If you look forward to doing the crossword, cryptogram, or sudoku puzzle in the daily newspaper, you’re going to like this site.

Word Games is a free online game website where games are organized into channels like word searches, typing, crosswords, sudoku, Mahjong, and puzzles. There is even one called ‘wordoku’ that uses letters for an extra challenge to traditional sudoku. New games are added every Thursday from popular developers including Crazy Monkey Games and Armor Games.

According to its developers, Word Games uses a custom Google search engine to quickly find your favorite games. You can also rate games and send them to friends.

With ESL students, demo an ‘Easy’ category word search and go from there. You might even add a Word Games block to your class blog or wiki to track the best scores per game, and even award extra-credit achievement points.

If you’re like me, you tote a laptop when you hit the road. Most hotels and motels in the U.S. now offer some form of Internet connectivity, making it easy to check your email, browse the Web, or update your blog or website.

Many such establishments (and this extends to airports and coffee shops) have chosen a Wi-Fi scheme. Unfortunately, most of  these hot spots are unsecured, meaning that any information you send or receive can be intercepted and read by others logged in to the same network. What to do?

Protect your privacy by installing a virtual private network (VPN) application on your laptop. A VPN is an impenetrable tunnel that prevents others from viewing your web browsing activities, instant messages, downloads, credit card information or anything else you send over the network.

Although there are several VPN clients to choose from, I can recommend two that I have used successfully. The first is a free program called Hotspot Shield. According to its developers, Hotspot Shield allows you to:

• Secure your web session, data, online shopping, and personal information online with HTTPS encryption
• Protect yourself from identity theft online
• Hide your IP address for your privacy online
• Access all content privately without censorship; bypass firewalls
• Protect yourself from snoopers at Wi-Fi hotspots, hotels, airports, corporate offices

This video shows how easy it is to download and set up Hotspot Shield on your computer.

The other VPN is a paid offering from Comodo called TrustConnect. Its features, according to the company:

• Securely encrypts all data transmitted over both wired and wireless Internet connections
• Creates a Virtual Private Network to hide all personal web-surfing information
• Utilizes industry-standard 128-bit encryption
• Lightweight—protects without interfering with normal computer operation

Which to choose? If you’re on a budget, go with Hotspot Shield. You’ll be served some ads, but that’s how they keep their service free. If you are experiencing lengthy delays connecting with one of their servers, you might want to consider TrustConnect. For a few dollars a month, you get a faster connection and no noticeable delay in surfing speed.

Can websites contain viruses? Unfortunately, yes, and they can spread to your computer if you’re not careful.

Depending on the strength of your antivirus software, you may be alerted and your access blocked when visiting an infected site. But sometimes the software delivers a false positive. So, is the site I want to visit safe or not?

You can get a qualified second opinion using a free tool called URLVoid. From  their homepage, enter the address of the site you want to check, then click the Scan Now button. URLVoid will check the suspicious website with 19 web scanner services, including McAfee SiteAdvisor, Norton SafeWeb, and Web Security Guard. It will then present you with the compiled results. Impressive!

If you are teaching online or otherwise assigning online content as part of your course, URLVoid seems like a good bet for checking sites in advance. You might also consider setting up a wiki or similar resource where you and fellow teachers can pool respective lists of suspicious sites revealed by this scanning tool.