Recommended Educational Software

eBook Builders: ebooks are a great way to publish and distribute a collection of student stories or web pages.

Crossword Construction Kit by Insight Software: This is one of my favorite software programs. I use it to create review puzzles for social studies and science tests. It has a great deal of flexibility. Insight Software also has a companion Word Search Construction Kit.

Hot Potatoes: The free Hot Potatoes suite includes six applications, enabling you to create interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises for the World Wide Web.

Mathematics Worksheet Factory Easily create instant, customized, and unlimited worksheets for the practice of arithmetic facts in addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Features horizontal or vertical question layout, WYSIWYG interface, customization of title, comments, date, picture, and font, riddle generator, easy selection of number of questions from 1 to 100, progress chart, multiplication tables, automatic answer key, and more. 

Report Maker allows pupil reports to be generated very quickly. Report Maker allows teachers to create pupil reports and Record of Achievements (ROA).

Chess Mates: A delightful, fun program that teachers students chess. This program provides step by step instructions and over 100 puzzles to teach basic moves and advanced strategies in addition to having various playing levels. I use this program with all of my 4th grade students. This program can be used by younger students as well as high school students who want to learn how to play chess.

Note: ChessMates was discontinued. I have had several teachers strongly recommend the Learn to Play Chess with Fritz and Chesster series.

Where in the USA/World is Carmen SanDiego?:: A classic game and still one of the best at teaching children about the geography of the USA/World.

Amazing Writing Machine: This program provides reluctant writers with motivation to write a little more willingly. It provides help with brainstorming ideas, story starters, and writing poems. It includes Kid Pix painting and graphics they can add to their stories.

Storybook Weaver Deluxe: This program is very similar to the Amazing Writing Machine. By providing story starters, pictures, backgrounds, sounds, etc. it gives many students the motivation to do a little more writing. This program was used by the 1st grade teacher at my school and she loved it. It does take a little more time to learn how to use in the beginning than many programs but overall she was very pleased with it.

Note: Amazing Writing Machine and Storybook Weaver Deluxe were Windows 95/98 products. I have received a number of recommendations from teachers for the two programs below.

Schoolhouse Rock: Grammar Rock! A wide variety of cute, simple games. Nothing fancy, but helped my struggling fourth graders learn the grammar concepts they needed to learn.

Grammar for All: I have not used this product but it comes highly recommended.

Mathematics Worksheet Factory Easily create instant, customized, and unlimited worksheets for the practice of arithmetic facts in addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Features horizontal or vertical question layout, WYSIWYG interface, customization of title, comments, date, picture, and font, riddle generator, easy selection of number of questions from 1 to 100, progress chart, multiplication tables, automatic answer key, and more.

Report Designer: The Report Designer is a narrative report card writing system with thousands of comments to choose from.