Educational Computer Games, web sites & programs?

byhookorbycrook

If the school uses Jolly Phonics, there's a good cd-rom of games to go with it.

phillip33

I use Reader Rabbit Personalized second grade for my kid and found it useful. softwareforkids also provides products for different age groups.

barneysplash

I asked this very question in the Computer & Tech forum last week.

I didn't get much response, but there seems to be a better audience here.

Here are the sites and programs I can recommend :


The American Libraby Association has a list of approved sites for kids:

http://www.ala.org/greatsites


The next 4 things are programs that are downloaded and used without
being connected to the internet. They are all free to own, and totally
legal to use and share.



Type Faster is a good freeware typing program that teaches touch typing.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/typefaster/



Pivot Stickfigure Animation : This is a program that lets you
make simple animations using a point and click vertsion of the
flickbooks we used to have years ago.

http://www.snapfiles.com/get/stickfigure.html



Tux Paint is a drawing and painting program.

http://www.tuxpaint.org/download/windows/

The link to download the program is in the bottom right of this page.



Wikipedia for Schools

My friend has asked me not to allow internet access on the laptop.

So I thought I'd use an encyclopedia so that her child can learn how
to use internet-surfing skills i.e. using hypertext, navigating between
articles etc.

I found that the online Encyclopedia, Wikipedia has a version that can be
downloaded for use offline. This was developed for use in schools that
have computers but do not have access to the internet, especially in
poorer countries. It is also used in schools in the UK, and is based on the UK
school's curriculum for pupils aged 8 - 17 years.

I've written a quick guide below, and there are instructions on the Wikipedia page
also.

To download the encyclopedia you have to use a program called Bit Torrent.
This is a program that lets people share large files over the internet.
It is a bit technical to do the download, so ask any computer nerds you know
for help

What you have to do is to download a small file called a torrent.
This is like table of contents for the main file.
This main file is a single file containing all the pages and
pictures that are in the encyclopedia.
This is called an archive or zip file. It is called a zip file because all
the files are squeezed down and "zipped" into a single container.

To download the main file, you have to load the torrent file into a program
called a client. This program then uses your internet connection to find and
download all the parts of the archive.

The most popular torrent client is called μtorrent, pronounced micro-torrent
as the μ is the Greek letter for micro.

You can download the torrent file and the utorrent program on the below page.

http://www.soschildrensvillages.org....ia-for-schools

Here is the Wikipedia page giving an overview of the encyclopedia for offline use:

http://schools-wikipedia.org/

Once you have downloaded the file you can unzip it using a program called an
archive manager. WinZip is a popular archive manager. I use a manager called 7-zip.

Using bit torrent and working with archives are great skills to have in this day and age.