The apparent purpose of the Midlink Magazine sight is to be an outlet for students, ages eight to eighteen, to submit and review art and writing. It is an award-winning magazine that is nonprofit It is sponsored by North Carolina State University and the University of Central Florida.

Its bullets include newest articles, table of contents, web honor roll, search strategies, cool schools, teacher tools, archives, our mission, and who we are The editors of Midlink are very successful teachers, grades K-12, who have produced this website as they say, “by students, for students-ages 8-18.”

The content of the site appeals to all teachers of grades K- 12 because of excellent accuracy and utility. When one clicks on teacher tools, for example, findings include clickable topics such as: Helping students cope with terrorism, grant money and funding hotline, and resources for educational leaders and policy makers, and collaborative learning.

The site is very user friendly and includes a variety of graphics that are cute and clickable. Another example would be under teacher tools, whereby you can search a variety of topics including: rubrics, graphic organizers, teaching resources, copyright guidelines for web publishing, and much more.
Many of these resources can be used to manage web activities, publish web projects, and evaluate your classroom activities. As a teacher, I am also allowed to suggest a site for the editors to review If they believe my site is focused enough, they may choose to include it in their links directory.

I found the accuracy and utility of the site to be in-depth and user friendly. I would recommend it to my friends and colleagues.

The ease of navigation and the overall appeal of the site are good I would rate it a seven out often on a scale of one to ten. My only suggestion is that sometimes the clickable teacher planning resources are way at the bottom of the page, and one has to go through a few uninteresting or corny graphics to find them.

I know I tend to want to click on artwork and pictures, and sometimes on this site, I feel that the graphics are in the way instead of helping.

Navigation is very effortless, as the left hand side of the website is a different color and bullets are focused with great headings to identify them This site, however, does not have a search box, and that would have been helpful, because grade level information could have been more easily obtained.

The overall appeal of the site receives a five out of ten, because the graphics are out of date (cartoon characters sitting at computers, etc.) and it lacks a modern professional appeal

There are a variety of ways that I would utilize the site and promote it to my friends and colleagues One, I would recommend it as a source for grants and projects, because under the section entitled teacher grants there are hundreds of links to grants for everything one can imagine.

Two, there is a link to this website which includes a teacher planning section with lesson plans, teaching ideas, online student activities, and web links available in these specific categories:

* Language

* Rhetoric

* Literary Genres

* American Literature

* World Literature

I was very impressed with this list, because I can utilize the resources on a daily basis in the classroom by downloading the articles, studying them, and then implementing them in my classroom

Overall, this website would be geared, I believe, toward the middle school student and to all teachers who desire to learn more about teaching to the middle and high school student.

There are tons of articles on the teaching of English, Math, Social Studies, Science and Art. There are quite a few elementary level articles, but far more middle and high school.

Students at the middle school age would love this site, and I would recommend it to my nephew Gabriel because he loves to draw and write, and I’m sure he would be most grateful to be recognized on the website as a published student “web” author! I am most certain everyone else’s son or daughter would enjoy this recognition as well!

If you’ve got a child in public school as young as third grade, you’re already starting to feel the testing frenzy. School administrators, teachers, and your child are all feeling the pressure to take and live up to state and national standards of learning. Those test results will be published in your local paper, appear on websites, and will be incorporated into every school rankings publication that exists.

What’s the Purpose of School rankings?

If you’re not familiar with the term, school rankings is the generic title give to any number of compilations of school assessments on the Internet, or in magazines and newspapers around the nation. Sometimes you’ll get a very specific set of school rankings, like Newsweek Magazine’s annual list of the best high schools in the country. Other times you’ll get a broader overview of the school demographics, test scores, ratios and facilities. The basic purpose of all of these is to help parents understand how well their child’s school is doing or to evaluate prospective new schools.

Test Scores and School rankings

How test scores impact school rankings depends on the specific assessment that it’s applied to. In a forum that attempts to compare schools across the nation, school rankings run into a very basic problem of apples and oranges. Because each state issues its own standardized test there’s no good way to compare a “B” rated school in Florida with a “B” rated school in New York State. For this reason test results for school rankings are a lot more useful when comparing schools at a local level.

Now throw private schools into the mix and your ability to decipher school rankings seems even more complicated. But here, you really just need to know what information you want. Some school rankings can be very useful for learning about the socio-economic status of a specific school. Another area I always recommend you check out in school ranking for k-12 gen interest is teacher turnover. This rate will tell you more about the overall climate of the school than any other.

Keep in mind that school rankings won’t always account for the special populations reported on the school’s testing. An inner city school that houses a magnet school may have high test scores for its magnet students, but a lower overall score because of the low-income neighborhood kids who attend. Sad- but a real factor of poverty that impacts school rankings k-12 gen interest.

You can use school rankings to help you evaluate schools in several ways. But just like any test the school gives your child, it’s one part of a bigger picture.