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This is a web-based tool that allows students to create virtual museum exhibits in 3-D cubes that can be manipulated to show connected information on each surface! This website, which houses a pay-to-use web tool, offers access for every teacher in a school and all of their students for $99.00 per year.

The is a new approach to capturing, connecting and sharing data about learning resources available online with the goal of making it easier for educators and students to access the rich content available in our ever-expanding digital universe. Today large collections of learning resources sit online, waiting to be accessed.

I really liked the site. Just looking at the partners to this network, I came across European School Net (http://www.eu.org), as well as many organizations and government entities in the U.S. KW

With all the areas that children are taught in school, the author feels that while trying work at the achievement gap we should look at the engagement gap. The eagerness that children have a young age needs to be maintained. Hands-on learning should be implemented into the lesson.

This is a great article focusing on engagement in the classroom! It discusses the necessity of hands on learning to maintain students interest. This is important for students of all academic levels. Hands on learning not only engages students because they are "doing", they also are developing critical thinking skills. As a special education teacher, I know that in order to assist my students in learning, I need to keep their attention and provide them with interesting, hands on learning.

I love this article! I have always been a strong believer in hands on learning and I love that they call it an engagement gap! Students get bored when a teacher gets up and lectures them all day. They need to be engaged! The activities need to be purposeful and have a specific meaning but a teacher can make just about any topic engaging just by getting the kids moving and interacting. I 100% agree that students retain information longer when they are engaged and enjoying what they are learning.

This article focuses on strategies to improve classroom questioning practices to support the learning gaps of students. I see learning gaps related to questioning levels also directly connected to an instructional gap as it is the responsibility of the teacher to facilitate these learning opportunities and an environment that nurtures curiosity. This resource is applicable to all grade levels as it focuses on the value of each level of questions and the role of the instructor as it relates to responding to questions by students, also known as feedback. Feedback is an essential component of student questions and is best managed with a few key steps: appropriate wait times for responding by the students and the teacher, encouragement of student responses to peer questions, specific feedback, and increasing student questions (rather than teacher-developed questions).

This article outlines why everyone needs to give Common Core a chance. The author points out that Americans have one of the best education system when it comes to ideas, but we have trouble following the plans out. Students really learn best not from drill and practice but by applying the information to real world problems. That knowing the procedure to working a long division problem isn't the same as the application of long division. By teaching problems with a real world concept the math becomes more concrete.

These lessons are common core based and gives teachers more of a performance task layout. The lessons have common core standards linked to them already making it easy to find aligned lessons quickly. Lessons are very detailed and teachers are provided with a key.

This is a great mathematics drill-and-practice educational software for students of all ages. It is completely web-based, and so students can access it from any computer with an internet connection. Each student has a personalized account and completes drills that focus on his or her specific "math fact needs". Thus, students are receiving individualized practice for math facts. My students love it! It's free, easy to use, and extremely student-friendly. I highly recommend it!

Dear Professor and Class, Sibelius is a music editor software that gives music students, composers, and songwriters a platform to write, play and publish music notations. Sibelius is ideal tool for music students and teachers. Sibelius is used to construct professional and perfectly aligned notes. Sibelius allows users to write music, transcribe audio, share notations, scan and print music sheets. The software is adaptable and flexible. Students and teachers can import music from other programs such as iTunes and connect to several sites such as Facebook and Youtube. Sibelius also is capable of using Midi instruments. Sibelius insists on being the fastest, smartest and easiest software around (http://www.sibelius.com/products/sibelius/7/index.html). Students easily write music by creating your own musical score and there are several templates already in place. References Sibelius 7 - music notation software. Sibelius - the leading music composition and notation software. Retrieved October 10, 2013, from http://www.sibelius.com/products/sibelius/7/index.html

Simple circuit activities (technology or physics classes).

This is a great site for teachers that has free feature and a cheap pay feature. The free feature will still give educators access to worksheets, but with the paid for version you can edit the worksheets to fit more of your classroom style. This helps tie real world problems into the math classroom, helping with the age old question "When will I ever use this." Hopefully this connection will help students not only enjoy math but remember it more too.

