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One of Jane McGonigal's games -this is an alternate reality game where students have the opportunity to think and communicate about what a world without oil would be like. The original game occurred in 2007 with over 1500 participants engaging and responding. However, students can still use the game. Lesson plans for teachers are available through the Learn About link. Teachers may choose to go through the whole series of ten lessons or use just one.

Videos, interactive presentations, data to visualize, labs. Lesson plans and resources to look at global issues and trends revealed in data. Handouts and lesson plans for teachers.

Always looking for a good way to engage students, this blogger makes math appear dynamic and interesting. Most of the math content in the projects he proposes is HS level. However, his manner of thinking through HOW to present the lessons in meaningful, real-life situations is relevant to any teacher. This is one of those blogs that makes me wistful about being in the classroom full-time.

Intended for middle school classes, these units work well with the interdicsciplinary theme of "Environments," allowing students to view events and ideas with the perspective of place. Teachers can search for lessons in a variety of ways, including location, time period, or type of student work. A number of different skills can be utilized through the lessons, and primary sources are a focus for many units. Some teachers will be able to take advantage of the resources in their communities and explore these real-life historic places more thoroughly. If your area has no featured lessons, students could always be encouraged to find a local "historic site" to research and visit.

JASON connects students with scientists. This link leads to curriculum developed for 5th -8th grades. There are units for geology, energy, weather, and ecology. All of these units are framed as "missions" in which students engage with research articles, hands-on lab activities, videos, games, and multimedia resources.

With the election coming up in 2012, it is important to remember that "current events" does not have to be limited to a humanities classroom. This lesson could make a nice starting point for an interdisciplinary lesson on math and government.

Explore Engineering. Good for 3-5th graders exploring man-made structures or forces & materials. Labs and challenges let kids "see" the possibilities and problem-solve. Includes a database of big structures for kids to research. Activities and links for bridges, domes, skyscrapers, dams and tunnels. Students could definitely use this information to outline their own big ideas - it would be fun to follow some of this work up with real-life collaborative design and model-making.

Upper el and middle school students can explore math concepts in a (somewhat) real life context through games. Geometry, Scale, Proportion, and Measurement are applied in different games. In Rock n Roll Road Trip, students work through a series of word problems in each city. In Rio, they work on ratios. Students can only proceed to the next problem by answering correctly. Great for making sure students read the instructions in the problem and pay attention to details like order of terms and reducing to simplest terms. Once the student reaches London, the topic switches to measures of time. The "game" framework helps make the student want to get to the next city, and it gives good word problem practice (useful for those tricky standardize tests). Nice for a mixed review challenge.

"Discover and apply principles of genetic inheritance by studying the inheritance patterns of fruit flies in a virtual environment. You will work on a virtual lab bench from which you can order fruit fly mutants from a web merchant, mate the flies in an incubator, anesthetize flies for observation, examine flies under a microscope, and analyze the data from offspring to determine patterns of inheritance. Your task is to propose hypotheses, design experiments, and analyze and interpret the data from these experiments."

Watch a video of a cow's eye dissection. Check out the interactive diagram. Read through the information about the parts of the eye. Learn about other activities or download instructions for your own real-life attempt at dissection.

An online global collaboration examining water resources