posts. This week I’ll be re-running a few of the most popular posts in 2020. Last week I was asked if it’s possible to use the MIT App Inventor to create a matching game. It certainly is. In fact, I have […]
A Good Game for Learning About Nutrition Around the World

The Smithsonian offers a lot of neat apps and games for elementary school students. One of those games is called Pick Your Plate. It’s available to play in your web browser or as an iPad or Android app. The premise of Pick Your Plate is that students have to create balanced meals within a budget […]
Map Quiz – Another Game for Geography Awareness Week

Earlier this week I shared a few games and activities for Geography Awareness Week. Here’s another one that I recently discovered through Maps Mania. Map Quiz is exactly what its name implies. It’s a quiz game in which you’re shown a country or territory on a map and have to identify its name. The questions […]
Two Games That Illustrate the Dangers of Distracted Driving

Last week someone emailed me looking for some alternatives to an old New York Times feature called Gauging Your Distraction. It was a Flash-based game that illustrated the danger of texting while driving. I didn’t have any alternatives in my archives so I did a quick Google search and came up with a couple of […]
Five Activities for Geography Awareness Week

This week is Geography Awareness Week. This week is one of the many things that I look forward to every November. (Thanksgiving, football, and the end of the first quarter are some of the other things I look forward to). Even though I now teach computer science instead of social studies, I still enjoy good […]
A Handful of Games for Fun Typing Practice

Last week I was writing a blog post early in the morning when my three year old came out of her room. She saw what I was doing and wanted to help. Since she can recognize all of the letters of the alphabet I let her type a few letters of each sentence. That little […]
Ten Resources for Learning About U.S. National Parks

Last week TED-Ed published a new lesson about national parks. The lesson explains the origins of the U.S. National Parks system and concludes with explanations of the challenges facing national parks managers around the world. The lesson also explains how parks managers try to balance access and conservation while also respecting the rights of indigenous […]
Factitious 2020 – Can You Spot Fake News Stories?

In yesterday’s episode of Two Ed Tech Guys Take Questions and Share Cool Stuff I shared some information about an update to a favorite resource of mine, Factitious. Factitious is a game that is designed to help students practice identifying real and fake news stories. The 2020 version of the game features stories about COVID-19. […]
A Challenging Battles and Heritage Map Game

Geoquiz History Edition is a fun and challenging history game for history buffs. The game works like similar geography games in which you’re given the name of a place and have to place a marker on a blank outline map as close as possible to the actual location. In Geoquiz History Edition you’re given the […]
Doozy – Create and Play Fun and Educational Quiz Games
Doozy is a neat service for creating online quiz games that you can share with anyone and they can play without having to register for an account. The quiz games that you create on Doozy can be multiple choice or short answer questions. The games that you make can, and probably should, include pictures as […]
10 Fun & Challenging Geography Games for Students of All Ages

We’re halfway through 2020. This week I’m taking some time off from the blog to work on some other projects. The rest of this week I’m going to re-run some of the most popular posts and videos of the year so far. Making lists like this isn’t my favorite thing to do nor is it […]
How to Use Kahoot in Google Classroom

This is the time of year when many of us are looking for fun ways to conduct end-of-year review sessions with our students. Playing Kahoot quiz games is one of the most popular means of doing that. Kahoot games are fun to play in a classroom and you can also use them for remote learning […]
An Easy Way to Create Your Own Online Jigsaw Puzzles

Jigsaw Explorer is a free site that hosts tons of online jigsaw puzzles. It also offers a free tool for creating your own online jigsaw puzzles. To create your own puzzle simply visit the Jigsaw Explorer Create a Puzzle page then enter the URL of the image that you want to use as the basis […]
Ten Fun and Challenging Geography Games for Students of All Ages

Over the years I’ve tried dozens of online geography games for students of all ages. Many have come and gone over the years but the following geography games are still going strong. WikiWhere is a neat map-based trivia game. The goal of the game is to identify cities based on their descriptions. The descriptions come from […]
Two Ways to Create Your Own Online Memory Games

Last week I was asked if it’s possible to use the MIT App Inventor to create a matching game. It certainly is. In fact, I have a student who is working on doing that right now. It’s a great exercise through which she’s learning about all of the variables and parts of the app that […]
Vortex by ClassTools – Create Your Own Sorting Game

