Despite the nation’s commitment to the ideal of universal access to education, our public schools frequently fall short of meeting the changing needs of students across the spectrum. The “no child left behind” mandate has still let some students slip through the cracks, revealing the structural deficiencies in our public school system. Schools struggle under budget constraints, and even the most dedicated teachers are only human. As it turns out, the one-size-fits-all approach is not the best fit when it comes to instruction since there isn’t just a single learning style that suits every student.

New entrepreneurial efforts are answering this need and seizing an opportunity to fill this educational gap with the latest in technology. They aim to provide educational solutions via technological avenues, offering software to supplement brick and mortar school instruction and even operating schools online. Technology offers the hope of bridging skill gaps by customizing instruction to target specific academic needs. And it helps fill the gap in science and math at the teaching level since instructors often lack experiential background in these subjects.

A major force in this new wave of online instruction is Ron Packard, CEO of K12. Inspired by his own futile search for a complete online course to help a daughter struggling with math, Packard devised a business model for a full-fledged web-based school. K12 now provides over 20,000 hours of instructional content covering the full K-12 progression (see story in Forbes). Operating its own web-based school as well as furnishing support to other online schools, K12 serves 70,000 pupils and generates $400 million in revenue.

While K12’s students aren’t a representative sample of the public school population, they all have needs which public schools failed to satisfy. They are students with exceptional talents as well as exceptional needs. Online schools cater to scholar athletes and others who find conventional school schedules conflict with extracurricular passions. In some cases, parents turn to online instruction because they see their own values in conflict with those represented by public school instruction.

Apex Learning is another entrant in this growing field. In operation since 1997, Apex Learning targets poor academic performers who are at risk of becoming part of a growing statistic, the million annual high school drop-outs. In addition to distance instruction courses, Apex Learning markets its programs to public schools, enabling more individualized, computer-focused learning in a regular classroom setting.

Making inroads into the achievement gap, Revolution Prep offers software that helps pinpoint and address concept/skill deficiencies. Its program has been adopted by Los Angeles schools to help struggling high school students pass mandated exit tests.

Confronting the challenges and limitations in our present public school system, technology is helping transform the role of teacher from lecturer to facilitator, and easing the workload on instructors at the same time. Technology provides a workable means of identifying and serving the unique academic needs of diverse students, while freeing teachers from some of the burden of devising and implementing lesson plans, and even filling the gap in subject expertise.

The idea of standardized online curriculum in public schools may strike some as revolutionary. But as weaknesses in the well-intentioned educational policies of the past grow more apparent, the concept seems tailor-made for the future of digital technologies in schools.

The following websites are both free and educational, spanning the academic spectrum across multiple disciplines and age groups. With a little guidance these sites should help students have a great time while exploring the wealth of knowledge around them.

1. Howstuffworks

Howstuffworks is a site is geared toward older kids or teens (or just curious adults), although it is also a great site to use as a resource. Great for those kids who have science based questions about consumer products, current events or just topics adults rarely stop to explain.

2. Factmonster

Factmonster is essentially a searchable encyclopedia for kids. Information can either be found by typing in the search bar or by following the link to various topics, like ‘money’, ‘people’ or ‘sports’.

3. Professor Garfield

At Professor Garfield students will learn about various academic topics with a focus on art and creativity. Students can make their own cartoons and watch videos of artists at work in a number of genres.

4. Funbrain

Funbrain has tutorials and games for such subjects as grammar, math and reading for all grade levels, including more advanced subjects like physics and chemistry. You can search games by grade level or age.

5. BBC Schools Typing

Typing is not a skill that we generally think to teach young children, but it certainly makes sense to start this indispensable skill early. At BBC Schools Typing, kids of all ages can learn to type with the fun tutorials.

6. Try Science

Try Science is an engaging website where kids can do virtual experiments or take virtual field trips related to science. Through the virtual adventures kids get to go through the stars or race across various terrain.

7. Internet4Classrooms

Internet4Classrooms is a comprehensive resource for all academic subjects and is easily navigated according to grade level and subject. Resources and links include both games and supplemental materials.

8. Kidsknowit

Kidsknowit is a network of free sites, each focused on a different academic area. Kidsgeo.com focuses on geology and geography, while Kidsbiology.com explores the human body and at Kidspast.com you can find games that help make history fun and memorable.

9) Kids National Geographic

Kids National Geographic is all the scope and depth of National Geographic brought down to kids size. The kid-friendly site includes dozens of games and activities based on geography, culture, science, adventure, nature and animals.

10. CoolMath4Kids and Cool Math

Coolmath4kids is full of fun puzzles and games designed to help elementary aged kids have fun with math. Coolmath focuses on pre-algebra and beyond and aims to get kids to have fun with math and overcome and negative feelings about difficult math topics.

This post was inspired by Mashable’s 10 Sites to Learn Something New in 10 Minutes a Day.

Quibblo is a user-driven survey, poll and quiz site where any registered user can participate in, create or modify quizzes, polls and surveys. After a user has created a quiz, poll or survey, they submit it to the world where other users can participate, rate, and comment. All of the quizzes and surveys on Quibblo are user-generated and can be embedded into any other site for external use. Quibblo’s format presents useful applications for students, teachers and administrators.

