In this comprehensive five to ten week unit, late elementary students (grades 5-6) will plan, create and observe three different environments: woodland, desert, and tropical. Each environment provides opportunity for activities studying adaptations of plants and animals, with focused activities on the earthworm and isopod. Humane treatment of organisms is stressed. This resource includes correlations with NY state standards. Each "kit" in the Curriki repository includes a teacher's manual and student activity book. The teacher's manual includes a unit overview, scheduling information, extensive and clear background information materials, preparation instructions, discussion questions, an assessment, cross-curricular extension ideas, a glossary and teacher references. Each student manual includes clear, reproducible student handouts and a glossary. The last section in the "kit" is a wiki, and Curriki members are encouraged to edit and build up the existing curriculum. It may take some time initially to organize and order all the necessary supplies, but these written materials are excellent and can be used immediately in the classroom.

This curriculum module contains lessons to be infused into a broader unit on ecosystems. It is divided into six sections. Each section addresses one of a set of six broad and persistent misunderstandings that students have about ecosystems. These misunderstandings stem from how students reason about the nature of causality. The module sections introduce understandings about the nature of causality in ecosystems that students need to develop in order to overcome the misunderstanding and to deeply understand ecosystem concepts. Research shows that students who are taught about the nature of the causal patterns while learning science achieve a deeper understanding than students who are just taught the science

I'm collecting a running list of promising educational software titles to support higher-order thinking in middle school science classes.

Hi Maggie,

I would love to see both a user's personal rating system combined with a reader's rating system - kinda like editor's comments & reader's comments on Amazon.

Creating lists could also be made easier with tagsonomy related sorting tools. After a while, I see that my tag list becomes unwieldy, repetitive, redundant and poorly organized. It would be cool to have the ability to resort, organize and create hierarchical tags.

Once I organized my tags (future project!) I would love to have a feature that would help me prevent tagsonomy bloat. Imagine three drop down menus for tags in the "Add a bookmark to Diigo" box. The first menu would be restricted to 10 major tag categories and a "create new category" link. Once selected, the second drop down menu would display subtags within that category also with a "create new subtag" link. Such a feature would nip tag bloat in the bud.

Together with automatically generated top ten lists based on editor's or reader's comments, these features would address Andy Whiteway's comment:

"There's also the issue that after a while, the volume of them will make them less acessible. I like the idea of moving links up and down."

All the best on Diigo ver. 4.0

Gregory Louie


Maggie Tsai wrote:
> Are you referring to sorting within a group? Currently with group bookmarks, the order can be displayed via "Time created", "New comments" "Thumb ups - group popular vote' We're evaluating more ways to sort such as alphabetical. Any input here?
>
> FYI: if you use a Diigo List, you can have full control of the order http://help.diigo.com/How-To_Guide/Lists