Vortex is the latest game template published by ClassTools. Vortex lets you create an online game in which players have to sort words or phrases into up to four categories. Vortex replaces the Dust Bin sorting game that ClassTools used to offer but ran on Flash. Vortex doesn’t use Flash which means it can be […]
Create a Sorting Game With a Free ClassTools Template
In last week’s episode of The Practical Ed Tech Podcast I answered a question about tools for creating sorting games. The Dust Bin game template from ClassTools was one of the tools that I suggested using for creating a sorting game. The template lets you create a review game in which students sort answer choices into […]
How to Make & Play “Fling the Teacher” Games

Earlier this week I wrote a post about a new game template from Classtools called Fling the Teacher. The game lets students slingshot or “fling” an image of their teachers after they answer fifteen multiple choice questions. In the following video I demonstrate how the game is played and how you can create your own […]
Fling the Teacher! – A Fun Review Game from Classtools

Russel Tarr recently added a new game template to the toolbox available on Classtools.net. The new game is called Fling the Teacher. Fling the Teacher lets students fling or slingshot their teachers across the screen for up to sixty seconds after they correctly answer fifteen consecutive multiple choice questions. Try it for yourself with this […]
A Couple of Fun and Simple Map Games for Students of All Ages

Ian Fisher is a software engineer at Google. In addition to his work at Google he’s developed a couple of fun map games. The games are How Many European Cities Can You Name? and How Many US Cities Can You Name? Both of the games are played the same way. Simply open the game map […]
Educandy – Quickly Create Educational Games from Word Lists
Educandy is a neat service that I recently learned about from Eric Curts. As I mentioned in this week’s episode of The Practical Ed Tech Podcast, Educandy strikes me as a slightly more polished version of Flippity. On Educandy you can create a list of vocabulary words or a list of questions and have a […]
How to Find and Edit Thousands of Halloween Games for Your Classroom

As I write this there are two mini pumpkins on my desk courtesy of my daughters. If you’re an elementary school teacher, I bet that there are plenty of visual reminders of fall and or anticipation of Halloween around your school. As Halloween gets closer and you think about reviewing trick o’ treating safety or […]
Bad News – Interactive Simulation Shows Students How Misinformation is Spread

Bad News is a website that offers simulations that show visitors how misinformation is spread through social media. Bad News is available in two versions. The regular version is intended for those who are high school age or older. Bad News Junior is appropriate for middle school and older elementary school students. The difference between […]
How to Use Kahoot’s New Question Bank to Create a Game

Earlier this summer Kahoot gave a preview of some new features including a question bank for making quiz games. Today, Kahoot made that question bank available to all users. Along with making the new question bank available to all users Kahoot unveiled a slightly new user interface for making quiz games. I tried it out […]
Changes Coming to the Popular GeoGuessr Geography Game

GeoGuessr is a fun geography game that I’ve been playing and sharing with others for the last six years. As I wrote back in 2014 GeoGuessr is a great game to have students play to spark their imaginations and lead them to making inquiries about interesting places all around the world. Yesterday, I was preparing […]
Three Good Resources to Help Students Become Discerning News Consumers

Earlier this week TED-Ed published a new lesson titled Can You Spot the Problem With These Headlines? The short video lesson walks students through dissecting a couple of hypothetical news headlines. By watching the video students can begin to understand how headlines are written to entice readers and how misleading headlines are created. Here are a […]
Create Individualized Spelling Games Through Flippity Spelling Words

Flippity’s Spelling Words is a free Google Sheets template that you can use to create individualized spelling games for your students. To do this you simply have to make a list of words that you want each of your students to practice. You’ll then put those lists under your students’ names in a Google Sheets […]
Get a Copy of My Jeopardy Gameboard Google Slides Template

In a workshop that I led last week I introduced the concept of linking slides together within a set of Google Slides. That concept can be used to have students create a choose-your-own-adventure story or you can use to create a Jeopardy-style gameboard. I made a Jeopardy-style gameboard using Google Slides that you can use […]
An Educational Game About Animal Habitats

Habitats is an educational game from the Smithsonian Science Education Center. The online game challenges elementary school to match animals to their habitats. In the Habitats game students are shown images representative of four habitats; desert, coral reef, jungle, and marsh. To play the games students have to drag pictures of animals from a list […]
A Virtual Amusement Park About Molecules
The NanoSpace Molecularium is a nice educational game produced by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. It is available to play in a web browser and is available as an iOS and Android app. The purpose of the game is to provide elementary school and middle school students with an introduction to the properties of atoms and molecules. The NanoSpace […]
Parts of Speech Quest

