Midlink Magazine: A Must Have Subscription for the Middle School Teacher

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!