What Can You Find Online for Your Gifted/Talented Middle Schoolers? A Lot.

Often, slower or needier learners get the focus of teachers' and school districts' interventions and budgets while gifted and talented students are overlooked, to the detriment of those easily-bored students and their teachers. Rachele Hall and Wendy Meunier write in techLearning about online resources that offer differentiated learning and more challenge and stimulation for your G/T middle schoolers.

Hall and Meunier divide the available resources into three categories: WebQuests, online projects, and virtual field trips. WebQuests offer real-world problems that require higher order thinking to solve and can be individual or group projects. Five links are provided that give details about WebQuests in general and how to incorporate them into your teaching. There are also lists of available WebQuests divided by grade level and subject. The site WebQuests seems to be the most comprehensive and may be the best place to start your search.

Virtual field trips are easy to incorporate into a curriculum for the whole class or a few select learners. Hall and Meunier provide a great list of links to start your search, including Tramline, which has resources, a book on virtual field trips, and a for-fee software that lets users build their own virtual field trips, which could be a great capstone project for a student or group. Other links provide lesson plans and links to museums. You can also find more virtual field trips in this post from April.

Online projects are also great for differentiated learning. Hall and Meunier describe the best online projects as beginning with a question that leads students "through a series of steps using the Internet to find answers." That search for answers should also offer "opportunities to communicate with students and professionals from other parts of the world." The culminating multimedia project can be presented to parents, peers and/or teachers or published on a website for general viewing. Six of the links lead to more information on how to use or find projects and to lists of available projects and their sponsors. Two of the best known hosts of online projects are iEARN and GlobalSchoolNet. iEARN has been at it 20 years and has projects that focus on science, the environment, and social studies.

The brief descriptions under the links make it easy to narrow in on a few links per category worth investigating. There's also a great list of online resources for teachers, parents and G/T students themselves that offer activities, details on state laws, camps, organizations for the gifted, and the California Virtual Academies, a public, free, online distance-learning program for K-12 students.

SOURCE: "Resources for Teaching the Gifted and Talented" 06/01/08
photo courtesy of http://flickr.com/photos/lorelei-ranveig/2294885580/, used under this Creative Commons license

How to Go Global on a School Budget

The goal: to connect your middle schoolers with experts, students, teachers and citizens around the country and world. The obstacle: your school's budget. But Alexander Russo reports in Edutopia that, using the Flat Classroom Project as an example, teachers can create global education projects with on-hand and free resources.

Russo tells teachers to start close to home, in their schools and communities. Teachers can tap other teachers and students, local businesses or cultural organizations, like churches, that have some connection to another country or region. One example comes from the small, rural town of Mathis, TX, where a new international studies school "discovered that a local company was selling cattle guards to India. The business owner helped explain to the class how the relationship with an overseas buyer works, along with the logistical and cultural issues." Starting close to home not only cuts costs but also helps teachers focus on content rather than webcams, microphones and projectors. Focus on "a meaningful, skill-developing experience, not just a virtual field trip that is pleasant but not particularly deep or rigorous," Russo writes.

And there are a lot of free tools available for all kinds of global or international projects. Wikis, podcasts, and Google Earth are familiar tools for sharing and working across borders and time zones. Nings, also free and with multimedia capabilities, allow students to connect and share in a controlled space, vital for middle schoolers. Scheduling can be coordinated with AirSet, a free online program. FlashMeeting provides free videoconferencing, even for schools with low bandwidth. ePals offers free learning communities that teachers can control and monitor. Many schools are already using ePals for all kinds of learning projects and needs.

For somewhat minimal fees, depending on your school's resources, teachers can also tap iEARN and Journeys in Film. iEARN, International Education and Resource Network, coordinates collaborative projects for $100 per teacher or $400 for an entire school. As many as 20,000 educators are part of iEARN's learning communities. If your school has no online connections, Journeys in Film offers lesson plans to use with international films to bring the world to your students. Journeys in Film charges $75 per teaching guide or $250 for a set of four.

Other sites that have resources for global projects include the Global Educational Collaborative, a social-networking site for teachers; the Apple Learning Exchange, an online community maintained by Apple; and Global SchoolNet, a site that offers project learning exchanges on the Internet.

SOURCE: "Global Education On a Dime: A Low-Cost Way to Connect" 11/12/07
photo courtesy of Gaetan Lee, used under this Creative Commons license