ABCya offers hundreds of fun and educational games for elementary school kids. Parts of Speech Quest is one of the games that was recently featured on ABCya’s homepage. Parts of Speech Quest is a series of nine games that, depending upon your age, will remind you of Legend of Zelda or Minecraft. Each of the […]
How to Find and Modify Halloween Games in Kahoot

Halloween is only seven days away. If you’re an elementary school teacher, you might be planning to do some trick o’ treating safety reviews with your students. Playing Kahoot games is a fun way to review almost anything including Halloween safety. That’s why I made the following video to demonstrate how you find and modify […]
A Fun and Free State & Country Capital Identification Game

Capital Toss is a free geography game from ABCya. The game has a state capitals mode and a country capitals mode. In both modes of the game works the same way. The name of a state or country appears at the bottom of the screen and three rows of capital names scroll across the top. When […]
Seterra Offers Science Quiz Games

Disclosure: Seterra is currently an advertiser on FreeTech4Teachers.com A couple of weeks ago I featured Seterra’s hundreds of geography quiz games that are available in more than thirty languages. But geography isn’t the only subject that Seterra offers quiz games about. Seterra also offers games about human anatomy, plant cells, animal cells, and microscopes. Just […]
Seterra – Hundreds of Interactive Geography Games in More Than 30 Languages
Seterra is a service that offers interactive geography games in more than thirty languages. I used the service for years with some of my own students. In the last couple of years Seterra has evolved from a desktop application to a web and mobile app service. You can play Seterra games in the web browser […]
Share Math Playground Activities to Google Classroom

Math Playground offers hundreds of free math games and interactive modules for elementary school students. I’m not sure if this is old news or not, but this morning I was looking at some of the games and noticed that you can share the games directly to Google Classroom. To share a Math Playground activity to […]
Kahoot Adds New Features for Teachers

Kahoot has just announced a feature that teachers have requested for a long time. You can now upload a spreadsheet of questions to create a game in Kahoot. To do this you have to use Kahoot’s spreadsheet template. I think that after you’ve used the template a time or two writing quiz questions and answers […]
A Great Example of a Teacher and Student Working Together
A couple of years ago I was contacted by a teacher just down the road from me in Portland, Maine who had developed an online geography game with the help of one of his students. That game was called GameOn World and it is still going strong today. In fact, they continued to work on […]
Factitious – A Game That Tests Your Ability to Spot Fake News

Factitious is a game for testing your skill at identifying fake and misleading news stories. The game was developed by the American University Game Lab and the American University’s School of Communication. I learned about the game last month when Larry Ferlazzo featured it and I have since shared it in a couple of professional […]
How to Create a Jeopardy-style Game in Google Slides

I think I was in the second grade the first time that I played Jeopardy-style review game. More than three decades later playing Jeopardy-style games is a still a popular way to host review sessions in classrooms. You can make your own Jeopardy games that include pictures and videos in Google Slides. In the following […]
Climate Kids’ Big Questions Teaches Students About Climate Change

NASA’s Climate Kids website has many excellent online and offline resources for teaching students about climate change. One of those resources is the Big Questions wheel. The Big Questions wheel guides students through the basic concepts and issues related to climate change. Seven big questions are featured in the wheel. Students select a question to […]
How to Use Blended Play for Classroom Review Games

Last week I published a post about a neat game platform called Blended Play. Blended Play provides five online game boards that you can project in your classroom to use as the template for review games. I have had a lot of questions about Blended Play since I published my blog post about it last […]
Blended Play – A Blend of Online and Offline Review Games

Blended Play is a service for creating educational games to use in your classroom. Unlike the game creation tools featured in my previous post, all of the games on Blended Play have to be played in your classroom. They have to be played in your classroom because Blended Play games are designed to be projected […]
Monster Heart Medic – A Game for Learning About Heart Health

