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May 15, 2008
Timely reminders, fabulous freebies, best sites & more "worth the surf"
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In Partnership With:
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Save
Our History is a national history education and preservation
initiative that seeks to raise awareness and support for preserving
local heritage. Elementary, middle and high school teachers who teach
American, state or local history in a social studies or history class
are eligible to apply for up to $10,000 in project funds.
Deadline: June 6, 2008
Click Here for More Information
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National
Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Grants for Learning in the
Arts are given to advance arts education for children and youth
in school-based or community-based settings. The program supports
in-depth, curriculum-based arts education experiences that occur over
an extended period. Projects must provide participatory learning and
engage students with skilled artists, teachers and excellent art. The
amount of the award varies.
Deadline: June 9, 2008
Click Here for More Information
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The
Live Monarch Foundation Educator Outreach Program provides
funding for teachers throughout the United States to enroll in the
national campaign to bring monarch butterflies into the classroom.
The program provides education and materials to strengthen the
monarch’s 3,000-mile migratory route within North America by
creating self-sustaining butterfly gardens and refuges. Materials
will be provided for each participant to raise a virtual butterfly
and start a real butterfly garden with professional instruction on
each level of its maintenance and care.
Deadline: Rolling
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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Asia
Society and The Goldman Sachs Foundation have announced
the 2008 Youth Prizes for Excellence in International
Education. The 2008 competition asks students to create an
in-depth written essay or multimedia feature examining a social or
economic issue that has relevance to them in a global context. In the
essay category, students will compare and contrast how the
issue affects their community and a community abroad, as well as
create recommendations for what lessons the two communities could
learn from each other. In the multimedia category, students
will explore how a global problem or challenge affects their life as
an individual, as a member of their local community and/or as a
global citizen. Five winners will be selected to receive up to
$10,000 each.
Deadline: June 12, 2008
Click Here for More Information
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The
Bridgestone Firestone 2008 Safety Scholars Video Contest will
award college scholarships for the most compelling and
effective videos that drive home life-saving messages on auto and
tire safety. The three top student filmmakers will each win a $5,000
college scholarship and a new set of tires; ten finalists will also
each win a new set of tires.
Deadline: June 24, 2008
Click Here for More Information
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The
M.Y.O.B Entrepreneurial Challenge is for all future female
moguls. To enter the competition, female students submit an original
idea for the creation of a business that can be successfully
implemented and/or brought to market. The grand-prize winner will
receive $10,000; four finalists will receive sponsor packages worth
$50 each.
Deadline: June 30, 2008
Click Here for More Information
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Plus:
The site provides useful tips for coming up with great
business ideas.
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The
Design Squad Trash to Treasure Competition, sponsored
by Intel®, challenges students to recycle, reuse and
re-engineer everyday materials into “out-of-the-box” inventions.
The grand-prize winner will receive $10,000, a trip to Boston to see
his/her design built and an Intel® processor technology-based
laptop; four finalists will also receive Intel-powered laptops.
Deadline: June 30, 2008
Click Here for More Information
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Plus: The
site offers handy tips for cranking out great ideas.
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States
may soon have less flexibility in defining when a child is fluent in
English and is no longer eligible for English-language classes,
according to a new U.S. Department of Education proposal.
The federal government is moving to put states on notice that they
will have to use a consistent set of criteria in reporting how
well English learners are doing in acquiring the language. Among the
specific proposals: (1) An English learner must score as proficient
or above in all language domains—reading, writing, speaking and
listening—on the state’s English-language-proficiency test to be
considered to have attained proficiency. (2) All students will have
to be included in measurements of student progress regardless of
whether they have participated in at least two consecutive and
consistent annual administrations of the state’s
English-language-proficiency test. (3) States’ definitions for
attaining proficiency in English must be consistent with and reflect
the same criteria states use to determine that ELLs no longer need
services and are prepared to exit programs.
Click Here to Access Full Government Proposal
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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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Indiana
University has recently set up a free Web-based
learning tool that allows high school students to get instant
feedback on chemistry questions. The tool, called
CALM (Computer Assisted Learning Method), is based on a Socratic
pedagogy. It provides both students and faculty with assessment about
the comprehension of a particular chemistry topic.
Click Here to Access Tutorial and Demonstration
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The
Harvey Mudd College mathematics department has created a site
with ideas and puzzles designed to change the way
students think about mathematics. Activities address high-interest
areas, such as the math behind card shuffling, fractals and music.
The site was designed as a resource for enriching math courses and
nurturing interest and talent in mathematics.
