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Another must see Mastery Connect is both an online standards tracking tool (parts of it are free) and a free iPhone/iPod/iPad app. Because the app is truly free, I'll start with it. The Mastery Connect app is a handy way to keep the Common Core standards accessible while you teach. The app sorts the common core standards by grade level, subject and strand. This is REALLY nice for quickly locating and referencing standards. Mastery Connect the website is the real gem. The site is brilliantly designed, easy to navigate, aesthetically pleasing and best of all, it works the way you think it should. With the Mastery Connect Master Tracker, teachers can assess core standards, monitor student performance and report student progress to parents and administrators. Master Tracker makes formative assessment that is standards based manageable to keep track of. Rearrange standards in the Master Tracker based on the order that you teach them in. View only the standards you are currently assessing, and view the entire standard as a pop-up. Within Mastery Connect, teachers can create and share common assessments. Similar in feel to other social networks, Mastery Connect lets you connect with other educators to share assessments, interact and offer each other support. It is easy to expand your PLN into the space, just find teachers with similar interests and goals and start sharing! And now for my VERY favorite part- bubble sheet scoring. Mastery Connect uses GradeCam technology to make assessment about as quick as it could be. Just hold up bubble sheets to your webcam or a document cam and it is instantly scored and entered into the Master Tracker associated with the student it belongs to and the standard it is addressing. Seriously cool. I am not a big fan of multiple choice testing (mostly because I think it is a lazy way to find out what a student knows and doesn't give a true picture of what a student knows or can do) but I think I have figured out ho

1) How does using the confined space of Twitter help your writing?2) What kinds of things do you think about when you use Twitter?3) Are there any other things that you would like to use Twitter for?4) Has using Twitter made you a better writer in other areas when using a pencil and paper? Computer?

to integrate History Buff into the classroom: History Buff is a website that can help history come to life through story, virtual tours, audio and primary source news papers. I suspect that most students fall into the judge-a-site-by-it's-cover category like me. For this reason, if I was using it in my classroom, I wouldn't send students directly to the website to do a lot of digging on their own. Instead, I might direct them to the portion of the site I knew we would be using through a classroom website, wiki, blog or use a Weblist or Symbaloo to link to them. It is amazing how changing something as small as the entry point into a site can change a students attitude about the site (heck, I'm like that too!). Once I got into History Buff, I really appreciated the connection to primary sources and the way that the "actual" newspapers bring history to life. I REALLY liked the hoaxes in news section and suspect that students will get a kick out of it to. Your kids will be asking, how can people be SO gullible? These kinds of stories are wonderful discussion starters and will make students think critically about their own news media. As a fun extension, have your students write their own hoax news stories. Okay, now for demystifying the navigation of this site. See the itty bitty brown words in the left sidebar that are all squished together? That is the navigation. For real. I didn't notice it at first either! Go ahead and click on one to test it out…not so bad when you know what you are looking for, right? Right. For your convenience, I'm linking to each page of the site below so you can easily find what you are looking for. :) Online Newspaper Archives Historic Panoramas Reference Libraries (audio resources, hoaxes) Primary Source Material State Facts Interactive Quizzes Tips: History Buff has a newsletter you can subscribe to if you are, you know, a history buff. Just enter your email in that box under the header and clic