Continue Your Professional Growth
The NEA Foundation’s Learning & Leadership Grants provide opportunities for teachers, education support professionals and higher education faculty and staff to engage in high-quality professional development and lead their colleagues in professional growth. Grants of $2,000 will be made for individuals; $5,000 for groups engaged in collegial study. U.S. practicing K–12 public school teachers, education support professionals and higher education faculty and staff at public colleges and universities are eligible. Applications may be submitted any time. Review occurs three times a year: February 1, June 1 and October 15 in 2007.
Deadline: Ongoing
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Champion an Active Lifestyle
Through its Champions for Healthy Kids grant program, the General Mills Foundation annually awards 50 grants of $10,000 each to community-based groups that develop creative ways to help youth adopt a balanced diet and physically active lifestyle.
Deadline: February 1, 2007
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Plus: Each year the General Mills Foundation sponsors up to 50,000 young people, under age 18, to participate in the President’s Challenge and earn the Presidential Active Lifestyle Award for their commitment to a physically active and fit lifestyle.
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Join the growing list of teachers enjoying the eBookDestination Rewards Program. On the first day of each month, a digital coupon (representing 5 percent of your total purchases in the previous month) will be added to your shopping cart. You’ll then be notified via email of the presence (and amount) of this coupon.

There’s no application to complete, no points to collect, no cards to carry, no codes to enter and (most important) no fees to pay. Quite simply, you are repaid for your loyalty with a 5 percent credit toward future purchases. It’s as easy as that!

Browse the eBookstore now! You’ll receive an automatic discount on some 3,000 ebook titles, many of which are bundled with downloadable audio MP3 files, from major educational publishers. Plus, there’s always a selection of the most popular titles on sale!

Recognize Exemplary Partnerships
Created by The Council for Corporate & School Partnerships, The National School and Business Partnerships Award recognizes exemplary partnerships between schools and businesses around the country. Partnerships involving K–12 public schools and/or school districts and businesses are eligible to apply for a $10,000 award in support of their efforts. Six awards are presented each year.
Deadline: January 30, 2007
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Encourage Middle School Explorers
The Christopher Columbus Awards—a national, community-based science and technology program—challenges middle-school students to work in teams of three to four, with an adult coach, to identify a problem in their community and apply the scientific method to create an innovative solution to that problem. Every team that enters receives a certificate of participation and the judges’ comments on its entry. Eight finalist teams get an all-expense-paid trip to Walt Disney World, and the winning team gets a $25,000 award to further develop its Christopher Columbus Awards project over the next year, making part or all of its idea a reality.
Deadline: February 12, 2007
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Get Girls to Increase Physical Activity
The Women’s Sports Foundation’s GoGirlGo! Ambassador Team Awards inspire teams to help fight the disturbing physical and psychological health risks affecting America’s inactive youth. Teams must lead their own team project that will get girls in their communities physically active and submit a detailed essay or a VHS, DVD or CD-ROM telling about the project. To be eligible for the $2,500 award, applicants must be school, amateur, community and/or nonprofit-affiliated teams whose members are female, enrolled in grades 9–12 and residents of the United States.
Deadline: February 16, 2007
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Learn About Environmental Change
AIT in the Classroom is offering a free DVD of An Inconvenient Truth, former vice president Al Gore’s documentary on environmental change, to the first 50,000 teachers who apply online. There is a limit of one DVD per teacher.
Deadline: January 18, 2007
Click Here to Apply for Free DVD

Strengthen Understanding of American Culture
Through its fourth annual We the People Bookshelf program, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is offering free sets of classic books to 2,000 community and school libraries throughout the United States to strengthen the teaching, study and understanding of American history and culture. Recipients of the NEH awards program will receive a collection of 15 classics selected to illustrate this year’s theme, “The Pursuit of Happiness.” Libraries wishing to participate in the We the People Bookshelf program can find more information and application instructions online.
Deadline: January 31, 2007 for applications
Click Here to Apply for Free Books

Get free unlimited online access to all the print content in The Big Deal Book for Educators of Struggling Students, Middle School Through High School and The Big Deal Book of Technology for K–12 Educators. Explore the many opportunities to fund your special programs, access timely reports and articles, locate free and inexpensive resources and identify engaging interactive Web sites. Many of the offerings will help you meet the needs of students with disabilities and English language learners.

