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June 2, 2008
Timely reminders, fabulous freebies, best sites & more "worth the surf"
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In Partnership With:
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The
Actuarial Foundation’s Advancing Student Achievement
Mentoring Program awards grants to schools and groups to develop
a viable mentoring program involving actuaries in the teaching of
mathematics to children in private and public schools. Collaboration
among school systems, local actuarial clubs, corporations and other
stakeholders in education is encouraged in order to enhance the
chances of success, particularly on a long-term basis.
Deadline: Ongoing
Click Here for More Information
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Digital
Wish can set up Employee Matching Fund programs for
corporations wanting to give back to their local schools. There are
no administrative fees, and Digital Wish will also donate an
additional 2% to 10% in funding, ensuring that 102% to 110% of the
giver’s donation will be allocated directly to the school’s
technology program to help modernize American classrooms. Donated
funds are instantly available to be spent on technology products for
the classroom. On the Digital Wish site, you’ll find free
downloadable flyers, which you can print out and
distribute to any parent, business or spouse that may be interested
in having Digital Wish set up an Employee Matching Fund program.
Click Here for More Information
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EBOOK DESTINATION
NEW
Look! MORE Savings!
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 thousands of 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!
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Sign
up at The Big Deal Book Web site for hELLo!,
a free monthly ELL e-newsletter that
includes information about new grants, upcoming contests, the latest
educational research and a wealth of information on interactive print
and online resources for students, teachers, librarians, principals
and others involved in the education of English language learners.
Click Here to Sign Up for Free Newsletter
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To
honor the late preservationist and ecologist Rachel Carson, the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Generations
United and the Rachel Carson Council, Inc., have announced
a photo, essay and poetry contest “that
best expresses the Sense of Wonder that you feel for the sea, the
night sky, forests, birds, wildlife and all that is beautiful to your
eyes.” In her book The Sense of Wonder (written in the 1950s
and published in a magazine in 1956), Carson used lyrical passages
about the beauty of nature and the joy felt when helping children
develop a sense of wonder and love of nature. Entries must be joint
projects involving a person under age 18 and a person age 50 or
older.
Deadline: June 16, 2008
Click Here for More Information
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The
Quiddler school competition is a challenge for K–12 students
to team up to compete with the best word sleuths in the country. To
participate in the competition, teachers must first register their
teams. Then each day a team member (or the teacher) prints out the
current day’s puzzle worksheet. This worksheet has the day’s
puzzle letters on it, and it shows the highest score attained.
Students work together to create words from the letters that add up
to within 10 points of that score. Your team then qualifies to enter
for that day. Do this once a week for 25 weeks and your school wins
an assortment pack of games made by SET Enterprises®. Top
scores are posted daily, so you can see how well your team is doing.
Deadline: Runs annually from August through July
Click Here for More Information
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The
Big Deal Book of Technology is partnering with the Software &
Information Industry Association (SIIA) to help implement the
organization’s Vision K–20 initiative. SIIA invites
all Big Deal Book readers and colleagues to visit the new Vision K–20
Web site to learn more about the initiative and to take the Vision
benchmarking survey. As an education leader at a classroom,
school or district level, you can use the Vision survey to check your
organization’s progress toward attaining the SIIA Vision goals. At
the end of the survey period, SIIA plans to summarize all Vision
survey data into a report that will be available to those who
participated in the survey at the NECC conference in San Antonio.
SIIA will conduct this survey in subsequent years, so you will be
able to see your annual progress toward achieving the Vision. Contact
Karen Billings at karen.billings@siia.net if you have
questions.
Click Here to Visit SIIA Web Site
Click Here to Take Benchmarking Survey
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PBS
TeacherLine provides professional development through
facilitated, online courses, collaborative learning communities and
Internet-based resources. Currently more than 100 courses across
multiple subject areas are offered to help teachers acquire the
skills they need in order to prepare students for a successful
future. In 2007, PBS TeacherLine and the International Society for
Technology in Education (ISTE) launched the Certificate of
Proficiency Capstone Program. In three courses, educators deepen
and demonstrate their mastery of ISTE’s National Educational
Technology Standards for Teachers (NETS-T) to earn a
certificate.
Click Here for More Information
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The
Center for Teaching History with Technology’s summer
2008 educational technology workshops are now open for registration.