Monster Heart Medic is a free iPad app produced by the Lawrence Hall of Science with funding from the National Institutes of Health. The purpose of the app is to help students learn about the cardiovascular system through a game environment. The basic premise of Monster Heart Medic is that students have to help a […]
My Ten Favorite ClassTools Templates
There are dozens of great game builders, writing templates, and handy classroom tools on Classtools.net. I’ve tried nearly all of them over the years. My ten favorite Classtools tools are featured below. The Dustbin game is an activity in which students sort vocabulary terms. Playing a Dustbin game can be a good way for your […]
ABCya’s Number Chart Is a Fun Math Activity for Kids

ABCya’s Number Chart is a simple but fun online activity for elementary school students. The chart offers “beginner” and “challenge” activities. In both activity levels students have to drag numbers into their proper places on a number line. In the “beginner” level students are shown a number line of ten numbers at a time. In the […]
Educational Games for Elementary School Science Lessons

Educational games can be useful in helping to reinforce concepts and content. A good game can keep students engaged while also helping them develop some thinking skills at the same time. You could create your own games on platforms like Kahoot or Metaverse, but those might not provide the depth of context that professionally developed […]
Now You and Your Students Can Create Quizzes in Kahoot’s Mobile App

Kahoot has released a major update to their free mobile apps. As of this morning you can now create a Kahoot game within the free app. The app also lets you distribute games to be played in your classroom or as “challenges” for students to play at home. More importantly, now students can create games […]
Quizalize Introduces New Differentiation Tools

Quizalize is an excellent platform through which you can create and distribute online quiz games. Your students can play the games as a group in your classroom much like Socrative or Kahoot. You can also have your students play the games at home. In fact, Quizalize offered the “play at home” option long before Kahoot […]
Forms, Augmented Reality, and Games – The Week in Review

Good morning from hot and humid South Paris, Maine. The warmth and rain have made our flowers bloom which is a nice sight to see to after a long winter. My toddling daughter is certainly happy about this weather as it she loves to play outside and sniff the flowers. And that’s what we’re going […]
Purpose Games – Create and Play Educational Games

Purpose Games is a free service for creating and or playing simple educational games. The service currently gives users the ability to create seven types of games. Those game types are image quizzes, text quizzes, matching games, fill-in-the-blank games, multiple choice games, shape games, and slide games. Text quizzes, matching games, fill-in-the-blank, and multiple choice […]
Nine Fun and Challenging Geography Games

Yesterday, I shared the City-Guesser geography game. That game was just the latest in a long list of online geography games that I have tried over the years. Many have come and gone over the years but the following are still going strong. GameOn World is a multiplayer geography game developed by a high school teacher […]
City Guesser – A Challenging Map Game

City-Guesser is a challenging map-based game. The game shows you a section of a map centered over a city. The labels are removed from the map so you have to guess the city’s name based on other clues like bodies of water and orientation. City-Guesser gives you four answer choices to choose from. If you […]
Play Code Fred to Learn About Circulation and Respiration

Code Fred is a free online game developed by the Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago. The game helps players learn about the human body’s responses to trauma. The object of the game is to help “Fred” escape from the woods while he is chased by a wolf. To keep Fred running players have to […]
Twelve Tools for Building End-of-year Review Activities (That Aren’t Kahoot Games)

The end of the school year is quickly approaching. At this time of the year I start to get a lot of requests for suggestions for tools to create review activities. Here are twelve good options for creating review activities. Video-based review activities: Vizia is a free tool for creating video-based quizzes. On Vizia you an […]
A Fun Game for Learning About Physics

Simple Machines is a fun game from the Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago. Simple Machines is a game that is designed to help students learn about the basic physics principles involved in the use of levels, pulleys, planes, axles, and wheels. The object of the game is to help a robot character named Twitch gather the […]
Dozens of Online Games Kids Can Play to Learn About Engineering

Try Engineering is a site that hosts lesson plans and games designed to get students interested in engineering. The lesson plans are arranged according age and engineering topic. The lesson plans can be downloaded as PDFs. The games section of Try Engineering features dozens of online games. Some of the games were developed specifically for Try Engineering while others are […]
Create Your Own Geography Game With Mission Map Quest
Mission Map Quest is a free tool for creating geography games. The concept is simple, you create a series of clues that your students need to follow to identify places around the world. You can add as few or as many clues to your Map Quest as you like. When you’re ready to have students try […]
WikiWhere – A Challenging Map Game

