Editor’s note: Guest contributor Nancy Barlow regularly blogs at The Teacher Geek. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Essential Resources for Teaching About The Middle-East

Teaching the MIddle East, a new online resource for educators who teach Middle Eastern history, strives to provide teachers with "a rich, reliable, and easily accessible resource that draws upon sound humanities scholarship to help build student understanding of Middle Eastern history and culture." Basically an expansive digital library created by the Middle Eastern scholars at the University of Chicago, the site has 18 learning modules, including extensive lesson plans for high school teachers.

That's a Coffee Bean Atom!

The Whiteboard Blog writes about two applications that can be used to help students visualize a sense of scale. The first, the Cell Size and Scale Interactive, provides a zoomed-in look at objects that can go right down to the atom. The second, The Scale of the Universe, allows users to start small and zoom out to the galaxy. Both are useful tools for comparing relative size of objects in our universe.

Put Gmail To Work As Your Classroom Inbox

If you have tablets like iPads in your classroom but haven't found an efficient way to collect work that the students create on those devices, then check out this article from the Learning At Hand blog. Tony Vincent explains how to make Gmail work for your tablet devices in your classroom. You may find this the ideal option for collecting and organizing the work from all of those devices.

App Of the Week: The Multiplication Table App

This app from gives the user a wonderfully visual way to manipulating and exploring the multiplication table. Purely an exploratory tool, it contains no quizzes, badges or timers - a pressure-free way for visual learners to explore groupings. It's available for the iPad only at the iTunes store.