Useful+websites

=Useful Websites=

[|www.tutpup.com]
This is website where students can compete against other people from around the world, mainly in maths competitions but also at spelling. There are numerous levels from the fairly basic to the very complex. The kids at my school love it, and best of all, it's completely free!

Registering your class is easy. First create your own profile. While you are doing this, you need to enter your year of birth - when you do this it will ask if you're a teacher, assuming you're honest :-). When you say yes, you are asked to provide a code for your class (eg. HurupakiRoom9) that your students will need when they create their profiles.

When your students register, they will be asked for their class code. When they create their profile with the code, they are automatically entered into your class. Once in your class, you are able to track their progress, and, if required, can reset their password when they forget their login name or password.

It is really simple, and I recommend that you give it a test-drive as a guest first, just to see how it works.

[[image:wordle.jpg width="239" height="161" align="left" link="http://www.wordle.net"]][|www.wordle.net]
This website allows you to create 'word clouds' using any text that you wish to use - you can enter words on their own or a piece of writing. You more often that a word appears in the writing, the bigger it appears in the word cloud. You can change the layout, design and colours of the cloud to customize it's appearance. Once you are happy with it, you can print your word cloud. You also have the option to publish it to the Wordle gallery. A word of caution - this gallery is not monitored in any way, meaning that their have been some rather unsavoury works published. I have had a look through the gallery to check how bad things might be in the gallery, but I failed to find anything unacceptable in the 20 minutes I spent searching. However, the possiblilty is always there...

I guess my recommendation is, by all menas use it, but stay away from the galley //just in case//. Print the clouds out. Or if you're an Apple user, click on print, and save as a pdf instead of clicking on the print button in the final window.