Connect with the Troops
In July 2006, Connect And Join, a family support and education-service publishing company, held a nationwide scrapbook initiative to have schoolchildren create the World’s Largest, and Greatest, Scrapbook in support of the troops. Connect And Join has received thousands of scrapbook pages from schools across the country to date and is extending the project to attempt a goal of 120,000 pages! The Connect with the Troops portal offers free tools that allow teachers, classrooms or students to communicate with and express support for U.S. troops or individual soldiers, while tying patriotism into the curriculum. The tools include scrapbooking instructions as well as lesson plans and suggestions on how teachers can make an archival activity into a standards-aligned learning experience for students. Lesson plans include a virtual visit to the Library of Congress, A Road Trip visiting our nation’s monuments, the United States Flag, a Hometown Brochure activity and more.
Click Here to Access Free Tools

Engage Parents in Children’s Math Learning
Helping Your Child Learn Mathematics features dozens of engaging activities that parents can use to help their children, from preschool age to grade 5, have fun learning geometry, algebra, measurement, statistics, probability and other important mathematical concepts. Activities relate math to everyday life and can be done at home, at the grocery store or while traveling. The booklet includes sections for parents on what math is like in schools today and a booklist for helping their children learn math.
Click Here to Download Free Booklet

Plan for a Healthier New Year
The Centers for Disease Control offers a free, illustrated 2007 Healthy Living Calendar and accompanying online tips to help you eat well, manage stress and plan important screening tests for a healthier new year. Separate printouts are available for men and women, in English and Spanish.
Click Here to Access Free Health Information

Consider the Future of NCLB
The No Child Left Behind Act is up for renewal in 2007. There are many calls for changing the law, with some bipartisan support for preserving its key emphasis on testing and accountability for schools. However, there is some uncertainty as to whether the reauthorization will actually happen this year or next. Listen to a recent discussion of “The Future of ‘No Child Left Behind’” on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered.
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Connecting American Education From Birth to Adulthood
Education Week’s Quality Counts 2007: From Cradle to Career tracks state efforts on more than 80 indicators in five categories: childhood well-being, early-childhood education, K–12 achievement, postsecondary education, and economy and workforce readiness. The report examines the extent to which states have defined what young people need to know and be able to do to move successfully from one stage of education to the next. Quality Counts 2007 includes a new “Chance for Success” Index, which provides a perspective on the importance of education throughout a person’s lifetime and is based on 13 indicators that highlight whether young children get off to a good start, succeed in elementary and secondary school and hit key educational and income benchmarks as adults.
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Grappling with the “Supergirl Dilemma”
The Supergirl Dilemma, a recent research report from Girls Inc., reveals that girls today experience intense pressure, at ever younger ages, to be everything to everyone all of the time. Girls are particularly frustrated with the growing expectations that girls should please everyone, be very thin and dress “right.” And while stereotypes about girls’ leadership capabilities and math and science abilities have diminished, persistent gender stereotypes and escalating stress levels limit girls’ potential and undermine their quality of life, according to the report.
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Celebrate the Legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.
In 1996, two third-grade classes in Birmingham, Alabama, and two third-grade classes in Kent, Washington, took part in a cyber-conversation about Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement. Peruse their letters of introduction, class photographs and email exchanges.
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Take Courses at One of the World’s Most Prestigious Universities
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is among some 120 universities worldwide that are sharing their course content, for free, via the Web. The MIT site, along with companion sites that translate the material into other languages, garners about 1.4 million visits each month from learners around the world. By the end of the year, the contents of all 1,800 courses taught at MIT will be available online to anyone in the world, anywhere in the world—at no charge. Learners won’t have to register for classes, and everyone is accepted!
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Plus: Besides MIT, the Open Courseware Consortium in the United States includes among its members Tufts, Johns Hopkins, Michigan State, Michigan, Notre Dame and Utah State. Internationally, members include groups of universities in China, Japan and Spain.
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Develop Cultural and Environmental Awareness
The Wilderness Classroom helps students explore the world around them, as they both ask and solve questions they encounter during online learning adventures. Each learning adventure is focused around expedition updates, posted on the organization’s Web site, which contain a variety of content designed to engage, educate and excite students. In spring 2007, the team will study South America, the Amazon Rainforest and global warming during the first stage of the Trans-America Expedition (mid-March to mid-May 2007). Join the team by registering your classroom online. Registration is free and grants you full access to all sections of the Web site, including lesson plans, live chats with the explorers and weekly teacher updates throughout the learning adventure.
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Investigate an Ancient Greek Computer
The Antikythera Mechanism is an ancient astronomical computer built by the Greeks around 80 BCE. It was found on a shipwreck by sponge divers in 1900, and its exact function still eludes scholars to this day. In September 2005, as part of the Antikythera Research Project, researchers at HP Labs were able to access the device in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens and apply “reflectance imaging” techniques to the front and rear surfaces of the more than 70 fragments that comprise the mechanism. Visit the project’s site to view an interactive relighting demonstration of this mechanism.
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Learn the Science Behind the News
The Why Files feature the latest news in science, math and technology. Learn how infrared “vision” works, the science behind cloning or the statistical calculations that make political polling possible. Visitors can also join the site’s online forum to participate in various science-related discussions, such as why the night sky is dark, interstellar distances, Einstein’s influence and much more.
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