Three workshops are available: Teaching History with Technology
(July 28–30), Teaching English & Language Arts with
Technology (July 14–16) and Teaching with Web 2.0 (June
24–26). These workshops offer classroom teachers, school technology
staff and library media specialists an opportunity to explore ways of
using technology to enrich the curriculum and engage students. The
workshops will explore innovative ideas, effective techniques and
ready-made plans for incorporating Web-based resources, desktop
software packages, and new and emerging technologies into classroom
instruction.
Click Here for More Information
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Bring
ePals’ In2Books® into your classroom and watch
your students experience reading and writing for real-life purposes.
Adult penpals mentor your students through reading and discussing
books, via email, about curriculum-aligned topics. Teachers choose
the penpals and the subjects to study. In2Books reinforces and
augments literacy instruction across the curriculum. The next program
begins Fall 2008. Books are provided free for Title I
classrooms.
Click Here for More Information
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The
U.S. Department of Education will aid in providing 850,000
free books to schools and programs serving disadvantaged
children as part of a 2008 Summer Reading Initiative.
The books, which will be provided by Random House,
will be distributed to schools, libraries and literacy organizations
serving disadvantaged children nationwide. The initiative is the
latest effort of the Book Donation Campaign, a collaboration
by the U.S. Department of Education, major publishing companies and
First Book, a Washington-based nonprofit organization that
promotes literacy.
Click Here for More Information
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COOL
SCHOOL: Where Peace Rules! is an interactive computer game
designed to teach children about conflict resolution in a lively,
entertaining and developmentally appropriate context. The
game features animated school characters in situations that ask
youngsters, aged 5 to 7, to select an action for resolving a
potential conflict, such as others crowding in line, refusing to
share or treating playmates disrespectfully. COOL SCHOOL was
developed by the U.S. Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service
(FMCS) in cooperation with child-development programs at the
University of Maryland, the University of Southern California and the
University of North Texas.
The game is available for free downloading to
teachers and families via the Curriki Web site.
Click Here to Download Free Game
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Funded
in part by the National Science Foundation, Girls at the Center
(GAC) provides opportunities for girls and adult partners to
investigate the world around them through inquiry-based,
hands-on science activities. The following GAC Packs are
available online for free downloading: Celebrate Science;
Communication; Energy; Science and Nature; Sports/Los deportes;
Structures; Water/El agua.
Click Here to Download Free Science Activities
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Climate
Change: Connections and Solutions consists of two 2-week
curriculum units—one for middle school and one for high
school—that encourage students to think critically about the global
problem of climate change and collaborate on devising solutions.
Students learn about climate change within a systems framework,
examining interconnections among environmental, social and economic
issues. The nonprofit Facing the Future publishes the units,
which include nine hands-on activities, five student
readings, homework assignments, reproducible handouts
and assessments. The curriculum units area available free
of charge from the organization.
Click Here to Download Free Curriculum Units
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Mixing
in Math offers 40 activities that can be used to “slip a
little math” into students’ everyday routines. Activities include
using clocks and calendars, figuring lengths and widths, gathering
and organizing fun facts about everyday things, and adding shapes and
numbers to stories and skits. Activities are designed for use in
afterschool programs and other programs for children aged 5–13.
Click Here to Access Free Resources
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Califone®
International and the American Speech-Language-Hearing
Association have collaborated to help educators teach safe use of
audio products. Listen To Your Buds!TM is a
consumer-awareness campaign about the potential risk of hearing loss
from unsafe usage of personal audio technology.
For more information about noise-induced hearing loss,
including warning signs and further prevention steps, browse the
links at the left side of the campaign’s Web site. Educators can
also encourage students to play Turn Down the Volume, a fun
and educational online video game for youth aged 6 and up. And
classroom teachers of K–8 students will find lesson plans
and classroom activities from various institutes as well. The
site is accessible in English and Spanish.
Click Here to Access Free Resources
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History
Matters offers unique teaching materials, including first-person
primary documents and guides to analyzing historical evidence.
The site’s resources focus on the lives of ordinary Americans and
actively involve students in analyzing and interpreting evidence.
