BV Middle School LMS

Vizaroo looks like it could be a good way to collect anonymous responses to questions that you pose in your classroom. Services like Vizaroo gives the shy student the opportunity to have his or her opinion heard by classmates and teachers.

"The Natural Inquirer is a middle school science education journal! Scientists report their research in journals, which enable scientists to share information with one another. This journal, The Natural Inquirer, was created so that scientists can share their research with middle school students. Each article tells you about scientific research conducted by scientists in the USDA Forest Service. "

written by Kevin Hodgson is a must-read for anyone interested in the use digital storytelling and games in their language arts lessons. Kevin also regularly posts book reviews. Take a look at his recent post about using Stykz for creating stopmotion movies.

Life Feast written by Ana Marie Menezes is an excellent blog for teachers interested in using technology in elementary and middle school ELL/EFL lessons. Check out this post about using VOKI with EFL students for a sense of what you'll get by following Life Feast.

Revised Bloom's Taxonomy adapted from "A Taxonomy for Learning,Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives" by Anderson and Krathwohl samples of how to construct learning targets

Storybirds are short, art-inspired stories, presentations, reports, or tutorials you and your students make to share, read, and print. Storybird is a fun, collaborative website that can be integrated in all content areas and at all grade levels. For Resources see: http://clifmims.com/site/resources-from-storybird-hands-on-workshop-at-msmeca13/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+clifsnotes+%28Clif%27s+Notes%29

Put yourself on the map: Easily make shareable, animated trips with photos, music, links and stories. At its most basic level, Tripline is a way for you to tell a story by putting places on a map. That's a very human activity that has been happening for thousands of years. It's also a way for you to easily answer those questions we hear so often: Where are you guys going? When are you leaving? How was the trip? What did you do? - the kind of questions that photos don't answer. And just like in the movies, the Tripline player gives you an animated line moving across the map with a soundtrack. That's appropriate, because our journeys are our own epic tales of discovery and adventure.

What it is: Physics Central is a fantastic website full of…you guessed it, physics! There are fantastic sections for students to explore science, activity books, experiments and activities. Students can learn more about physics in action (physics as found in the world around us), meet physicists, and learn about physics research. Physics Central will ignite a students curiosity in: sound, electricity and magnetism, force and motion, light and optics, material science, quantum mechanics, space and the universe, and thermodynamics and heat. My favorite find on Physics Central so far (I'm sure there will be many more favorites the longer I explore) is the Nikola Tesla and the Electric Fair section. Here, students will find a downloadable kit that includes a manual, comic book, and four related activities.

Science

Popcorn Maker is an online video mashup tool that makes it easy to integrate several different forms of online media into a video. A clip from YouTube can be enhanced with article clips, images, text, audio, maps, other live feeds and social media content. Add some "bling" to any video clip…interactive is better! Videos can be mashed without logging in. Creating a user profile let's you save and share the finished project.

"Graphing Stories is a new website that was developed by Dan Meyer and Buzz Math. Graphing Stories features 24 short videos that tell a story that students can graph to tell the mathematical story happening in the video. I recommend reading this post by Dan Meyer to get a full sense of how this works and where the idea came from. All of the graphing stories videos can be downloaded to use in your classroom. Graphing Stories even provides the graph paper for your students to graph the stories."

Hey! Maybe I can get those math people to visit the library!

With a mix of vibrant images, visual annotation and text, the modules are designed by educators to engage students in information literacy and the research process. What constitutes credible information? How does source type contribute to relevance, authority and point of view? How do I evaluate and cite born-digital images and online sources? Over twenty full modules are available, addressing source and website evaluation, digital literacy skills, plagiarism prevention and ethical writing. There are three progressive levels to choose from (Starter, Junior and Advanced) for elementary through university students.