Find Sounds is a search engine for….sounds. It lets you search for hundreds of thousands of different sounds on the Internet, which you can then easily play or download. For example, type in “lion” and you’ll find several short snippets of a lion roaring.

I use CD’s of sound effects in my classroom as a vocabulary-building game by dividing students into teams and having them compete to see who can name different sounds correctly (after, of course, we’ve reviewed the words).

I could see using Find Sounds for a somewhat similar exercise, though this time students can easily create their own sound “quizzes” using the urls of the sound effects they find on the Web. You could have them download the sounds and use them in a much more sophisticated way, but I plan on just having them use a Jottit page to paste the urls of different sound effects and have them list a series of multiple choice answers. They can then have a partner in the next computer try to figure it out.

If you wanted to get even more ambitious, students could use the urls to create a slightly more sophisticated quiz using one of the easy online quiz-makers you can find on my website, particularly SMILE and CLEAR. You can find a bunch more online test-creation tools on my website under Student Tests and Create Tests and Exercises on my Teacher’s Page.

I’ve placed the link to Find Sounds on my website under Audio.