Puzzlemaker

I love giving my students a chance to be creative while reviewing materials, so I’m always excited when a tool comes along that allows them to partake in a creative process without getting caught up in the some of the difficulties of manipulating pencil and paper to create what’s in their minds’ eye. Not that I encourage my students to be lazy and use technology to make a process easy, but rather encourage them to use tools to make their work quicker and more engaging. That thought in mind, Puzzlemaker.com is a great site, run by the Discovery Channel, that allows users to quickly create crossword puzzles, hidden word searches, math squares, cryptograms, and other puzzles. Each puzzle is fairly straightforward to create, and can encourage the use of word processing skills, cut and paste skills, and basic web navigation. That and the puzzles look highly authentic (think teacher’s black line masters), and let students that might struggle with putting together a crossword puzzle just focus on the clues and let the computer put together the words in the correct order.