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This resource provides excellent examples or "higher-level" or "essential" questions. Check out the article by McKenzie that looks at the differences between trivial, meaningless questions and those that truly encourage students to use critical thinking skills.

I do liek this article. It reminds us that just asking questions of students is not enough. I also thought that the web was also helpful for a visual representation of the information. It does also tie-in with our class as it strongly relates to UbD, as the essential questions can guide your development of lessons and units.

Middle schoolers love this! This site is very fun, obviously engaging for students, and could be used for varying purposes. Students can create their own comics, using as many or as little words as they like, and individualize their projects setting the scene and characters.

I love Legos! This is a really cool site. I will have to use it in an upcoming reading project.

This is more than just building with Legos on the computer. This is placing them in a story-board and coming up with a comic book/story with the Legos. What a creative way to use Legos without actually having them in your hands!

Great resource for teachers! Features lesson plans, archived videos, and much more that can be useful in the classroom!

I had never checked out this site before. After looking around on it a bit, I am very excited to take advantage of it. I noticed that they have archived a bunch of webinars. There were many that interested me, and I'll be checking them out more later. I also loved that you can ask questions and respond to other teachers. What a great way to get new and fresh ideas!

Very nice resource. So many great aspects to this site.

A website that feature free educational videos that are organized by subject and theme. There are so many videos here. Any time that you need a short video for just about anything, this is the place to look. For example, do you need a video that explains the history of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day? Go to the Holidays link and find the link for MLK, Jr. Day. A great resource!

For educational purposes, I think this site is actually easier to use than youtube. The search and subcategories make it very simple to find good videos to fit what you are teaching.

This is a pretty sweet website! There are over 600 videos for music alone! Bill Nye the Science Guy has a 24 minute video about music that would be perfect for my music appreciation class next year.

Find out whether or not a movie is worth watching

This is a large site having sections on DNA, genetics, heredity, and cells.  There are interactives, paper and pencil activities, animations, and much more.

This site has some excellent resources for high school biology students. There are tutorials for several areas to reinforce classroom teaching. Students can practice on their own making DNA molecules and transcribing and transating DNA and RNA strands, creating their own karyotypes, and more. The interactive features on the site are great nonlinguistic tools for students who are struggling or need practice with biology basics.

This website allows students and teachers to create imaginary Facebook pages for study purposes. Within the site you can choose from historical people such as Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill or Queen Elizabeth. Students can create a profile for their person and choose their "friends." They can also add posts and comments to their person's Fakebook page. This website can be used for book reports, character plots from novels, historical moments and many more educational purposes.

I just checked this out. It actually seems much more user friendly than myfakewall. Thanks for the resource, Erin. I'm going to use this with my classes for the next novel that we read.

Very cool. Like Greg, I've seen myfakewall, but not this one. This will be a great thing for us to do in my 7th grade classes when we talk about cyberbullying and online safety. The students will love it!

A great place to teach and learn about not only time lines but also to find out "great people" in history who share the same birthday as you. You can also find out peers, aka people who were born in the same year as you around the same month.

This is a fun and easy to use activity, especially for younger kids not completely familiar with timelines. And Sarah, I also find the age thing useful- I had a group of fourth graders this morning who didn't have a clue what Jurassic Park was (seriously, are we old?):)

A fun site to use with students! I liked finding out who my famous "peers" are that share my birhtday &/or birth year. The peers that share my birth year are Neve Campbell and Monica Lewinsky, what does that say about me? :)

This is a website where teachers can share Boardmaker activities. Boardmaker is a software program used by many special education teachers to enhance communication. It provides 4.500 picture communication symbols that can be used to create schedules, communication boards, calendars, bingo games, worksheets and more.

This sites boasts of 50 different educational games on its site. It also recommends trying a new one everyday. The games do actually cover a wide variety of topics: comparing decimals, making sentences, and confusing words to name a few. I played the Making Sentences game, which can be played by students of all ages to reinforce the essential elements of a sentence. I did get all 10 correct if anyone feels up to the challenge:)

The BBC Skillswise website is very well organized and has a wide variety of games, activities, and worksheets especially for mathematics and language arts. They have a Quick Read section where you can download the first few chapters of "bite-sized" books by best-sellling authors. Students can also practice their scanning skills through many formats from online activities to worksheets. One game called "Who Killed Angela Spelling" is a fun way for students to test their ability to scan text for specific information. This might be a good activity prior to doing research. The site also offer a wealth of resources for students to practice pretty much any area of mathematics.

This is a really neat website. I am always looking for games that my students can practice on and review new concepts, skills and strategies. In looking through the games I was impressed by how challenging some of them were. A lot of the games that I have found on previous sites are pretty easy but these are challenging. I tried playing the Apostrophes game, Beat the Clock on fast speed and I couldn't beat the clock!

