Pearl Trees

I have come across a fabulous little tool - especially if your school has access to a student set of computers or a computer lab. Have you ever had an amazing lesson planned, integrating technology with a super website....only to spend half of your class helping the kids type in the URLs and micromanaging what websites they are really visiting?

Check out Pearl Trees.

Once you sign up (for free), you can organize and save selected websites for your students to easily access. You get your own URL, and once you have saved this to favourites for your kids, they can easily access any sites you have saved with just one click. Or perhaps you want to use it just for your own organizational purposes?

Here is my Pearl Trees site, if you want to check it out and see some of the great educational sites I have saved. http://pearltrees.com/karlen My school is lucky enough to have class sets of lap-top computers for the kids, so once in a while I give the kids Pearl Tree free time - this way I know what sites they are visiting, and can be assured that they are educational games.

The best part is that this handy little toolbar is installed to your browser:

So if you find a neat website to add to your Pearl Tree, all you do is click PEARL while you are on that site, and it is added. Easy as pie.

I find that this is especially helpful for those little ones who can't quite type yet. 

Do you think that you would use this in your classroom??