WikiWhere is a neat map-based trivia game. The goal of the game is to identify cities based on their descriptions. The descriptions come from Wikipedia entries. You can get up to three clues before you have to answer by clicking on the map to identify the city that you think is described by the excerpts. […]
How to Share Kahoot Challenges Through Remind
This week Kahoot announced an integration with the Remind messaging service. This integration lets you send your Kahoot Challenges (games for students to play at home) to your students and their parents through the Remind messaging service. In the following video I demonstrate how to send your Kahoot Challenges through the Remind messaging service.
Kahoot Now Lets You Share Games Through Remind

Last fall Kahoot released a new feature called “Challenges” that are review games your students can play at home or anytime they are outside of your classroom. That feature has proven to be popular. Today, Kahoot announced a new integration with Remind that will make it easier than ever to send Kahoot Challenges to your […]
TinyTap – Create Image Reveal Games and Identification Games

This morning I answered an email from a reader who was looking for a way to create educational games in which students have to correctly answer questions in order to reveal a picture or part of a picture. My suggestion was to try TinyTap. TinyTap is a free iPad app and free Android app that […]
13 Free Typing Games for Kids

TypeTastic is a service that currently offers thirteen free typing games. The games start with basic skills like identifying the letters on a keyboard and build up to touch typing skills. Unlike some other typing games services, all of the TypeTastic games are designed to work equally well on laptop as they are on a […]
A Cup Stacking Typing Game

ABCya produces lots of games designed to help elementary school students sharpen their skills in a lot of areas. Included in ABCya’s catalog of games is a fun typing game called Cup Stacking. In this game students have to type the letters that they see on the cups that appear on their screens. When they […]
The Cat In That Hat Knows A Lot About That – Educational Activities Inspired By Dr. Seuss

Today is the birthday of Dr. Seuss. If he was alive he’d be turning 114. Here’s a set of fun, online activities that you could use to celebrate the work of Dr. Seuss. The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That is produced by PBS Kids and features online games, videos, puzzles, and printable materials based on […]
Aquation – A Game for Learning About Global Access to Clean Water
Aquation is a free game offered by the the Smithsonian Science Education Center. The game, designed for students in upper elementary school or middle school, teaches students about the distribution of clean water and what can be done to balance global water resources. In the game students select a region to explore its current water […]
How to Use Google Sheets to Create a Bingo Board With Pictures
A couple of weeks ago I shared the news that Flippity’s Bingo board template now lets you include pictures in your boards. I’ve had a few people ask for clarification on how to include image links in the template that generates the game board. In the following video I demonstrate how to create a Bingo […]
NASA Kids’ Club – Fun Games for Learning About Space

NASA Kids’ Club is a collection games, interactive activities, and images for students in Kindergarten through fourth grade. At the center of the NASA Kids’ Club is a set of games and interactive activities arranged on five skill levels. The activities range from simple things like guessing numbers in “Airplane High Low” to more difficult […]
A Fun Geography Game for All – Best of 2017
As I do during this week every year, I am taking some time off to relax and prepare for the new year. Every day this week I will be featuring the most popular blog posts of the year. This was one of the most popular posts in September. Earlier this week Maps Mania published a […]
Two Good Tools That Help Students Learn to Program Games

Code Maven and Game Maven are interactive programming tutorials from Crunchzilla. Code Maven and Game Maven use the same style as the popular Code Monster javascript programming tutorial. That style is to present a piece of code with instructions on one side of the screen while providing a visual of the outcome on the other […]
51 World Geography Games for Kids

World Geography Games is a free site that features 51 geography games. The games are simple identification games in which students are shown the name of a country, state, city, or geographic feature and then have to click on the correct locations. Students earn points for each correct answer. World Geography Games tracks how many attempts […]
MindCipher – Find Your Next Brain Teaser

Solving riddles and other brain teasers can be a fun way to “warm-up” the brain before a brainstorming session or before a lesson on Monday morning. If you use this method, take a look at MindCipher for some new-to-you riddles and brain teasers. Mind Cipher is a collection of brain teasers, logic puzzles, and riddles submitted by […]
A Fun Game About Ecosystems

Feed the Dingo is a fun game that teaches students about the importance of maintaining balanced ecosystems. In the game students have to build and maintain a desert ecosystem. The game begins with a blank slate to which students have to add plants and animals. The game plays out over twelve virtual days. Each day […]
Outline Maps – Simple Geography Games for All

