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Set Up a Free Math Program For Your Class Create interactive assignments for your students - with hints and video lessons. Proven to deliver results. TenMarks is mapped to state and common core curriculum standards for grades 2 - high school.

This site is for kids, parents, and teachers. By creating a secure online account, students can create a personalized reading list of fiction or nonfiction books by grade level, genre, topic, and level of difficulty. There are quizzes students can take to earn points for prizes. This is a great reading incentive site.

A couple of weeks ago, Megan Allen, a fifth-grade teacher in Tampa who blogs at transformED, wrote a post entitled "I've got my teacher evaluation. Now what?" In her post, Allen shared six suggestions that would help link teacher evaluations to effective professional development. The following post is our response to Megan.

"Just as teachers need data to most effectively support students, instructional coaches need data to support their teachers. We recently spoke with Paola Valdivia, Manager of Teacher Leadership Development (MTLD) in Teach For America's Southern Louisiana region, about how she uses data to support first- and second-year teachers, called corps members. Regardless of the grade-level, experience-level, or content-area of the teachers you support, or the school in which they teach, we think these strategies for data-driven instructional coaching will help."

"PowerMyLearning.com is an acclaimed free online platform for K-12 students, teachers, and parents, developed by the national nonprofit organization, CFY. CFY has unique expertise in selecting the most effective digital learning activities available on the web and making them easily accessible and usable in one trusted place. This expertise comes from more than a decade of experience working directly with more than 50,000 students, along with their teachers and parents, in more than 100 schools across the country. A free account grants access to a world of smart and engaging resources… * 1,000+ thoroughly vetted academic games, interactive simulations, and videos * Easy-to-find activities tagged by subject, grade, and Common Core Standards * "Playlist" feature to sequence activities and individualize learning by student or class * Lesson plans to incorporate activities into instruction * Detailed reports for teachers, parents, and students * Badges and Playpoints to reward student usage * Flexible platform that can be used in school, after-school, at home, or anywhere in between With PowerMyLearning, students and parents can discover fun and stimulating activities to reinforce classroom learning and spark new areas of interest. Teachers can take advantage of the free instructional resources and use this tool to help meet the specific learning needs of their students. "

Today we're looking at GEteach [Google Earth PLUGIN required.] , a site developed by 9th-grade Geography teacher Josh Williams. The site uses the Google Earth Plug-in to give you quick access to a wide variety of information such as the CIA Factbook, population densities, and various other human and physical geographic overlays.

Since MIT's Lifelong Kindergarten group released Scratch in 2007, kids ages 8 to 13 have built more than 2.2 million animations, games, music, videos and stories using the kid-friendly programming language. Scratch allows kids to snap together graphical blocks of instructions, like Lego bricks, to control sprites-the movable objects that perform actions. Sprites can dance, sing, run and talk. Now, with a grant from the National Foundation of Science, Lifelong Kindergarten is collaborating with Tufts University's DevTech Research Group to make Scratch Jr, a new version aimed at kids in preschool to second grade. The expected launch date is summer 2012.

Girls in grades 5-8 can sign up to be mentored by real engineers, accountants , scientists, and astronauts at NASA through Skype in this 5 week summer program. Taking applications now. Adventure starts in July!

"What happens when 80 10th grade students watch, analyze, and reflect upon 640+ TED Talks in pursuit of the answer to the question, "What Matters (To Us)"?"

"John Taylor, retired superintendent of schools in Lancaster, S.C., offers this history of the above essay which he wrote while leading that district: "The parody was originally titled 'Absolutely the Best Dentists.' It was written and sent to every newspaper and legislator in South Carolina a number of years ago in an attempt to point out the absurdities inherent in South Carolina's then new accountability act which was focused on 'absolute' performance and threatened retention for every child who couldn't meet very challenging grade level standards. (Not to mention severe penalties for 'poorly performing' schools, teachers ands administrators.) Since then it has traveled widely to the point that I have not been able to keep up with the uses; but I know it has appeared in teacher association publications in at least three Canadian Provinces and in Australia, as well as dozens in the USA. The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) seems to have given the story a new life." Thus: No Dentist Left Behind. The essay remains on the Lancaster County School District's Web site."

"This workspace was created for educators to share and categorize livebinders by subject, grade-level, and whatever else makes sense. Please feel free to add binders, pages, and new sections. "

Their portal for Education. "Wolfram Research is dedicated to the advancement of science and mathematics education. For both students and educators, this educational portal contains a collection of resources spanning all precollege grade levels, including dynamic classroom Demonstrations from the Wolfram Demonstrations Project. Explore the topics below to find Demonstrations for your classroom or for individual study."

Resources by grade and subject - work in progress

"Laments about our schools are nothing new; everyone is an expert, it seems, when it comes to education. While most critics point to the lack of funding or the shortage of teachers, John Taylor Gatto insists the problem goes deeper; we've turned our schools, he says, into "torture chambers." If that sounds abrasively radical, consider this: Gatto, with almost thirty years' experience as a public-school teacher, has just been named New York City's Teacher of the Year for 1989. Gatto teaches seventh grade at Junior High School 54 on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Something of a local legend, he's a chess player and a songwriter - and he grows garlic. He was once named Citizen of the Week for coming to the aid of a woman who had been robbed. He has lectured on James Joyce's Ulysses at Cornell University and has taught philosophy at California State College. Perhaps it's not surprising that he's been approached by a film company interested in making a movie of his life. Gatto once ran for the New York State Senate on the Conservative Party ticket, and some of his ideas are quite traditional: he stresses "family values" and questions increased funds for education. But he's too much of a maverick to be easily labeled. At a recent hearing in New York, he castigated the school system for "the murder of 1 million black and Latino children," and was met with a standing ovation. What follows is the text of the speech he gave upon being named Teacher of the Year."

"The report found that the use of Web 2.0 tools such as blogs, podcasts, wikis, and comics-creating software can heighten students' engagement and enhance their writing and thinking skills in all grade levels and across all subjects."

Follow along as ipads are integrated in 1st and 2nd grade.

"The following lesson ideas utilize several of the Lite or free apps available for the iPad. These are basic lesson ideas that demonstrate the concept with specific content areas, but can be applied with a variety of curricular areas and grade levels."

"Are you ready to solve the challenges of space? Join the RealWorld-InWorld NASA Engineering Design Challenge! This is a unique education initiative that targets students in grades 9-12 and encourages them to explore and build skills essential for successful careers in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) through two phases of project-based learning and team competition"