Will allow you to convert files

This is a website that offers differentiated spelling lists for students. What is really cool about the website is that it has different skill activities that are very nonlinguistic and helps students make connections and applications with the spelling words.

This does have a lot of good activities. It took me a while to figure that a lot of the bold words were links.

A reading website for students. The best part is, students don't realize they are reading. They are too busy having fun!

A website designed to promote reading using phonics for prekindergarten to second grade. Students can practice skills through the use of songs, stories and videos.

This site offers free interactive reading activities that I've found very useful for kindergarten and beginning ELL students. The activities are formatted as games to engage the students, and they include sound features to encourage understanding of phonics and phonemic awareness. Beginning with ABCs and moving on to reading stories, this site lets students have fun while improving basic reading skills.

This website has a plethora of games that teachers can customize. You can choose from about 22 different types of games and interactive organizers and input all kinds of information that you want students to be challenged on. The games and organizers are great to use as a review for students as well as having the students create a game as part of a project or assessment. The games and organizers can be saved to a webpage or embedded into a blog or webpage (possibly even Moodle although I haven't tried it yet). One added bonus to this website is that it is free and you don't have to sign in by creating a log in or password!

There are quite a number of valuable tools on this site. There are many different types of graphic organizers and templates. You can also create some games, quizzes, and diagrams. The resources they have can be sorted by either subject or template type. They have one template called Fakebook. You can click on the picture of a famous person and see their "Fakebook." Some of them are very clever and funny. However, I noticed on the Mickey Mantle one that his comment for October 11, 1957 was that he had just lost the World Series to the Milwaukee Brewers. It actually should have said Milwaukee Braves. So I guess you have to be careful that some of the information could be inaccurate.

Science and Math interactive learning activities (Gizmos) for student learning.

I've used these in the past. I agree that they're good. Do we still have a license?

@ Bill: We do still have some licenses. I've used Gizmos this year. I would ask Christine about getting your kids on (?).

Middle School students would love this site. Students will be able to apply the knowledge they have on an assigned topic and create a game for classmates to play to review that information.

My F/CE students would love this! They often ask if they can play a game but the ones I have are a little silly for 8th graders. I know with theirr computer skills, my students could easily make games that are more appropriate for thier age!

I wish I would have known about the site a few weeks ago! My students are taking turns teaching my reading class some vocabulary words and they are playing games with the students to help reinforce what they are teaching. This site would be great to help my students remember and apply what they are learning.

Great article about Essential Questions. Author also includes links to other "essential question" resources. I appreciate these technologies that support cues, questions, and advanced organizers which assist me with gathering and organizing students' responses into useful information quickly

Using Quia, you can create your own or use other teacher's activities to provide students extra practice and extended learning time! There are activities in all subjects and levels and you can browse by category, activity type, or most popular activities. I found numerous Java games that were created to reinforce music skills. For example, my students could use the site to study for our upcoming terms, signs, and symbols quiz. There were free, online flashcards, matching, concentration, and word search games that reviewed all the terms I've been teaching. You can share all activities you create with other teachers and you can copy and modify other teacher's activities and contact them if you have a question. If you create a quiz in Quia, it will automatically grade it for you and track student's test scores throughout the year. You can also track how long a student spends on Quia activities. The site offers online surveys, activities in 100 languages and a calendar feature for communicating deadlines and assignments to students and parents.

This site has pretty much anything you could want to help students practice or review content. I checked out the math, biology, and art sections and found literally all kinds of interactive games, flashcards, and quizzes on a variety of topics. The site is very easy to use and find the topic you need; the search function allows you to search by category or textbook. If you make an account, you are able to create your own activities and quizzes and also view your students' results for the activities they have completed. I will definitely come back here.

Interactive way for students to practice a variety of geography and math exercises.

I tried this out and really liked the math practice. I can have my students practice their addition and subtraction facts easily. In addition to that they can select how many digits to add or subtract and if they will be required to carry or borrow when doing so. I also really liked the Little Farmer money practice. This is a major concept we work on in second grade, so this site would be perfect!

Thank you for sharing this, Greg. I appreciate how the different activities are leveled. I will plan to use this to help my students practice long division, a skill that they are all over the place on in terms of abilities.

Looking for activities and lessons for preparing students for the 21st century? Well, this is the jackpot of resources. I was introduced to this site at a conference on the subject of 21st Century curriculum, and this site is loaded with ideas for alternative forms for assessing students. You will also find various links to websites that offer interactive and student owned activities and projects.

I like this one. I had fun playing with Google Image Swirl. Does anyone use any of the curriculum mapping resources. Some of them looked similar to what we're using in the "Best Practices" course.