This summer we've been busy creating new lessons, adding new features, and revamping our professional development offerings.

New and Updated Lessons

With the help of our Summer Teacher Institute participants, we're thrilled to kick off the school year with several new and updated interactive lessons (all of which, of course, include standards alignment and a lesson guide):

• • English Language Arts
    • Fact and Opinion: Can You Tell the Difference?
    • Memorable Dangling Modifiers
    • Fixing Fragments
    • Affect or Effect
    • Transforming Words into Poetry
    • Revising, Editing, and Proofing
    • Sound and Sense in Emily Dickinson's Poems
    • Active Listening
    • Theme and Purpose in Science Fiction
    • Ideas for Generating Writing
    • The Naturalistic Elements of London's "To Build a Fire"
    • Active Reading
  •  Math
    • The Pros and Cons of the Measures of Central Tendency
    • Mean and Median: Are They Stable?
    • Normal Distribution: Z-scores
    • Fractions: A Part of a Whole
    • 

      QL #230: El Canal de Panamá

      Sampling Methods and Bias

    • The AIDS Epidemic: Analyzing the Data
    • Surface Area to Volume Ratio
    • Analyzing Bivariate Data
    • Analyzing and Interpreting Measures of Central Tendency
    • New Data Depot datasets
      • Crude Oil Production
      • Petroleum Reserves and Production
      • Proved Oil Reserves
      • Aircraft Monitoring
      • Data on the Fly
      • Household Telephone Status (updated)
      • Top Movie Box Office Results
  •  Science
    • The Incredible Floating Crayon
    • Lab: Floating Crayons
    • Thunder and Lightning
    • Lunar and Solar Eclipses
    • Lab: Density Bottle
    • The Kingdom Protista
    • The Forces of Flight
  • Social Studies
    • Ancient China: Buddhism and the Silk Road
    • Age of Exploration: The Columbian Exchange
    • Battles of the Revolutionary War
    • Characteristics of a Civilization
    • The Spanish-American War
    • The Civil War: The Emancipation Proclamation
    • Exploring King's "I Have a Dream" Speech
    • Ancient Middle East: Mesopotamia
    • The Daily Lives of Slaves
    • The Declaration of Independence: Analyzing Grievances
    • The Roaring 20s: Flapper Culture
    • Medieval Europe: Bubonic Plague
    • The Jamestown Colony
    • New Explore! Primary Sources documents
      • A Flapper's Appeal to Parents, a 1922 letter published in Outlook magazine.
      • The Fugitive Slave Law passed by Congress in 1850. It further polarized the nation on the institution of slavery.
  •  Spanish
    • La Vida de María
    • El Canal de Panamá
    • La Bandera de México
    • Las Meninas
    • El presente del indicativo

Saving and Sending Work

Students can now save and send their work with our new Portfolio feature. From the user home page, use the new Portfolio tab to view, organize, and send work. For some, you can now relaunch to continue working on a resource! Resources that support reloading of student work are identified ask links in the Name column of Portfolio.

Professional Development

Don't forget we not only have the resources to bring your teaching to the next level, but the PD to support you as well...all for free! Between traveling for PD sessions, we spent the summer updating our on-site offerings and completely overhauling our online courses. We adopted a new platform for online PD making the overall experience more seamless and user-friendly.

We also added a new 12-part course, Teaching Writing in the Digital Age, that promises to sharpen your writing instruction skills.