Pen Pal News gives students from different parts of the country a chance to be election pen pals.

If you’re like us, you see the election everywhere on the Web. But finding useful Web sites for teaching the election? That’s a different story.

Below, we’ve gathered a list of what we think are the best election-related Web sites for teachers we’ve seen, and organized them by category.

And if you haven’t looked already, visit our own Election 2012 resource page.There you’ll find links to lesson plans (including our special curriculum unit), student crosswords, a special Election 2012 student contest, and links to a huge variety of Times articles, Opinion pieces and multimedia.

Great Free Web Sites for Teaching Election 2012

1. Election Pen Pals: At PenPal News Red Blue you can sign up your classroom to be pen pals with students from a different geographic region in the U.S. Over a six week period, your class will learn about five important election issues that they can write about during their pen-pal partnership.

2. Political Matchmaking: Sometimes the incessant mudslinging and obsessive poll watching hide the fact that the election should really be about the issues that affect our lives and the world we live in. iSideWith.com lets students take a short quiz to find out which candidate is their best match based on their own political opinions.

USA Today’s Candidate Match Game II lets students answer questions and watch as the face of President Obama or Mitt Romney shift across the screen depending on the answers they choose.

Or, students can take this Political Party Quiz to be part of a national survey conducted by the Pew Research Center. ElectNext is another matchmaking tool, though it requires participants to sign in with an e-mail address or social media connection.

3. Election Lessons: We’ve created our own flexible, four-part Election Unit that includes lesson ideas and projects and culminates in a mock election.

The Choices Program provides a nice companion: a free “Following the U.S. Presidential Election“ lesson that builds students’ media literacy skills by having them compare sources as they analyze the news. The Youth Leadership Initiative also provides general election lesson plans and runs its own mock election (see below) and e-Congress.

Edutopia has additional ideas and resources for how to use project-based learning to engage students in the election.

4. Issue Research: The most comprehensive tool for researching the candidate’s stance on issues is the nonpartisan nonprofit ProCon.org. The site provides quotations from Mr. Obama, Mr. Romney and the major third party candidates on more than 60 issues.

5. Mock Election: Our own Election Unit provides a curriculum road map for how to organize a mock election in your classroom or school.

National mock elections are also taking place this year online, and you can sign your students up to participate in The My Voice National Student Mock Election or the Youth Leadership Initiative mock election. In addition, we like the detailed mock election curriculum guide (PDF) produced by Michigan Government Television.

6. Election Game: We’ve seen plenty of buzz about MTV’s Fantasy Election, an online game styled after the ultra-popular fantasy football leagues. Participants draft a team of presidential and Congressional candidates and rack up points based on how well the candidates perform in various categories such as transparency and honesty. We signed up ourselves, but it’s still too early to tell if the game will appeal to students the same way fantasy sports teams do.

7. Youth Reporting: Are you looking for a way to give your students a voice in this election (besides, of course, through our contest)?

You can get inspired to have your students create their own election videos by watching Youth Communication’s Teen Guide to the 2012 Election or New Tech Network’s #Myparty12, where students create a party platform and a thirty-second video commercial.

Students are also reporting on the election at What Kids Can Do and Y-Press,Youth Radio and Scholastic.

8. Candidate Commercials: Having students analyze television commercials can help hone their media literacy skills. Watch the candidates’ commercials on their respective YouTube channels, or watch historic commercials from past presidential elections on The Living Room Candidate. You can use our Television Commercial Analysis Chart to help guide student analysis.

Students will love FlackCheck.org’s exploration of the power of negative advertising through its creative “Could Lincoln Be Elected Today?” series. It also challenges the most egregious inaccuracies in current campaign commercials on its “Taking Down the Worst” page.

9. Debate Watch: NBC Learn, in collaboration with Lynn University, provides a series of K-12 activities to help students prepare for and analyze the presidential debates. The activities use video clips from past debates, news reports and commercials.

10. Candidate Web Sites: The official Web sites for the presidential candidates – Barack Obama, Mitt Romney (and third party candidates likeGary Johnson and Jill Stein) — are worthwhile places to see how the candidates present themselves and their positions on the important issues in this election.

11. Tracking the Election: You can turn your class into election fanatics and have them keep score on how the candidates are doing, in the same way they might pore over sports team stats or Billboard rankings.

The New York Times Electoral Map or Huffington Post Election Dashboardprovide colorful visuals for students to follow the electoral scoreboard as we head toward Election Day.

For poll watching, The Times and Politico both offer clear up-to-date swing state results. Or, track a different kind of index with your students, the “Twindex” – a tracking tool that compares Twitter posts about the presidential candidates.

12. Election Math: Carnegie Learning has partnered with NBC Learn to create math problems tied to voter statistics, campaign polling and other election-related topics. For ten more ideas on how to explore mathematics using the election, read our lesson plan “The United States of Numeracy: The Math of a Presidential Campaign.”

13. Election Opinion Questions: Every day during the school year we post a new student opinion question, and some of our questions this fall will be election-related, such as our current contest question: “How Would the Presidential Campaigns Change if the Voting Age Were... During this election season NBC Learn will also offer “Weekly Thought Starters”.