Students can also use a Quibblo poll limited to their class population to vote on senior class gifts. Student council representatives can use a Quibblo poll to uncover the most pressing issues for their constituents. Teachers can create quizzes for students to take in wired classrooms or at home; for credit, or to collect information about present levels of knowledge before beginning a class unit. Teachers can also use a Quibblo poll or survey to receive feedback on classes or teaching techniques from students, to hold a vote on an upcoming class trip or theater production. A survey or poll conducted at home or in a wired library encourages students’ sense of having a stake in their own education while improving the chances of candid responses by offering more anonymity than a “show of hands” approach.

School administrators may find Quibblo to be useful beyond teachers and students. A Quibble can be embedded in any website, so a survey or poll could be set up on the school site to receive feedback from parents and guardians on school activities, extracurricular functions, school lunches, graduation ceremony dates, or any other school program. A survey or poll not only allows administrators to quickly get access to the opinions of parents and guardians, it also helps to foster parental participation and an open discussion. As it is, a large number of the quizzes, polls and surveys on Quibble are posted by students and revolve around non-germane issues like celebrity and music, but this does not undercut the opportunities that Quibblo provides to democratize decision-making and bring new technology into the classroom.

Note: It can be difficult to copy the embed code for a poll or quiz. I had to click several times before the site finally copied the code.

New internet tools can be a very useful in achieving educational objectives by facilitating learning through technology. The following article from the blog Moving at The Speed of Creativity describes some great online tools that can be utilized in school projects that incorporate video.

My name is Richard Byrne. I write Free Technology for Teachers. When Wes asked me last week if I would guest blog during his vacation, I was flattered and immediately agreed. This post is based on a workshop that I will be leading in a couple of weeks at MLTI’s Summer Institute.

During the past school the projects that my high school US History students enjoyed most was creating video mash-ups to demonstrate their content knowledge. My students used Animoto and Remix America to complete these assignments. There are other web-based video mash-up tools available on the Internet, but these were the two that suited our needs the best. So that you can choose the tools that best suit your needs, I’ve included short summaries of Animoto, Remix America, Stupeflix, and Photo Peach in this post. In the projects that are described below, students had to find public domain and Creative Commons licensed images. For US History projects there are some excellent image sources including Flickr’s The Commons, the National Archives, and the Library of  Congress. To conduct a more broad search for Creative Commons licensed images you should also use Compfight, Yahoo’s Creative Commons filter, and Google’s new Creative Commons filter.

To give you a little background on my work, I teach a class of special education students as well as college prep courses. In both settings my students have enjoyed creating video mash-ups to the point where they were suggesting video projects to their other teachers.

Project 1: “Using Animoto to Celebrate the Presidents.”

This is a project that my special education students did during the last month of school as a way to review the year.  Each student (there were 13) was randomly assigned a president to research. The students had to gather some basic biographical information. The students also had to gather information about significant events and or acts from their assigned president’s time in office. The information the students gathered would be used for captioning images in their videos. After gathering the information students had to find, using the sources mentioned above,  images for their videos. When all information and images were gathered, students then created their videos. Each image had to be accompanied by a short (one sentence) explanation.

The culminating experience for this project was an “Video Release Party.” During the “Video Release Party” students introduced their video to the class, showed the video through the LCD projector, and answered questions after the showing the video.

If you decide to try a project like this you should apply for an Animoto for Education account. It’s free and it gives you and your students access to editing features for which you would otherwise have to pay a fee.

Project 2: “Art as US History”

In this project students studied how artists created records of US History. Students again used Animoto for this assignment. Since my own knowledge of American artists was fairly limited and I needed a list long enough for a class of twenty-two, I worked with an art teacher to generate a list of notable artists. Students then selected from an artist from the list to research. Using the same procedure as outlined in project 1 above, students created Animoto videos about their artists’ work. An integral part of the assignment was for students to note what was happening in the US at the time their selected artist was working.

Project 3: “Make Your Own Civil War Documentary”

Remix America, launched last fall, makes it fairly easy for students to create their own US History documentary videos. Remix America provides video clips, audio clips, and images that students can arrange to create a Ken Burns-style documentary. If the stock media doesn’t contain what your students desire for their videos, they can upload their own media. My students used Remix America to create mini-documentaries about the US Civil War, but you could use Remix America to create mini-documentaries about any period in US History.

Other free video mash-up tools to consider.

Stupeflix allows users to drag and drop their images into the sequence that they would like the images to appear. Adding text to the images is easier in Stupeflix than it is on Animoto. Stupeflix offers only one default soundtrack so you have to upload your own audio clips.

Photo Peach is similar to Animoto although there is one difference worth noting. Adding captions to each image is a little more intuitive on Photo Peach than it is on Animoto. To add captions to your Photo Peach slideshow simply type your desired text into the caption box that appears as each image is automatically displayed by Photo Peach.

This article has been republished from Moving at the Speed of Creativity and is licensed under the Creative Commons 3.0 License.