Enter Donnie Piercey, a fourth-grade teacher at Ashland Elementary School in Lexington, Ky., with 20 years of experience and the state’s 2021 Teacher of the Year award under his belt, who presented some of his favorites to colleagues Monday at the annual Future of Education Technology Conference.
Leading a session called “Cool Free Stuff I Found Online,” Piercey explained his presentation as a collection of fun ideas for other fellow elementary teachers to try in the classroom.
“Some of these sites, I’ll be honest, are ones that my students have found,” he said. “Sometimes, especially as an elementary school teacher, it’s indoor recess and I need something fun for them to do. Other times, you have websites and links that are just helpful. They just provide very functional things for you to check out.”
Ranging from utilitarian to ridiculous, these were among the websites he demonstrated:
PRACTICAL OR EDUCATIONAL
- If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel: Fairly self-explanatory, a “tediously accurate” scrollable model of the solar system that conveys distances between celestial bodies.
- What Did the Earth Look Like X Million Years Ago?: A 3D rotating visualization of the Earth in space allows users to plug in a time in geological history and see where the continents were. They can also put a pin in a particular city in the present day, then see where that coordinate on the tectonic plates would have been at an earlier time.
- Down for Everyone or Just Me: Check if a website, app or service is experiencing an outage.
- Will Robots Take My Job?: Get a probability rating for the likelihood that a particular job will be automated.
- PDF Mergy: A simple drag-and-drop interface allows users to merge multiple PDFs into a single file.
- Population Bracketology: A trivia game creates a data visualization in the form of a competition bracket, asking users to guess which cities, states or geographic locations have the bigger population.
- Iceberger: Draw an iceberg and the website will animate a simple 2D visualization approximating how it would float in the water, with a waterline indicating how much of it sits above and below the surface.
FUN/STUPID STUFF
- Stranger Things Intro Creator: Users can input text and generate their own custom "Stranger Things" opening title sequence.
- BouncingDVDlogo.com: Everyone has seen the animation of the “DVD video” logo ricocheting off the edges of the screen. Will it hit the corner?
- The Restart Page: An interactive catalogue of IT history allows users to simulate the restart process of various operating systems in their web browser, from Windows 2000 to Apple IIGS.
- Scream Into the Void: Type your feelings and watch them disappear with the sound of a primal scream.
For those interested in more niche websites, visualizations and gags, Piercey said a bigger list is available on his personal website.
