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Another article that promotes the benefits of autonomous learning for students, in this case for teens. Touches on service learning and initiative as a psychological quality.

I have no idea why the name, but the site seems to include dozens of short cartoons and videos about Internet safety, targeted at a range of learners, from grade school through high school. Topics include cyber-bullying, recognizing opinion and fact, and computer security. There are cartoons, self-tests, and interviews with real teens and pre-teens.

"Here you can start thinking about what you want to do with the rest of your life. This Web site was built to help you plan for the future. What will you do after high school? Will you work? Go to college? Live in a place of your own? By using this Web site, you can plan for your future right now!" Uses polls and questionaires as well as bulletin boards for teens to communicate. Not specifically oriented to ESL/EFL, but of interest to a difficult age group.

CodeWizardsHQ is the leading online coding school for kids and teens ages 8-18. We deliver the most fun and effective live, online coding classes which are designed to give our students the programming knowledge, skills, and confidence to thrive in a digital world.

Interactive, educational safety resource -- teach kids and teens how to stay safer on the Internet

We're still working on how to use virtual realities for educational purposes. This article proposes some sites for both younger kids and early teens.

"Whether you are looking for teaching activities, worksheets, lessons, games, ideas or articles, you've certainly come to the right place. The pages at Teach-This.com are designed to direct you quickly and easily to the ESL/EFL teaching resource you are looking for. You will find lots of new teaching ideas and activities to keep your classes imaginative and interesting." Created by Paul Adams, this crowd-sourcing site collects lesson plans and activities from teachers and lets other teachers download pdfs and use them. Categorized roughly by themes and grammar structures, there is a lot of helpful cross-referencing. Each lesson has a designated level (intermediate, elementary, etc.) and a brief abstract. Most lessons are for teens/adult learners. It's up to you what pedagogy or approach is going to work with your students. It's free -- add your own lesson!

A great lesson plan for teens using QR codes to find out information and write a short report. Thanks to Carla Arena and the Casa Thomas Jefferson team for passing this on.

This tool opens up to a full soundboard where you can create your own audio and special effects. Should be fun for teen-agers, especially.

Remarkably informative, instructional science blog with all kinds of infographics, video how-to's, etc. For teachers and teens and up.

This guide is fairly complete on how to use Google Hangouts, but doesn't mention that you can open a text chat elsewhere on the web, e.g., in your blog or YouTube channel, and thus have a much larger class or group of students join in with text chat, while seeing and listening to the audio-video hangout. Participants take turns dropping in and out. This would be hard to organize with high school kids/teens, but would work with adults or teachers-in-training.

R. Byrne: "Code Maven and Game Maven are interactive programming tutorials from Crunchzilla. Code Maven and Game Maven use the same style as the popular Code Monster javascript programming tutorial. That style is to present a piece of code with instructions on one side of the screen while providing a visual of the outcome on the other side of the screen." Students can learn how to program at their own pace. Great for teens into gaming -- or those who might like to be.

This site is a geat resource for content-based learning for teens and adults. You can browse by categories (right-hand column) for topics in history, nature, people/biography, science, etc. There are no lesson plans or other educational apparatus.

"Create a newspaper, ninja text, a clapper board, wizard text, talking squirrels, talking flowers, a cigarette packet, talking tomatoes, talking cats, talking owls" - Fun projects for younger learners or teens, with fairly simple interface. The final project can be downloaded and images placed on your own website or blog.

"OnSugar is a hosted publishing platform that is based on what we use to publish PopSugar, FabSugar, and the rest of Sugar. Key Platform Features: * 11 different post types: (text, gallery, layout, poll, look, quiz, quote, link, chat, video, & audio) * Free access to a hundreds of thousands of Getty Images® * Fun drag and drop layout tool. Create your look with thousands of fashion images from hundreds of online retailers through ShopStyle, e.g. ShopBop, J. Crew, Net-a-Porter, and others. * ShopSense: Make money by linking to products and retailers NEW * Build your audience of followers with automatic notifcation of new posts * Follow your favorite sites and view an aggregated feed of your followed sites * Post by email NEW * Automatic update of your Facebook and Twitter status NEW * Multiple sites per account * Multiple authors per site * Easy import from Blogger, Wordpress, & Typepad * Full domain support * Free Key Site Features: * Drafts/Timed Publishing * Search * Archives * Pages (e.g. About Me, Galleries, Videos, etc) * Widgets for highlighting content from your site or around the web (e.g. Popular Posts, Latest Comments, Latest Tweets, etc) * Completely customizable themes" Looks like an up-to-date blog tool that allows for lots of different social networking interfaces, and has drag-and-drop tools for layout and adding media. Somewhat commercial, but might appeal esp. to teens.

A series of three YouTube videos for teens and tweens. Uses the Little Red Riding Hood motif to comic effect. All about cyber bullying, identity safety, and safe Facebooking.

An August 2007 report indicating social networking is popular with 96% of students (tweens and teens or US grades 6-12).\n--Elizabeth\n

Simulating the world of travel for children using Google Earth.\n\nviaTime is a virtual transportation simulator developed by Matt Paskus. The initial phase of the application\nallows children of all ages to create a virtual airline and observe their progress in real time utilizing Google Earth.\n\nDoes not specificy target age, but directions look like best for tweens and teens (US Grades middle school-high school or ages 10-17).\n--EHS\n

Truly free and non-commercial, the collections M. Sheehan lists include the Federal Registry (FREE, and non-commercial) with animations, primary docs, maps, etc.; Graphic Organizers from Vermilion Parish; The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, with primary sources and online exhibits to explore history; Chonicling America from the Library of Congress, which contains a database of newspapers from 100 years ago. These sites would be great for authentic materials and content-based tasks for teens/adults.