Current Freebies
December 13, 2011
Freebies, Do It Yourself, Protect Your Family
Today is Currclick’s Language and Culture Club day. Today he’s doing something different. He’ll be talking about December Holidays around the world. Decemeber 13th, 1PM CST http://currclick.adobeconnect.com/languageandculture
Bethlehem scene – I don’t have this on the site anywhere, but if you are looking for a new craft for Christmas, this is making models out of paper.
Chronicles of Narnia — audio books — download the whole series or listen online
Currclick has a Christmas word search book.
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My new favorite online toy is a puzzle maker, PuzzleFast. You type in the words once and then can print out or (I like even better) do online word searches, unscramble and crossword puzzles. Nice for vocab and spelling.
I’ve also been making online games with this fun site, class tools. You just type in the question and answer. Save. Then you have a webpage with a game on it. It doesn’t save the link for you anywhere. Bookmark the page or save the link to your page somewhere. My kids love playing the games I’ve made. At the top of the list is an arcade creator. That’s the best for games. There are also many online graphic organizers you could use.
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One thing we deal with a lot as people who use free things is ads. I wanted to let you know that sometimes you can do something about the ads. At sheppard software I contacted them about an ad that I thought was inappropriate for a children’s educational site, and they had it down within the hour. I was really impressed with them. You can help all of us by reporting (or trying to report) inappropriate ads. Unfortunately, Google controls the majority of ads. As far as I can tell, they have no way of reporting something as offensive. There is a little triangle at the top right of ads that says “Ad Choices.” You can “manage your preferences.” Now, I changed my preferences to like home and garden and (I hope you won’t think I’m evil, I’m just trying to protect my kids) I put my age as 65+ :) The only problem is that it doesn’t listen to you. It constantly readjusts itself to what websites you go to. I have edited my preferences any time I start seeing things I don’t like. Our biggest problem is my son is learning to program online games. He’s gone to tutorial websites and Google registers his interest in online games. You know how awful those online game ads can be.
Yahoo has a profile where you can change yourself to be a 70-year-old man. That gets rid of all the diet ads with girls in bikinis :) Microsoft has an easy way to report an ad as offensive, but as far as I can tell reporting it does nothing.