Update: February, 2020: This resource is no longer available. Outline Maps offers a free set of geography games. The site contains games about Africa, South America, Europe, the United States, and the world. There are two basic types of games on the site. The first type, “find by name,” displays a state, country, or city name […]
10 Good Resources for Geography Awareness Week
This week is Geography Awareness Week. As academically-themed weeks go, this ons is my favorite. For as long as I can remember I have enjoyed looking at maps and wondering about far-off places. I hope that I’ve be able to pass on that fascination to some of my students. If you’re looking for some resources […]
Crowdsourcing Digital Breakouts – Get Paid for Your Contributions

Earlier this week I shared Metaverse’s directions for creating digital breakout games. Yesterday, I had a conversation with Johnathan Miller, one of the founders of Metaverse, who was excited to share that they are now paying teachers for making digital breakout games. Use the free Metaverse platform to create a digital breakout game to use […]
Use the ClassTools Power Search to Find Educational Games

ClassTools.net is one of my favorite places to find free educational games and templates for creating educational games. Russel Tarr, a history teacher and developer of ClassTools, has made so many games that the site now needs a power search function. You can use this search function to find games and templates according to the […]
Using Classcraft for Gamified Motivation and Formative Assessment

This is a guest post from Rachel Langenhorst. Rachel’s work has appeared here in the past and been quite well received. I was excited to get another guest post submission from her. Every teacher in this day and age must be able to juggle 3 to 45 things at any given moment. There are days […]
Kahoot Launched a Paid Plan – What That Means for You
Kahoot launched a paid service yesterday. You might have seen some Tweets or Facebook posts about it and gotten concerned as did the folks who emailed me about it yesterday. The paid plan isn’t going to have a direct impact on your teacher account. The new Kahoot Plus plan is designed for corporate users who […]
How to Create a Simple Timeline-based Game

ClassTools.net has many great online game templates for history teachers to use. Play Your Dates Right is one of the templates that I like to use to create a game that is focused on helping students recall the sequence of historical events. In the video embedded below I demonstrate how to create a simple timeline-based […]
Create Interactive Diagrams on Quizlet
Earlier this month Quizlet, a popular flashcard service, added a new interactive diagram feature. This new feature can be used by students and teachers to create review activities that are based upon pictures and charts. Clicking on a point on an interactive Quizlet image will reveal the name or term clicked. You can then “flip” […]
How to Launch Kahoot Challenges
Challenge mode is one of the key features of the new Kahoot mobile app. Challenge mode lets students play your Kahoot quiz games even when they aren’t in your classroom. When Challenge mode is used students see your quiz questions and the answer choices on the same screen on their mobile phones. In the video […]
Using Augmented Reality to Learn Nouns and Verbs

Metaverse is a great platform for creating your own augmented reality games and activities. Through the Metaverse Studio anyone can program an augmented reality experience without having any prior coding or programming knowledge. With Metaverse Studio you can build and publish an augmented reality game to accomplish many learning objectives. A great example of this […]
Play Your Dates Right – A Fun History Game

Play Your Dates Right is another great game template developed by Russel Tarr at ClassTools.net. The concept of Play Your Dates Right is that students have to pick the correct sequence of three historical events. The event in the middle of the game template is always the event that actually did come second. Students have […]
Kahoot Launches a New Collection of Math Games
Kahoot, the immensely popular review game platform, has launched a new component for teachers. The new component is called Kahoot Studio. Kahoot Studio offers curated collections of pre-made Kahoot quizzes. The collections will contain quiz games created by Kahoot staff and Kahoot’s “expert” educators. As of right now the only curated collection in the new […]
A Game for Learning About International Trade

This post contains content that I originally published a couple of years ago. An email from a reader who was looking for suggestions on activities for teaching global trade prompted me to pull these resources from my archive. The multimedia library on The Economist contains a set of cartoon videos explaining some big concepts in […]
Three Ways to Create Jeopardy-style Games
On Friday I shared a video about how to create and play Jeopardy-style game on the Factile platform. There are other good options for creating and playing Jeopardy review games in your classroom. On eQuizShow you can build and display your quiz completely online. To build your quiz just enter a title, an administrative password, […]
Jeopardy Rocks Now As Factile – Jeopardy & Flashcards