"AutoCAD for Education Design and shape the world around you with the powerful, connected design tools in AutoCAD software." This software is free for students and has a three year licence. This would be a great tool for theatre students to download and use to create set and prop designs.

This article is spot on in suggesting that blended learning can help close the achievement gap. I worked in a high school with a very large population of ESL students and always felt as though I was not getting through to many of them. I would try many different strategies but not often successful. Using blended learning strategies, I feel as though I could start to really connect with my students and raise the success rate and confidence especially with my ESL students.

The NEA published this wonderful compilation of "research-based instructional strategies, school change activities, and family/school engagement efforts for closing the achievement gaps." Within its pages, the acronym C.A.R.E. - Culture, Abilities, Resilience, and Effort -- is referenced and connected to strategies for teachers to employ in order to make improvements in their classrooms. Teacher checklists, lesson plans, and student worksheets are included for each of these areas, which is great! The chapter on abilities is very interesting. It references the 8 different learning styles and challenges teachers to consider incorporating activities that touch on all. Overall, this booklet of sorts contains a lot of information that provokes much thought and reflection.

Week 8: In our Data Action meeting we discussed intructional strategies involving simulation and games. This article explain some advantages and fears for educators implementing games into their lesson plans. Matthew Farber Social Studies Teacher, Ed Tech Leadership EdD Candidate, Author In the fall of 2014, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop (a nonprofit founded by Sesame Street creator Joan Ganz Cooney) assessed the impact of the gaming in school settings.

Initially, I was very hesitant to buy into learning through online games. I know that children today spend so much time in front of screens, and I didn't want to contribute to this obsession (for some children it does border on that). I did see that BrainPop, a site which I use frequently, introduced GameUp and Spotify. I figured if BrainPop was okay with gaming for learning, then I had to give it a try. Well, my students will now beg for BrainPop and will do evey activity, quiz and graphic organizer associated with a lesson in order to get to sortify. What a great tool. I am now a firm believer.

I too see the benefits of using these online games within instruction. The games provide students with a means of engagement that we often struggle to provide students. With the growth of technology, students are becoming more in-tune with new technology and are using it more often at home. By connecting technology to instruction, we are able to meet them in the middle. There are so many tools available online that it's a shame not to use them!

This article describes the report of a 4 week study of the English reading comprehension of struggling readers. The research used technology to decrease achievement gaps in reading. Thirty 4th-grade students read narrative and informational hypertexts that contained vocabulary, comprehension strategy supports, and text to speech read aloud features. In the process, vocabulary and comprehension achievement was observed in the students. The results in this article suggest that struggling readers and Spanish-speaking ELLs used technology and beneficiated by learning vocabulary and effectively applying reading comprehension strategies.

In reading this article it was quite interesting to me the successes that occurred when the school incorporated the use of a technology based universal digital literacy (UDL) tool. The digital text coupled with vocabulary support was instrumental in the success of these students. It is also important to note that the stories given to the students to study were a blend of folktales that represented many different cultures rather than strictly from the US. It is important to note that when ELL students and struggling readers are given text or material that is relevant to their own culture they are able to access prior knowledge to make connections to the new material. The supports utilized in the study were the initial discussion of "power words" that are prominent in the text. The mid reading strategy is a support to develop comprehension by prompting students at the end of each page to stop, reflect and summarize/predict then being prompted to give a written or recorded response. These activities are able to be tracked using the technology thus furthering a teachers ability to interpret student needs and supplement with various strategies in the classroom. An important element to this programs success was the training of the teachers on the UDL technology.

This article highlights the benefits of engaging in school partnerships to enrich student learning. With high-art experiences, underprivileged students can improve their performance in various subjects and strengthen the connection with community and learning.

Manuel Hernandez Carmona is an ESL teacher from New York. The video describes the importance of providing culturally relevant material to students to ensure academic success. He emphasizes how critical it is to help students make connections with their own personal experiences to build bridges into other content.