8th grade science

The Great Energy Challenge is a National Geographic feature that offers some nice interactive posters for evaluating personal and global energy consumption. Global Electricity Outlook is an interactive display of electricity consumption across the globe. You can view the global picture or click on the map to view regional consumption. The display shows the means of electricity production globally and regionally. To see how shifting production sources would impact the world or a region use the sliders below the map. Read more about the Great Energy Challenge posters here.

8th grade science

The Blobz Guide to Electric Circuits is a neat series of interactive animations designed to help students of elementary and middle school age learn how electric circuits work. There are five sections to the series. Each sections builds upon the lessons of the previous section. The series starts with the basics of what makes a circuit complete and concludes with diagramming and building circuits. Each section in the series has a few short lessons and is followed by an animated interactive activity to which students can apply what they have just learned.

8th grade science

Squishy Circuits is a project developed at the University of St. Thomas for the purpose of creating tools that students can use to create circuits and explore electronics. Squishy Circuits uses Playdough-like to enable hands-on learning about conducting and insulating currents as well as creating circuits. The Squishy Circuits website provides directions for creating the dough and offers ideas for lessons using the dough. Watch this TED Talk for an explanation and demonstration of Squishy Circuits.

8th grade science

Circuits.io is a free website on which you can design and test electrical circuits. You can design your circuits using the virtual version of components that you could purchase and place on a circuit board. As you design your circuits, Circuits.io will tell you if your circuits will work or not.

8th grade science

Kids these days don't read email. So how do you get them to remember important assignments, tests or messages for their parents? You send them a text. SendHub is a fast and simple communications tool designed to help educators communicate more effectively with their students after the school day ends. Their simple user interface enables teachers and administrators to make calls, send messages to individual students or entire classes, and also stay in touch with parents. Here are a few reasons why SendHub might be right for your class: * Easily build your class database with text to join, or simply import existing contact lists. * Send messages from your phone or the Web-- communicate the way you want to. * Schedule assignment or test reminders to be sent to students for any time in the future. * Share groups with other teachers or administrators without hassle-- then everyone with your group will get changes you make immediately. Signup for free at www.sendhub.com

This is a listing of 614 sites that legally offer free books (eBooks) for download or for online viewing.

"Meograph helps easily create, watch, and share interactive stories. Our first product combines maps, timeline, links, and multimedia to tell stories in context of where and when. Authoring is structured into a few simple prompts on an intuitive interface. Viewers get a new form of media that they can watch in two minutes or explore for an hour. Sharing is easy: the two most viral types of media are videos and infographics ... Meograph is both."

Thanks, Kelly! is this a free tool?

Apps & Web 2.0 tools for every level of New Bloom

A Digital Novel Set in a technology saturated near future, Inanimate Alice tells the story of a girl called Alice, merging text with animation, videos, music and games to explore what it means to conduct your life online. Inanimate Alice has proven to be popular across a broad range of ages as well as with a broad range of viewers, including both book-lovers and gamers. Because the level of interactivity starts out low in episode one, increasing with each subsequent episode in order to reflect Alice's own growing abilities, we've found that we can take an audience unfamiliar with multimedia fiction with us. Educators like Inanimate Alice because of this; students from primary to post-graduate level find the work engaging.

Book reviews authored by a seventh grader

Current Event news stories written for students ages 8-18 There are 3 different site -- junior, tween, & teen

This could be a great resource for finding articles! Teachers can have accounts and assign students to read and respond to articles.

From Marsha Fassold At a recent conference, I saw an interesting website called SideVibe. Basically, it allows you to create a "vibe" or window for asking questions and having discussions while using websites. This could help students stay on task better and guide them in using websites for lessons. Students do not need to have an email account to use it, which is especially great for us.

Infographic with most popular ed hashtags for Twitter October 2012

Updated guide

Probably not free!