Do you know somebody you care for so much you’d like to give them the sun, moon, and stars? Now you can! Just give them the URL to download Stellarium! It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope. It is being used in planetarium projectors, but it’s totally awesome on your computer screen. There are versions for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux (the source code).

There’s a lot of talk recently about all the electronic and digital versions of books that you can find on the web. I decided to create a resource list of these electronic books to share with the parents. Some of the books have pictures and some do not. There are some that are appropriate for preschool, elementary, middle and high school as well as college age students. The list was created to give any child that can’t read in a traditional way, access to more literacy.

Just in time for Halloween, this fun activity lets students create digital jack-o’-lanterns. In all, nine different faces are possible. The artwork is very three dimensional and realistic. Once a jack-o’-lantern is finished, students add a lighted candle, and finally gets to see what their creation will look like on Halloween night. Bonuses: Zip files of both the art and creepy sounds!

In The Animals Game, a fun science activity, students pick an animal and make the computer guess its name. It’s really a test of the student’s grasp of animal characteristics, but with a twist so that the student runs the show. Students answer questions yes or no, and the computer quickly closes in on the answer. Bonus: Clip art collection and flow chart.

This Classroom Suite activity has a new frame animation, a blue butterfly, to use in creating IntelliMation in your activities. The animation is contained in a toolbar button. Instructions on the page explain how to reach into this resource holder document from an activity you’re building, and bring in the blue butterfly to use in animation.

Mountain Bike Race takes the reader to the top of a mountain and down the trails to the bottom on a mountain bike. The reading level is 3rd to 4th grade, but the story would interest older students as well. The reader sees the scenery from a bike rider’s viewpoint, and movies of the bike coming up the lift, the racers starting down, and the end of the race make this a vivid and real experience. Bonus: Collection of photos from the story, plus extra mountain scenes!

Feathers is a science activity explaining how birds and people use feathers. Movies let students see close-up views of birds in flight, a diving bird, and penguins walking about on the ice. Then photos of many different feathers challenge students to guess which bird they belong to. Each feather photo leads to a page with a photo and movie of the bird. Bonus: Collection of the bird and feather photos used and a set of off-computer match cards!

The interactive book Showertime! challenges the reader to find and place all the items needed to get ready to take a shower. To make the experience more interesting, the student reading and controlling the story actually goes into the shower, turns on the water, and sees and hears the water flowing, via animated movies. Bonus: Clip art collection from story!

The freeware sound editor Audacity (Mac/Win) is powerful and easy to use. After a short time with it, I could record, change the pitch so that my voice sounded like a baritone or a child’s voice, convert a sound effect to match the format of my recording, and paste in my sound effect after the recording to create one long track. Get Audacity, a tutorial, and a link to 5,000 free sounds!