Despite misgivings about plagiarism, many educators are excited about the promise of ChatGPT to help students research content-area topics for papers and projects. MiddleWeb’s John Norton shares his “conversation” with the new ChatGPT-4 while researching some family history.
Women’s history is no longer in hiding, thanks to scholars who are documenting women’s impact on society. Middle grades teachers can help their students trace that history with these resources, just updated and expanded, for Women’s History Month and beyond.
Find out how adopting a lawyer mindset can help all students develop critical thinking skills and dispositions in Thinking Like a Lawyer by Colin Seale. NBCT Kim Rensch likes that the book is a quick read and offers reasonable ways to integrate thinking skills with curricula.
When students can clearly see the path before them and how to get there, they can achieve the highest expectations, says language specialist Tan Huynh. His S.P.E.N.D learning tool (statistics, places, events, names, dates) brings clarity to research and writing.
Imagine an activity that takes little class time but engages students in current events and encourages them to speak with their families about what’s happening in the world. Teacher Megan Kelly longed for just such an activity and finally found it in “fantasy geopolitics.”
Content Learning / The Unstoppable ML Teacher
by Tan Huynh · Published 09/18/2022 · Last modified 01/26/2023
Teaching academic content is less about receiving students who are ready to learn and more about creating conditions to support learning. Tan Huynh shares a geography lesson he designed to meet three conditions multilinguals need to learn content and language simultaneously.
Hispanic Heritage Month / Resources
by Susan Curtis · Published 08/30/2022 · Last modified 10/19/2022
For over 50 years the United States has commemorated the achievements of Hispanic and Latinx Americans as well as learned about the discrimination they have faced over centuries. MiddleWeb’s resource collection can help students learn more about this rich and complex heritage.
History & social studies / Resources
by Susan Curtis · Published 08/20/2022 · Last modified 04/11/2023
Help students discover Labor Day’s origin and the United States labor movement’s past triumphs and current challenges in this MiddleWeb resource roundup. You’ll find resources for history, current events, English Language Arts and civics classes, across grades 4-8.
History & social studies / Resources
by Susan Curtis · Published 08/08/2022 · Last modified 09/12/2022
As the twenty-first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks approaches, help students born as much as a decade later understand the attacks and their impacts on us since that tragic day. We’ve gathered teaching resources from many sources.
Close Reading the Media / Teaching the Holocaust
by Frank Baker · Published 04/13/2022 · Last modified 01/25/2023
What we do as educators to help our students better understand the reality of the Holocaust is crucial in a time of lies, half-truths and misinformation, writes media literacy expert Frank Baker. “It is my hope that the ideas, suggestions and resources offered here will be helpful.”
