A Gaggle of Gift Guides and Places To Give
Looking for gift ideas for your classroom or home? Here are some of my favorite gift guides:
- Is there such a thing as a desert island gift guide? If so, mine would be the one from The Kid Should See This. Lots of brain-engaging toys, books, and games.
- Terri Eichholz at EngageTheirMinds.com has put out a gift guide called Gifts for the Gifted.
- Geek Dad creates an annual guide featuring books, games, and toys. My pal Jonathan writes the game reviews!
- The site Toys and Tools has an annual gift guide with everything from games, to cooking tools, to tech toys (that Lego New York print looks amazing!).
- Lisa Van Gemert has a gifted gift guide as well.
Giving
If you’d like to do some giving to groups or people, I like the following:
The Internet Archive – This non-profit crawls and archives past versions of websites. For example, here’s Apple.com back when the iPod was brand new. It’s an incredible service that you don’t appreciate until you need it! When a site goes down, it’s gone forever, unless Archive.org has grabbed it. I’ve found several resources that disappeared using this service. Naturally, they have incredible server and storage costs.
Wikipedia – Maybe you’ve heard of this website? Such a world-changing free resource with no ads or creepy tracking. If kids want to give back, this might be a worthwhile cause. I do a monthly $5 donation – which, frankly, seems pretty miserly given how much I use Wikipedia.
Lisa Van Gemert speaks frequently of Kiva, a micro-lending tool to loan small amounts of money to people around the world.
Child’s Play is a charity that provides video games for children who spend their holidays in a hospital. Since 2003 they’ve raised tens of millions of dollars. Best of all, you can find a local hospital, search their Amazon wishlist, and give something specific that the kids there really want.
Happy Holidays, ya’ll!
Ian
PS: Byrdseed.TV makes a nice gift for teachers, too :)