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 […]
A Fun Augmented Reality App for Spelling Practice
My daughters really enjoy the PBS Kids show called Word World. In each episode of the show the characters build a new word. As I was recently watching Word World with them I was reminded of a fun augmented reality app called Catchy Words AR. Catchy Words AR is an augmented reality app that provides […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
A Quick and Easy Way to Make Your Own Wordle-like Game
A few months ago I published a video about how to make your own Wordle-style games. Since then Wordle craze has not shown any signs of slowing down (at least amongst my network of friends and colleagues). New DIY tools for making your own Wordle-style games seem to pop-up every week. The latest one that […]
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 […]
How to Make Your Own Wordle-style Game
I’ve yet to play Wordle and by the time I do the fad will probably be over. That said, I know a lot of people enjoy the game and are looking for ways to bring it into their classrooms. If that describes you, this blog post is for you. Flippity.net offers more than two dozen […]
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 […]
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 […]
BookWidgets – Create Unique Online Activities for Your Students
BookWidgets is a service for creating interactive online activities. It has been on my radar for a while and last week I finally gave it a try. I wish I had tried it sooner. BookWidgets lets you create online interactive activities for your students to complete on any device. One of the best things about […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Create Outdoor Bingo Games
I originally shared this video on my Ed Tech Fitness blog. The reaction there has been good so I thought that I should give it a bigger audience by posting it on Free Technology for Teachers. Outdoor Bingo is exactly what the name implies. Kids are given Bingo boards that have things like leaves, squirrels, […]
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 […]
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 […]
How to Play Kahoot Games in Google Classroom
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. 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 […]
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 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 […]
A Couple of Good Places to Find Icebreaker Activities
Every year at about this time I get a handful of requests for ideas for icebreaker activities. In fact, I found of one of those requests this morning in my inbox. Here are the two sites that come to the top of my mind when I’m asked for places to find icebreaker activities for classrooms. […]
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 […]
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 New Look for Kahoot – Coming Soon
Two weeks ago Kahoot added a new game creation capability to their free mobile apps. This week at ISTE they’re previewing a new user interface for teachers. The new user interface is based on the one that is now available for Kahoot business users. The new interface features improved collaboration options and improved results reporting. […]
Common Craft Offers a Great Guide to Understanding the World Cup
Like many Americans, I don’t really understand soccer so when the World Cup rolls around every four years I have to refresh my memory about the game. Fortunately for me, as they did four years ago, Common Craft has released an updated guide to understanding the World Cup. Common Craft’s Soccer Guide was made for […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
How to Create a Vocabulary Sorting Game on Classtools
Classtools.net, developed and maintained by history teacher Russel Tarr, offers lots of great templates that you can use to create review activities for your students. Recently, I received an email from a reader who was having trouble with the Dustbin game template on Classtools.net. To help her out I created the video that you see […]
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 […]
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 […]