Among the sites many features: Many Pasts contains 1,000
primary documents in text, image and audio that emphasize the
experiences of “ordinary” Americans throughout U.S. history. All
of the documents are accompanied by annotations that address their
larger historical significance and context. Making Sense of
Documents provides detailed strategies for analyzing online
primary materials (including film, music, photographs,
advertisements, oral history, and letters and diaries) with
interactive exercises and a guide to traditional and online sources.
Scholars in Action shows how scholars puzzle out the meaning
of different kinds of primary sources (from cartoons to house
inventories), allowing students to try to make sense of a document
themselves and then providing audio clips in which leading scholars
interpret the document and discuss strategies for overall analysis.
WWW.History
is an annotated guide to more than 850 useful Web sites for teaching
U.S. history and social studies. And there’s much more!
Click Here to Access Free Resources
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THE
BIG DEAL BOOK TECH CENTER
Interactive
Experiences for the 21st Century Classroom
Check
out the new look of The Big Deal Book
Web site. And be sure to explore the Tech Center,
which offers resources and activities for integrating technology into
your classroom. In the Tech Center is a feature that
changes mid-week, every week, appropriately called Web
Wednesday! Here you’ll find new interactive
experiences and resources that incorporate 21st century
themes and skills into the study of core subjects.
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Science
Whatzit! is an online science learning project of the Oregon
Museum of Science & Industry (OMSI), in collaboration
with the Science Learning Network. Students can send the Science
Whatzit Gremlin their science questions, queries, thoughts and
ideas—but no homework assignments! Or, if they’re looking for
inspiration for a science project, students can browse through the
archive of Science Whatzit questions and answers.
Plus:
OMSI’s new podcast, Sound Science, answers questions
every Friday. Students can ask their questions from the podcast page
or call and leave a message at (503) 863-5625.
Click Here to Visit Web Site
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At
the Kennedy Center’s ARTSEDGE site, students discover
the who, what, where, when, why and how of storytelling through
interactive games, media galleries, lesson plans
and more. The site introduces students to the techniques that
storytellers use to bring stories to life. Interactive
demonstrations and quizzes help students appreciate and
master a storyteller’s primary tools: words, imagination, face,
body and voice.
Click Here to Visit Web Site
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Ed.VoiceThread
is a Web-based communications network for K–12 students and
educators. It’s an easy and safe place for creating and
collaborating on digital stories and documentaries, practicing and
documenting language skills, exploring geography and culture, solving
math problems or simply finding and honing student voices.
VoiceThread offers a free account allowing anyone involved in
education to participate. Audio commenting, text commenting, Webcam
commenting and Doodling are absolutely free. For a low annual
fee, Pro Users on VoiceThread have an increased capacity to create,
control, share, store and archive their work. Visit the Web site and
see it in action!
Click Here to Visit Web Site
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The
Crab Nebula, the Trapezium Cluster or Eta Carinae, a star 100 times
more massive than the Sun and 7,500 light-years away—those galactic
destinations and thousands of others can now be toured and explored
at the controls of a computer mouse, with the constellations, stars
and space dust displayed in vivid detail and animated imagery across
the screen. The project, the WorldWide Telescope, is the
culmination of years of work by researchers at Microsoft. The
project spans astronomy, education and computing. Educators hope its
rich images, animation and design for self-navigation will help
entice computer-gaming young people into astronomy and science in
general. The Web site and free downloadable software are
accessible by clicking below.
Click Here to Visit Web Site
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The
WWII What If Web site is the command center for all
activities related to a worldwide online history game. If
you’re a WWII history enthusiast, you can test your abilities and
help command one country of your choice. Can you change history? Do
you have the political skills necessary to guide your beloved country
down the path to success? Join the game and prove your mettle! Of
course, you are not required to play. Anyone can access the Web site
to watch and listen to the progress of the game as it plays out.
Click Here to Visit Web Site
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Learning
about gardens, flowers, vegetables and the principles of horticulture
can be a really fun experience for you and the children you teach.
The University of Illinois’s My First Garden Web site
is intended for elementary students to learn about the beauty of
gardens and the care involved in planning, nurturing and enjoying the
benefits of gardening in a variety of spaces and places. As students
go through the basics, the FUNdamentals and the process
of planning a garden, they will be acquiring skills that
will last a lifetime. The site is accessible in English and
Spanish.
Click Here to Visit Web Site
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