A couple of years ago I featured Jeopardy Rocks. Recently, Jeopardy Rocks changed its name to Factile and added some more features. At its core Factile is a free platform for creating Jeopardy-style game boards to use in your classroom. Factile lets you create games and save them in your account to use whenever you […]
Teach Your Monster to Read Minigames Overview
Last month the folks behind the popular Teach Your Monster to Read virtual world for literacy development introduced a set of minigames. The minigames are short activities designed to help students improve the speed and accuracy with which they recognize letters. In the video embedded below I provide a short overview of the Teach Your […]
Hone Geography Skills With These Fun Games

Yesterday, I received an email from Kahoot that featured six games they are promoting along with National Geographic. The games are intended to help students brush-up on their knowledge of U.S. and world geography. You can find those games here in the public gallery in Kahoot. I played a couple of the games and found […]
Two Good Sources of Online Grammar Games

Road to Grammar is a free resource featuring quizzes, games, and lessons for English language learners. Visitors to Road to Grammar will find grammar quizzes. Most of the quizzes provide students with instant feedback. Part of the feedback that students receive on the quizzes they take includes explanations why an answer is correct or incorrect. Before taking the […]
Teach Your Monster to Read Minigames

Teach Your Monster to Read is a fun online environment in which students play games that are designed to help them improve the speed and accuracy with which they recognize letters, sounds, and words. Students play the games as friendly monster avatars that they are helping learn to read. This week, Teach Your Monster to […]
TinyTap Handbook – Tutorials for Making Interactive iPad Activities

TinyTap is a great tool for creating interactive, educational activities that your students can play on their iPads, on their Android tablets, or on their laptops. I have recommended TinyTap to at least five people in the last week. If you’re looking for a way to create iPad games, TinyTap is the first tool that […]
Games@NOAA – A Gallery of Educational Games About Oceans and Weather

NOAA’s Games Planet Arcade offers twenty-six educational games for young students. The games are intended to help students learn about oceans, wildlife, and weather. Twenty of the games address topics related to marine life. While the games are not terribly complex or fancy, they do offer some solid information for young students. For example, the Humpback Whale […]
The Climate Time Machine

Crafting my previous post about 40 years of snow data reminded me of a neat climate change demonstration for kids. NASA’s Climate Time Machine is one of many activities that students can complete on NASA’s Climate Kids website. The Climate Time Machine is essentially an interactive timeline that lets students see the changes in the […]
Pop Penguin and the Place Value Race
Pop Penguin and the Place Value Race is a new game on Math Playground. The free game is played in a classic board game style in which students advance along the board by completing math challenges of varying degrees of difficulty. As you can see in my demonstration video below, students can pick the difficulty […]
How to Create Kahoot Games

For the last eleven months “create Kahoot games” and “Kahoot” have been the most frequently searched terms on this blog. While I have published videos about specific parts of Kahoot, until today I didn’t have a video on the complete Kahoot creation experience. In the video embedded below I demonstrate how to create a Kahoot […]
5 Fun Geography Games for Geography Awareness Week

On each of the previous three days I’ve shared some resources and ideas for Geography Awareness Week. Continuing that pattern, here are five fun games that your students can play to test and develop their knowledge of geography. GameOn World is a multiplayer geography game developed by a high school teacher and his student in Portland, […]
Six Tools for Creating Classroom Quiz Games – A Comparison Chart

Twice in the last week I have given presentations about tools for creating fun formative assessment activities. The most popular part of that presentation is when we play a couple of quiz games in Kahoot and Socrative. Those are probably the best known quiz game platforms. They are not the only quiz game platforms. There […]
Math Playground – Hundreds of Math Games & Instructional Videos

Math Playground is a great website containing hundreds of mathematics games appropriate for K-8 students. I first reviewed the site back in 2008. Whenever I have returned to it since then, more games and other helpful features have been added to it. Math Playground offers a huge variety of math games for students. You can […]
Magic Gopher – A Math Game

Magic Gopher is a fun little game in which students select a two digit number, add the digits together, subtract the new number from the original, then look up a symbol associated with the final number. The Magic Gopher the correctly “guesses” the final number symbol. Of course it’s not actually magic, but young students will […]
TinyTap Courses – Create Interactive Lessons for iPad & Android

