This course will expand participants' understanding of vocabulary development and instructional techniques that are effective in helping students in grades six through eight expand their vocabularies. Participants will learn how to assess students? vocabulary knowledge and select words from a text that are most useful for instruction, including those with high-frequency Greek and Latin word parts. In addition, participants will have the opportunity to explore online resources for vocabulary development and assess their own current vocabulary teaching strategies. This course is designed to help teachers and other educators learn new ways to extend the vocabularies of middle school students.

Research indicates that effective school improvement plans should be based on careful analysis of school data. This course provides an introduction to the process of using data to guide school reform. Workshop participants will review current data-driven decision-making theory, use technology to identify, gather, and analyze data for patterns and trends, examine the role of data in equity reform, and develop action plans in support of their school-based data.

This course will enable teachers of all grade levels and subject areas to use Internet resources to design a 'virtual field trip' for their students. Participants will become familiar with the strategies and resources that educators use to design these field trips, as well as tips and tricks to ensure their success. By the end of the course, participants will have designed effective and engaging virtual field trips for their students that are aligned to state and national standards.

Integrating high-quality Internet resources in the classroom is an important part of teaching students to be critical locators, assessors, readers, and contributors of online content. While many rich resources are available, they are only useful if educators can find them. Today, a search engine is only part of the toolset, Web 2.0 tools like blogs, microblogs, and social bookmarking enable us to find the best resources from other people. Participants in this course will explore the range of educational material available on the Internet and develop a varied approach that uses both computer and human networks to find these resources. As a context for integrating these resources more effectively, participants will explore several teaching strategies for better digital media literacy. Participants will leave the course with an emerging personal learning network (PLN) that they may continue to nurture and a collection of web resources appropriate for their classroom use.

In this course, Geometric Measurement, designed for teachers in the middle and high school grades, participants will become familiar with relevant research in teaching geometric measure and learn how to analyze student work to inform their instruction. They will complete classroom tasks designed to help them learn approaches to teaching geometric measurement to help students develop stronger conceptual understanding and procedural knowledge, especially in linear measurement, area, surface area and perimeter. They will also explore relationships between perimeter and area and between area and surface area. In addition, they will become familiar with virtual manipulatives designed to promote both conceptual and procedural knowledge around geometric measurement. For the final project, participants will complete an analysis of a math task and a personalized version of the student work template for use in their own classrooms.

In order to be successful in content area classes such as social studies, science, and mathematics, students must be able to read a variety of informational texts and produce written documents. This course will give teachers the tools they need to integrate literacy strategies into content learning to help raise student achievement. Participants will use the Literacy Matters web site as an anchor throughout this course for exploring instructional strategies. By the end of the course, participants will be able to locate web-based tools, strategies, and lessons that foster literacy skills in all content areas. They will also have developed a preliminary lesson plan incorporating these tools and strategies.

Participants in this course will learn about the science behind electric circuits and how this content can be taught through inquiry. The course will help teachers gain a better understanding of electricity and circuits, including conducting and insulating materials, open and closed circuits, and series and parallel circuits. Participants will learn numerous inquiry-based teaching strategies throughout the course. They will consider inquiry-based methods to introduce the content to students and will enhance their questioning techniques to help students make predictions about the content. Participants will also learn strategies for managing inquiry-based lessons in the classroom and tools for assessing students' understanding of the content. Through completion of an inquiry-based lesson plan as a final project, participants will demonstrate much of what they learned about the content and teaching methods described above.

The Internet as we know it has been constantly changing and improving over the past several years and these changes have been so numerous and so dramatic as to inspire people to refer to this 'new' internet as Web 2.0 or the Read/Write Web. The content of the Read/Write Web, as we will call it, is characterized by open communication, freedom to share and re-use content, and dynamic interactivity among users of varying technical abilities around the globe. There are now a multitude of web-based tools available that can allow people to organize their favorite bookmarks, write online documents, and share information with others through social software like blogs and wikis. These tools can positively impact teaching and learning and the implications are significant. Students can be empowered to see how their ideas can be shared easily with the world and students around the globe can easily collaborate and communicate with each other to build knowledge communities that are not dependent on time and space. A few dedicated educators are sharing their ideas and blogging about these new tools so that they can be used effectively in classrooms. In this course, participants will be exposed to many of the tools of the Read/Write Web and will get the chance to experiment with new tools each week. The final session will focus on how educators can help students to use these new tools safely. Discussions will help participants focus on how these tools can be integrated into the classroom to make the most of their potential to enhance student learning.

When teachers integrate adolescent literature into the curriculum, students are given an opportunity to learn about themselves and the world during a critical time in their development. Recent research on reading development suggests a growing number of evidence-based practices that can help students with the complex process of reading to make meaning. In this course, participants will learn how to select literature for students of varied needs and how to improve students' reading comprehension through questioning techniques. They will also explore a wide range of literature response strategies and techniques for assessment. As a final product, participants will create a classroom lesson based on the strategies learned in this course.