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Many things about Blogger make it a popular choice for middle school and high school classroom blogs. It's easy to create a blog on Blogger, all back end maintenance is done for you by Google, and if your school uses Google Apps for Education it can be added to the list of services your students can access with their Google Apps for Education accounts. There is one thing that can't be done easily and that is moderate students' posts (not comments, posts) before they go live on your classroom blog. But if you have students post via email then you can moderate the posts before they go live.

BBC Schools offers an excellent collection of resources for helping students learn about World War I. The materials are sorted into a section for primary school students and a section for secondary school students.

Richard Byrne: Like many of you, when I was in middle school and high school we were taught to create index cards to organize our research. After creating the cards we sorted them into an order to support writing our research papers. That same concept can be applied to organizing research with Google Slides. In the video below I demonstrate how this is done.

Edmodo is a web-based platform that provides a safe and easy way for your class to connect and collaborate, share content, and access homework, grades and school notices. It is like Facebook but in a safe and controlled environment appropriate for school.

"WhatsDue is a free service for sending due date reminders to students. The service sends push notifications to students' iOS and Android devices. I reviewed the service last spring and thought that it was good as it doesn't rely on SMS/ text messaging. Just in time for the new school year WhatsDue released some updates."

"Chalk is an excellent web tool that teachers and educators can use to reduce their paperwork. Chalk allows users to convert any document into a form that can be easily signed or filled out online. As a teacher you can use this tool to distribute forms to be filled out and signed by others (e.g parents, students, school personnels…etc)."

Quill is a service that provides an updated take on the old writing worksheets that most of us used in elementary school and middle school. The service offers more than just the writing practice activities, but that is its core feature. Here's how it works; students sign-in (email is not required) to find the worksheets that you have assigned to them. The worksheets contain spelling and grammar errors that your students have to identify and correct. Students submit their corrections and Quill shows them how they did by showing what they did correct and what they should have corrected. An explanation accompanies each Quill correction.

Commonlit is an organization that is building sets of thematic discussion questions to use in conjunction with upper elementary school and middle school students.

A great guide to Chrome, including apps and extensions.

Every day during the school year we invite teenagers to share their opinions about questions like these - on topics from hip-hop to climate change - and hundreds do, posting arguments, reflections and anecdotes to our Student Opinion feature.

To help teachers get started on the road to blogging Richard Byrne created a free 90 page guide to using Blogger in school. The guide is embedded in this post. You can also find it here (clicking the link with initiate a PDF download).

These could be very useful for next school year with the amount of chromebooks we will have.

Booktrack is a new way for students to read stories and texts accompanied by a movie-style soundtrack. Students also create Booktracks, using their own writing or works being studied in school. This short video provides a great overview of Booktrack Classroom and how it can produce immediate results with your students.

An awesome new google app that could eliminate using doctopus and Gclass folders to farm out assignments and utilizing our school google accounts.

Curricular resources from the Traverse Bay School District. Great learning scales and more.

Comic Creator is very easy to use. To get started will have to provide a name to their cartoon, add a subtitle and type in the name of the author. Next, they select one of the four templates provided there and hit next. Now they can add characters, balloons and props. There is also a text book where they can write in a caption for their comic. once done they click on finish to print their work. Comic Creator can be used 'by students from kindergarten through high school, for purposes ranging from learning to write dialogue to an in-depth study of a formerly neglected genre. The tool is easy to use, made even easier with the Comic Strip Planning Sheet, a printable PDF that comic creators can use to draft and revise their work before creating and printing their final comics'.

"When it is used correctly YouTube can be a good platform for spreading news about the great things that are happening in our classrooms and schools. It can also be a good platform for students to share their thoughts and projects. But before you upload videos to YouTube there are a few settings that you should be aware of. In the video embedded below I provide an overview of those settings."

"Lab Scheduler is a neat Google Sheets Add-on that enables you to easily create and maintain a lab or room reservation system for your school. Once you have added Lab Scheduler to your Google Spreadsheet it will walk you through the process of creating blocks of time and lab/room space in your spreadsheet. You can set your Lab Scheduler to maintain a preview of as many dates as you like. The preview is what people will see when they want to make a reservation. Share the spreadsheet with your staff and they can reserve a block of time in it.