4 Websites that spread charity and kindness

The 1 year anniversary of the tragedy at Sandy Hook renewed people's focus on kindness and acts of charity. The four websites listed are also trying to make the world a better place for all.

Free Rice
First is Free Rice, which an education game site that gives 10 grains of rice for every correct answer you give. The player sees the rice they are earning grow as they play. The player can choose games that focus on vocabulary, math, science, famous quotes and more. It's educational and you can help feed hungry people around the world.

________________________________________________

Give Back Mail
The second site is Give Back Mail which is an email service that gives 25% of it's advertising income to charity. The more people who use their service, the more they donate to various charities. You may not need to change your email service. It works with G mail, Yahoo mail, AOL Mail, and Hotmail. Go to their site to learn more.

______________________________________________

Care2
Third is Care2.com, which is a website that promotes a healthy, greener lifestyle. One of the cool things available on their is an E-Card service that rewards its users with "butterfly points." These points can be put toward donations for various charitable organizations. So you send E-cards and help charities at the same time. Sounds like a win/win situation.

___________________________________________

Kindspring
Last but certainly not least is Kindspring. Spreading kindness is something we all should do and it is the mission of kindspring.org. There you can share your story, print kindness cards or read inspirational stories from others.We have all had moments where we feel down on humanity or even worse, down on ourselves. Reading the stories at will help restore your faith in humanity and perhaps inspire you to "pay it forward."

Two user created history sites

History Pin is an online collection of photographs, videos, audio files, and text that have been shared by people from around the world. Their tag line is "a global community collaborating around history." Users can post their documents or search a map to find things in their area or search by collection, channel, and project. One of my favorite features is their tours and collections section which contains documents all centered around specific topics or events.History Pin is a great resource for educators as well as anyone who loves history.

Timelines is a site where history meets social media. The website itself is very useful by categorizing key historical events in several ways. You can browse the site by era, type of event (ie; war), or by date. They have a neat page where you simply select a date and the events that occurred on that date appear. Almost everything you find on Timelines is created by their community and registered users can record events and contribute descriptions, photos, videos and links related to events. Unlike a wiki, the site is built to display various (and potentially conflicting) descriptions of the same event from many different contributors which is always important when trying to understand historical events. Timelines is a great site because it allows you to report and discover history with your friends, colleagues, and students.

Picfull - Fast and easy photo editing

Picfull is an easy to use photo editor that requires no sign up and is free. The site offers a wide range of standard photo editing tools which even a novice can manage. Once you are satisfied with your work you simply save your picture and you can share your picture on your favorite social media site. If you want a quick and simple way to edit and share photos, you can't go wrong with Picfull.

Curate.us - Clip and share anything from the web

Curate.us is a new online tool that allows you to share your favorite web content. When you find something you want to share you can paste the URL into their website or you can add their clipping tool onto your tool bar and clip whenever you'd like. When you first clip, an image of a large dog will appear (called the Big Shmoo) for about 20 seconds, which means the clip is being processed. When your webpage image appears you can add your own note and then share it via Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, email. or embed it into a blog or webpage. The image includes a link to the original web page so anyone who has an interest can go to the original source for more information. Curate.us is a much more useful way of sharing websites because it allows you to share more than just a link. Thanks to Make Use Of for the information regarding this site.

PicMark - Brand your pictures before sharing them

PicMark is a simple tool that allows you to brand your pictures with a custom frame before you post them online. Adding a mark is as simple as uploading your picture to their site, choosing a frame, and sharing it to Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest. The site allows you to further enhance your frames by choosing colors, styles, and typing messages on the frame. If you'd like, you can even design your own custom frame to use anytime. PicMark is great for teachers to share class pictures on their class web page or with students in projects. PicMark is free to join and it makes sharing pictures just a little bit more fun.

10 great tools for education: Day 1

This week I will be sharing 10 websites themed exclusively around cloud based education tools. While there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of excellent web based sites available, it would be impossible to share them all. I will be sharing two per day for 5 days with the hope that less is more. Exploring two websites is much easier than the 5 to 8 that I have normally been sharing. With that said lets get rolling with the first two sites.

Three Ring is a website that allows you to take a picture of student work with your smart phone or tablet and upload and store it to your Three Ring account. Three Ring has an app for iPhone and iPad as well as the Android market and the website is free for teachers. You can go here to find out more or sign up if you are so inclined.

The second site I'd like to share is the Teaching Channel. This site is comprised of high quality videos produced by educators from all over the country. The website is easy to navigate and the videos are sorted by grade level, content specialty, or topic. This site is a must see and best of all, it is free!

Please stop back each day this week, as I will be sharing two new sites every day.