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West Point Bridge Designer Reading Rockets Book Club   Funderstanding Roller-Coaster Simulation

Music for your Website Plagiarism sources  Build a Castle

West Point Bridge Designer

http://bridgecontest.usma.edu/download.htm

“The West Point Bridge Designer will introduce you to engineering through an authentic, hands-on design experience. This software provides you with the tools to model, test, and optimize a steel highway bridge, based on realistic specifications, constraints, and performance criteria.”

The software is a free download and you can install it on as many computers as you like for educational purposes only. You can also request free curriculum resources to go along with the software for using the program in your classes.

http://www.readingrockets.org/

Funded by a grant from the US Department of Education, and produced by public radio station WETA/Arlington, Va., this website offers much valuable information in all areas of reading to both teachers and parents. One of the sites regular features is The Book Club where a different author is highlighted each month. This month you can listen to clips of an interview with, Patricia MacLachlan, the author of Newbery Award winner, "Sarah, Plain and Tall."

http://www.funderstanding.com/k12/coaster/

"This simulator is designed for kids who want to design their own thrilling coaster and educators who want to use a cool activity to simulate the application of physics by using an exciting interactive tool and access to a wonderful reference source.” Students have tons of fun seeing who can build the fastest and slowest coasters that actually make it safely home.

Music for your Website or PowerPoint

http://www.geocities.com/Broadway/Balcony/7500/midi.html

Although they don't sound as good as real recordings, MIDI music files are very small (less than 1/1,000th of an MP3!), and many are not copyrighted. Here's a good collection sorted along style/ethnic lines

Are your students stealing from the Internet? Here's a good article about students using the Internet for cheating/plagiarism.
http://www.districtadministration.com/Features/story.asp?txtFilename=cheatin.html&txtTitle=Their%20Cheatin%27%20Hearts

Some related resources:

• http://www.plagiarized.com
• http://www.groton.k12.ct.us/mts/egtoc.htm
• http://www.academicintegrity.org
• http://www.fno.org/may98/cov98may.html

http://www.yourchildlearns.com/castle.htm

Free software you can download for educational purposes - your students can use it to build a medieval castle. There is also software to print out shields and elements of heraldry for a coat of arms.