Kerpoof.com

I went to Kerpoof.com to check out some of what is available for educators there and found it to be quite interesting.

Kerpoof provides free multimedia software that can be used directly from any browser, on any computer with Internet access and an up-to-date Flash player. While Kerpoof offers paid, premium services directed to at-home, entertaining use of the site, all basic content directed to in-school use is entirely free.

Kerpoof can be used to create original artwork, animated movies, and stories, among other things. All shared content is carefully reviewed by trained moderators before it appears on the site.
Kerpoof publishes a free monthly electronic newsletter that describes new features on Kerpoof, new lesson plans published on the Kerpoof Teacher's page, and gives ideas for using Kerpoof in the classroom. We want the newsletter to be a great resource for you and welcome feedback for improvements and also encourage you to share idease for using Kerpoof in the classroom. Kerpoof can be used to help as a creativity starter for writing. Or ask them to write a fictional story about a scene. It can help them with reading comprehension, social studies (you can use the Mt. Fuji scene to teach about Japanese culture), or study the life cycle of a caterpillar using the Butterfly Pavilion scene.

Are you teaching about the food chain? Our Northwest Territories scene (sponsored by Northwest Trek in Tacoma, Washington) can be the perfect place to create illustrations of several food chains. We've got plants to be eaten by deer and bears to eat the plants. We've got toads to be eaten by rattlesnakes and bald eagles to eat the snakes. There are insects, small rodents and reptiles, larger rodents, and several types of ruminants. Then we have all kinds of beasties from higher in the food chain, bears, wolves and birds of prey to name a few. And they're all real inhabitants of the Northwest Trek wildlife preserve. Students can even have math experiences. You can use any of our nature scenes to create intricate worlds that will test your students' powers of observation. Can they identify and describe a list of animal types you describe? Can they find fourteen yellow fish swimming in and around the sunken ship? Turn it into a math lesson by asking them to categorize and graph difference groups. Kerpoof even offers you sample lesson plans. It's a great resource.

You can find an archive of all past issues of the Kerpoof Scholastics e-newsletter online: Kerpoof Scholastics News Archives.