Click Here to Access Free Math Puzzles
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Filamentality
is a fill-in-the-blank tool that guides you through picking a
topic, searching the Web, gathering good Internet links and turning
them into a Webquest. Support is built in through “Mentality
Tips” that guide you along the way. In the end, you’ll create a
Web-based activity you can share with others.
Click Here to Access Free Webquest Tool
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Educational
Simulations’ Real Lives 2007 gives students the
opportunity to learn how people in other countries really live. In
this simulation, students take on the persona of a peasant farmer in
Bangladesh, a Brazilian factory worker, a police officer in Nigeria,
a Polish computer operator or a lawyer in the United States, among
others, experiencing those lives based on real-world statistical
data.
Click Here to Download Free Game
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RaceBridges
for Schools offers resources to help teachers and administrators
create a school climate that fosters knowledge of and respect for
diversity. The lesson plans on this site assist teachers in
building community in their classrooms while honoring the wide range
of differences among their students. The resources for
administrators offer suggestions for providing diversity awareness
activities to faculty and staff and for designing institutional
structures to address the diversity of the school community.
Click Here to Access Free Diversity Resources
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The
MIT Teacher Education Program, in conjunction with The
Education Arcade, has been working on creating “Augmented
Reality” simulations to engage people in simulation games that
combine real-world experiences with additional information supplied
to them by handheld computers. The first of these games,
Environmental Detectives, is an outdoor
game in which players using GPS-guided handheld computers try to
uncover the source of a toxic spill by interviewing virtual
characters and conducting large-scale simulated environmental
measurements and analyzing data.
Click Here to Visit Web Site
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Revolution
is the Education Arcade’s multiplayer American
Revolution–themed role-playing game based on historical events
in the town of colonial Williamsburg. Set in 1775, on the eve of
violent revolt in the colony of Virginia, the game gives students an
opportunity to experience the daily social, economic and political
lives of the town’s inhabitants. By allowing role-play from one of
seven social perspectives—for example, an upper-class lawyer, a
patriotic blacksmith, an African American house slave—Revolution
places students in a situated learning context. Games respond to
player choice: one’s actions have real consequences that depend on
one’s politics, gender and class standing in colonial society.
Click Here to Visit Web Site
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On
this Kennedy Center ARTSEDGE site, you can trace the
blues from its early beginnings in southern American fields to its
global impact on music today. Through informative interviews
and a wealth of music clips, you’ll learn the ins and outs
of blues music and find out how the history of the blues has
been brought to life on stage at the Kennedy Center.
Click Here to Visit Web Site
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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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The
University of Colorado’s Physics Education Technology
(PhET) site
engages students with fun, interactive simulations of
physical phenomena. More than 35 simulations let students
experiment with circuits, string tension, kinetic and potential
energy, radio waves and electromagnetic fields, balloons and static
electricity, ideal gas and buoyancy, velocity and acceleration, sound
waves and the Doppler effect—and more!
Click Here to Visit Web Site
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The
Weather Channel presents a set of realistic weather conditions in
this interactive educational resource. Middle school students will
learn how to make important safety decisions during severe weather
events when they become virtual youth interns in the SafeSide®
Severe Weather Challenge. The learning activity lets students
take control as they manage the Severe Weather Command Center and
field questions from virtual families around the country. The
multimedia, Flash-based activity uses actual forecasts from on-air
meteorologists and footage from real storms. A stormtracker also
provides clues via video.
Click Here to Visit Web Site
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In2Books®
is an e-mentoring program from ePals, which embeds
literacy across the curriculum. The program is available to
Title I schools at no cost during the 2008–09 school year.
Students participating in In2Books select and read age-appropriate,
high-quality books from a list compiled by a team of children’s
literature experts. The students are matched with carefully screened
adult penpals who read the same books as the students. After
reading each book, students and their penpals exchange thoughts about
the important issues in the book via online letters.
Click Here to Visit Web Site
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Plus:
In2Books features Student Place, a dedicated Web site that
helps students be self directed and make intelligent choices about
books they would like to read based on genre and by sampling passages
from the book, trying out the readability and exploring the author’s
style. In addition, the Web site offers a scaffolded writing
environment and literacy tips to help students enhance their reading
and writing skills. Teachers are supported through a dedicated Web
site, Teacher Place®, which includes detailed lesson plans
and instructional tips and forums linking them to other educators
implementing In2Books in their classrooms.
Click
Here to Visit Student Place
Click Here to Visit Teacher Place
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