TinyTap is an excellent tool for creating your own educational games that your students can play on their iPads, Android tablets, or in the web browser on their laptops. I have been demonstrating the platform in workshops for elementary schools for a few years. It has been a hit every time I show it off. This […]
GameOn World – A Fun Geography Game

GameOn World is a free geography game system developed by a teacher and his student here in Maine. GameOn World is played in a manner similar to Kahoot. The teacher projects the game questions on a screen and students reply from their phones, tablets, or laptops. One of the convenient features of GameOn World is […]
Sushi, Gmail, and Kahoot

At the end of every month I like to take a look at the search terms visitors frequently use on Free Technology for Teachers. It gives me a sense of what people are interested in learning about. That information helps me brainstorm new blog posts for the next month. The three most commonly searched terms in […]
Timers, Word Clouds, and Kahoot

At the end of every month I like to take a look at the search terms visitors frequently use on Free Technology for Teachers. It gives me a sense of what people are interested in learning about. That information helps me brainstorm new blog posts for the next month (by the way, I have a […]
A Simple Way to Make Your Own Google Maps Street View Game

Earlier this week I stumbled upon a local radio station’s blog in which they had posted a little game called How Well Do You Know Maine Roads? That game was nothing more than ten Google Maps Street View images that you had to try to identify. The answers to the game prompts were posted at […]
Digital Dialects – Games for Learning a New Language

Digital Dialects offers a nice selection of educational games and activities for learning more than 50 different languages. Most of the games are designed to learn and practice the basics of each of the languages listed on the Digital Dialects homepage. Another good website for learning and practicing language basics is Literacy Center.net. Literacy Center offers games for learning […]
GeoQuiz – A Talking Map Quiz

There is certainly not a shortage of map quiz on games on the Internet. GeoGuessr and Spacehopper have been two of my favorites for a long time. Now I have another to add to my list of favorites. That addition comes in the form of GeoQuiz. GeoQuiz is a map game that shows you a […]
Three Geography Games Based on Google Maps and Google Earth

One of the things that I emphasize to students before they embark on any kind of research or problem-solving task is to take a good long look at the information that they already have before them. To that end, I’ll often request that they construct a list of what they know about a topic or […]
12 Tools for Creating End-of-Year Review Activities

This is the time of year that we think about activities that we can do to help students review the school year. At this time of the year I frequently receive requests for suggestions for tools to create review activities. The tools presented in the slides below can be used to create online games, iPad […]
10 Educational Resources About the American Revolution

Today is Patriots’ Day in Massachusetts and Maine. The day commemorates the anniversary of the first battles of the American Revolutionary War, The Battles of Lexington and Concord. As a New Englander this is a good day to review some good resources for teaching and learning about the American Revolution. Revolutionary War Animated is a great place to […]
Gauging Your Distraction – A Game to Show Students the Dangers of Texting While Driving

Update November 2020: This game was Flash-based. Flash is a standard that will be deprecated in December 2020. The game is no longer available. The New York Times has a nice interactive game that every teen driver or aspiring driver should play at least once. Gauging Your Distraction requires players to try to read and reply to three […]
Quizalize – Create Interactive Review Games to Play Synchronously or Asynchronously

There is certainly not a shortage of interactive quiz platforms available to teachers today. Platforms like Socrative and Kahoot have turned boring review activities into fun games that students want to play all the time. The trouble with those platforms is that to get the most out of them all of your students need to […]
Have You Tried Kahoot’s Ghost Mode?

The buzz coming out of the Tech Share Live session at FETC today was all about the “ghost mode” in Kahoot. Kahoot’s ghost mode essentially gives students the opportunity to play a Kahoot review game against themselves. In ghost mode students measure their progress against themselves. How ghost mode works: First, run a Kahoot game […]
16 Ways to Use TinyTap in Your Classroom

TinyTap is a fantastic free iPad app and Android app for building fun and interactive review games. With the app you can create games based on pictures, diagrams, videos, and icons. Students can play your games on their iPads, Android tablets, or in the web browser on their laptops. Speaking of playing games, TinyTap recently published […]
How to Create & Run Review Games on Triventy

Triventy is a free quiz game platform that I wrote about at the end of December. The concept behind Triventy will feel familiar to anyone who has tried Kahoot or Quizizz. In the video embedded below I demonstrate how to create and run review activities through Triventy. Applications for Education One of the best features of […]