Cool lesson idea for pythagorean theorum and ratios. Includes already-made geogebra apps for the lesson so that students can manipulate the size of the TV in order to respond to teacher questions.

Lesson objective: In this lesson, students use coordinates to compute perimeters of polygons and areas of triangles and rectangles, e.g., using the distance formula. Pretty much all the steps to this lesson are on the website, which also includes a download link with all the materials that you will need. Something to think about if you plan on completing this lesson: When you first pose the problem to the students - Have the students discuss how they could represent the location of the different vertices for the Bermuda triangle. Give the students time to research/explore and find the latitude/longitude on their own rather than giving it to them directly. There are plenty of tools out there that can help the students complete this task, the most common being Google Earth and Google Maps

This seems like a decent interactive for an introduction to atoms/elements/period table. Have the students click through several atoms in order and then discuss: - What do you notice? - What do you wonder? - Predict what the next atom (or the atom 17 clicks away) will look like. Explain your response.

This could be an interesting conversation starter for a lesson on water, weather, natural disasters, etc.

Database of historical maps.

Although some of the lesson plans are relatively vague, this a pretty solid site overall. There are a number of lesson plans here that could be adapted to fit your specific unit/essential questions. The best thing about these lessons is that the lesson documents (PDFs) contain a wide variety of primary and secondary sources that you can use in a variety of ways. The Zinn Education Project is free to sign up for and use.

There are a lot of great problems here that could be used in math class. Starting class with one of these problems could be a great way to hook students into the lesson and have the students start generating their own questions and problem solving methods. Then, the math can be brought in appropriately. A lot of these problems seem to lend themselves to the "3 Act Task" model. A video/image representing the problem could go a long way in getting kids hooked.

Do you teach struggling readers? No matter the content area that you teach, student success is often defined by literacy. Reading comprehension and vocabulary frequently act as roadblocks that prevent students from grasping difficult concepts. Rewordify is a tool that will help you ignore this roadblock, and even teach reading comprehension and vocabulary when used appropriately. I initially read about the tool from this blog post (http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2013/08/rewordify-helps-students-read-complex.html#.UhuJ79KsiSp). If you don't have time to check out that entire post, here is a brief summary of the tool and a few possible uses for it: Tool Description: This online tool allows the user to input a chunk of text and replaces all the "hard words" with synonyms. This seems like a spectacular tool to promote reading comprehension across the content areas. Here a just a couple ways you could use this tool. * Have you found a website with incredible information, but the reading level is way too high for your students? Have the students use Rewordify and make the reading level more appropriate for your students. * This could be a great tool to teach new vocabulary and reading comprehension. Here's one idea on how to do this: o Have students read a passage and highlight/underline/annotate the passage, including making notes of the words that they don't understand. Then, have the students summarize what they have read. Input the same text into rewordify and have the students read and summarize what they have read a second time. Compare the two summaries and discuss any similarities/differences. Now, have the students create definitions for the words that were highlighted (Students cannot use the provided synonym when completing this portion of the activity). William Berry Dept. of Organizational Development, Quality and Innovation Moody Middle School ITRT - (804) 261-5015 http://blogs.henrico.k12.va.us/techtips/ http://blogs.henrico.k12.v

I've never been a huge baseball fan, but I do like data. This interactive display shows the total expenditure of every Major League Baseball team (from 1998 out until a few years in the future). Clicking on a team in the top chart will break that expenditure down per player and show what each player makes per year. Just looking at this chart for a few minutes, I've come up with the following questions that could be used in a math class for a problem solving lesson. Some of these questions would also require the students to locate some additional data as well. * Is there a correlation between team expenditure and winning the Championship/making the playoffs/number of wins in a season? * What percent of a team's total expenses do "star players" take up? * Are star player's "worth it" for a baseball team? * How have team expenses changed over the past 15 years? * Are baseball players being paid more today than in the past or are their salaries just keeping up with inflation? * How much do today's baseball stars make in comparison to the stars of the late 90's and early 00's? Is this difference warranted? I'm sure there are plenty of better questions here that I'm missing.

This is the Newest webtool developed by Dan Meyer and Dave Major. Dan Meyer discusses the tool and task in a post on his blog here - http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?p=17503 I think this tool would be very engaging for students. Give them the task of finding the quickest route, and they will go nuts with it. I see two main applications for this particular tool/task: You could use this tool as an introduction to angles. Put it on the board, give the kids the task, and have them discuss how they would tell the ship captain to navigate around the buoys. When non-mathematical language and vocabulary bogs down the ship's progress, overlay a grid/protractor and introduce the idea of angles. Have the kids play around with the tool to come up with the quickest route. Discuss the result of small differences in angle measurement on the ship's progress (each degree above the necessary increases the amount of time lost). This could lead into a discussion on the importance of precision… This would be an easy task to make over if you wanted to talk about slope and writing equations of lines (Algebra I). You could overlay a grid on the board, The kids could draw the lines in to get the ships around the buoys, write the equations, then you could talk about how cumbersome the equations are and how ships are actually piloted and bring in the idea of degrees/vectors (direction and angle). Not only does this tool help to teach angles/vectors, but it's also a tool to get students estimating (angles AND distance).

Short list of questions for teachers to use while problem solving

This article answers a question I have had since 10th grade English - "Is it possible to make Jane Eyre interesting?" I watched the Hamlet video and was thoroughly entertained. I could see these videos being used in 8th grade and high school English classes, especially if you edited one or two short segments (he says a** and b****, but other curse words are bleeped out within the video). These clips could be really useful when discussing the topic of "audience." As a culmination to a unit/lesson on audience, I could see students making their own version of "Thug Notes" or "rewriting" a book to some extent and adapt the work for a specific culture/group of people.

This is a pretty powerful Ignite Talk. Might be a good resource to get teachers pumped up for the year.

The Washington Post uses Timeline JS for a story on the Civil War.