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"Editor's Note: Matt Weyers and co-author Jen Dole, teachers at Byron Middle School in Byron, Minnesota, present the seventh installment in a year-long series documenting their experience of launching a PBL pilot program. Project-based learning is a complex teaching method that, in our experience, requires a clear and established workflow to seamlessly accommodate the needs of teachers, parents, and students. Throughout this school year, we have found several apps, add-ons, and programs that have helped us best manage our workflow. Before we provide brief descriptions and links to each of them, it is important to state the current situation in our classroom: Students in our classes have individual iPads to use during the school day (they stay at school). Every student has a school-generated Gmail account. The majority of students have access to the internet outside of the school setting."

"In the fall of 2006, Clarence R. Edwards Middle School ("the Edwards" as it is known locally within Boston Public Schools) became one of the first schools in the state of Massachusetts to implement the Expanded Learning Time (ELT) Initiative. The reasons why were simple: we were not making Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) and we wanted to make significant academic gains with our students. As it turned out, making our school day longer was one of the best things we could have done to help reform our school model and improve student outcomes. Our statewide exam scores, student enrollment, daily student attendance rate, community and family engagement, and time for team teaching/collaboration all improved as a result of ELT. "

"The U.S. Department of Education released a free, web-based survey Thursday that schools can use to track the effectiveness of school climate efforts and resources on how to best improve learning environments for students. The surveys, developed with input from researchers and the department's office of safe and healthy students, can be administered to middle and high school students, staff, parents, and guardians, providing real-time data about their perceptions of the school environment."

"'We must reimagine middle school science and math not as a way to prepare students for high school, but as a place where students are inventors, scientists, and mathematicians today.' So say Sylvia Martinez and Gary Stager in this exciting guest article about the Maker Movement and its implications for kids, schools and STEM studies. Martinez and Stager are the authors of a must-read book, Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom. In this informative post, they encourage STEM educators, school leaders and teachers across the curriculum to transform our classrooms into centers of innovative thinking and experimenting. ~ Anne Jolly"

"Principal Kamar Samuels had a problem: how to reach the most disaffected students at Bronx Writing Academy, a middle school serving mostly low-income students. The usual discipline methods weren't working and Samuels knew that if he could figure out how to engage his toughest students, he'd have a playbook to reach them all. So, he decided to make those students his focus group, asking them what they liked about school, and really listened to the answers. That technique is part of a user-centered design approach he's trying out in order to tackle some of the age-old problems in education, like low achievement for Latino and African-American boys, with a new lens."

" Indiana Department of Education is now making NBC LEARN K-12 a part of its digital offerings! Now all middle and high schools will be able to access thousands of high-quality archival, original, and currents events videos from NBC LEARN K-12 for use in classroom instruction, student projects, and homework."

"During last year's edJEWcon conference (a Teaching & Learning Institute for Jewish Educators, which I help organize with Andrea Hernandez and Jon Mitzmacher), we invited our Middle School students to attend our keynote session with Heidi Hayes Jacobs. We all watched magic happen, when students (without being asked) created their own backchannel and added their perspective to the conversation about THEIR learning."

"Regardless of what content area we teach, middle school educators are always on the hunt for free tools that get kids reading and thinking about the world around them".

"This week I'd like you to meet top-notch STEM program developer Dr. Susan Pruet. I was fortunate enough to work with Susan as she developed and directed two remarkably successful NSF-funded school reform efforts involving STEM education: the Maysville/Mobile Math Initiative and, more recently, the middle grades program Engaging Youth through Engineering. Susan - best described as a high-energy dynamo - has a talent and a well-designed process for establishing successful STEM reform initiatives. And she is masterful at joining hands with teachers, administrators, and community & business leaders to make it happen. In this guest blog post, Susan passes along some of her wisdom on how to design and implement a successful, sustainable STEM program. Here are 7 tips Susan thinks you should know up front."

"Even the smallest things, like the living cell, become big enough to grasp in Rob Olazagasti's middle school science class, where he enables students to learn by creating, remember by experiencing, and show what they know by teaching."

"As seventh grade students at Mt. Ararat Middle School finish reading a memoir by a former Afghan refugee, they had an opportunity to delve deeper into the narrative Friday by communicating electronically with one of the key characters via Skype. Using Skype, an online videoconferencing tool, the students conversed with Alyce Litz, who plays a prominent role in the book "The Other Side Of The Sky: A Memoir" by Farah Ahmedi. The book was previously published in 2005 as "The Story Of My Life, An Afghan Girl On The Other Side Of The Sky."

"3. Atop the Mountain, Into the Sea On the board, I draw a picture of a mountain overlooking the sea. A lone figure stands perched atop the mountain's summit and another swims among the waves below."

"Here's a fun thought experiment for teaching current events: With infinite class time and thinking time, how could I reach every single eighth-grade U.S. history student where he or she is most curious and invested? If one student can't get enough of foreign policy accords and another wants to read only feel-good stories about human nature, what could I do for each of them in class? How could this attention play out in their lives, now and in the future?"