Check out the free app DigitalCitizen. Lessons are geared towards middle schoolers and topics include online safety, ethical use of digital resources, and cyber bullying.

http://www.learning.com/digital-citizenship

KidS LOVE Kahoot! And teachers love it too because it's a simple and effective assessment tool!

Take vocabulary lessons to the next level with Greek and Latin prefix and suffix games:

http://teacher.scholastic.com/activities/athens_games/gameGreekToMe.htm

ALL of my 8th graders are on Instagram. Why NOT incorporate it in the classroom?!

Check out this awesome link below:

http://dailygenius.com/instagram/

This past school year, the science teacher on my team started using Google Classroom. We share the same 100 students, and they absolutely loved it. They asked me if we could use Google Classroom in language arts, but I felt too overwhelmed to learn new technology in the middle of the school year. However, the science teacher recently walked me through it, and I am excited to launch my own Google Classroom next school year.

I found this youtube video which is incredibly informative and user-friendly to anyone interested in launching their own Google Classroom:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd4ko0lsHl4

Some things I'm specifically excited about:
*Students can receive feedback electronically as soon as you add comments/grade their work
*Students can communicate with each other in many different ways: they can share documents and work together on group assignments, they can post questions and responses to the classroom page if they're unsure on that night's homework or have a question on directions. A student can actually respond before the teacher does if the student sees it first!
*As an English teacher, I feel students will be more likely to actually edit/revise when the comments have been made electronically rather than hand-written.