Actively Learn - resources for middle and high school ELA, science, and social studies teachers, including interactive text and video assignments as well as PhET sims.

Actively Learn is an excellent resource for teachers and students, providing middle and high school teachers in ELA, Science and Social Studies, resources to help their students. Resources include interactive text to help reading comprehension, videos and simulations from PhET.

Here are two overview videos as well:
Teacher overview video
Student overview video



It offers a searchable catalog of thousands of free assignments with embedded media, standards-aligned questions, scaffolding notes, and Teaching Ideas to save teachers time and drive deeper learning for students. Any teacher can create a free Actively Learn account that never expires by going to www.activelylearn.com.

Let’s say a teacher is doing a unit on cells. That teacher can come to the Actively Learn Catalog and find the Cells Topic page, which includes a variety of assignments related to cells like textbook sections, high-interest articles, videos, and PhET simulations. All of these assignments have scaffolding notes in the margins to describe concepts that may be challenging to students and standards-aligned embedded questions.

A screenshot of an assignment in Actively Learn with embedded media and scaffolding notes:


With Actively Learn, teachers are in the driver’s seat. On a free plan, teachers can:

• Customize any of the instruction in Actively Learn (edit questions or notes)
• Upload any Google doc, website, video, or PDF and turn it into an interactive assignment with their own embedded questions and notes
• Deliver feedback to students as they read and get real-time data on student reading progress

Students can:

• Create annotations in the text, share their annotations with their peers, and respond to one another’s notes
• Translate text into over 30 languages, hear text read aloud, look up words as they read, and read in “dyslexic mode”

Example of a student discussion in Actively Learn:

Some of the benefits of Actively Learn:

The instruction is designed to drive deeper learning. Questions are aligned to Depth of Knowledge and Common Core or state standards. It actually helps students to engage with their content instead of asking generic, “What’s the main idea?” questions. Scaffolding notes are designed to help fill gaps in background knowledge while students read so that they can make sense of their grade-level, rigorous texts.


Actively Learn:

• is a one-stop-shop for teachers of ELA, social studies, and science. 
• has a content catalog of novels, short stories, primary sources, science simulations, textbook articles, high-interest articles, videos, and more. 
• has content organized into topic pages that give teachers a full suite of options for their core content needs.
• saves teachers time by offering pre-created instruction and automatic grading for multiple choice questions. Teachers on the paid plan have access to suggested grades for short answer questions and can see student progress by standard and assignment type.
• offers the flexibility for teachers to create their own assignments or modify any of the ones in our Catalog. 
• integrates with Google Classroom and Canvas for even easier use by teachers.

Take a look and try it out: https://www.activelylearn.com/









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Molecular Workbench - Visual, Interactive Simulations for Teaching & Learning Science

Molecular Workbench is a free and open source site with some really nice interactive simulations in science.

There are hundreds of simulations in physics, chemistry, biology, biotechnology and nanotechnology. There are embedded assessments and the ability to create your own simulations and even create modules with text, simulations and more all together.

It is a download for Windows, OS X and Linux and they are creating the next generation of simulations using HTML5 so they can be used online. Google is helping them with this.
http://mw.concord.org/nextgen/#interactives

Take a look - there are some great activities on here.


Related:

PhET - excellent, free, virtual labs and simulations for science - new materials available  

PhET - free online science and math simulations

PhET is an awesome resource from the University of Colorado at Boulder. The site has interactive simulations for physics, chemistry, biology, earth science, and math that teachers and students can use.

The simulations can be run on the site or downloaded. The simulations are accurate and real and can help students learn concepts in more depth. They are easy and fun to use, and really do demonstrate the concepts well. In the physics ones I use, a big benefit is that students can quickly and easily change variables and conditions and then see what happens. This is very hard and time consuming in many hands on labs.

The simulations are also a great alternative to live labs if you don't have the resources available. Some of the simulations are better than any hands on lab because the students can truly see and understand what is happening.

You can search by topic, grade level, or just see the newest ones added. There are teacher resources for many of the simulations. Teachers who use the simulations post lesson plans and resources to the site for others to use also.

I use the Physics simulations in my classroom and they work great. This is one of those sites that every science and math teacher needs to check out.

Here's a list of some of the new simulations they have: