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April 15, 2011
Timely reminders, fabulous freebies, best sites & more "worth the surf"
In This Issue
Grants and Other Funding Sources
Awards, Competitions and Other “Winning” Opportunities
Free and Inexpensive Resources
Mobile Learning on the Move
Of Special Interest
STEM Gems
“Worth-the-Surf” Web Sites
Bookmark These!
In Partnership With:

Grants and Other Funding Sources

“Green” Your Environment
EPA Office of Environmental Education Grants support education projects that enhance the public’s awareness, knowledge and skills to help people make informed decisions that affect environmental quality. EPA awards grants each year based on funding appropriated by Congress; annual funding for the program ranges between $2 million and $3 million. Any local education agency, college or university, state education or environmental agency may submit a proposal. On March 21 and April 6, 2011, EPA hosted two conference calls for potential applicants interested in additional information about the application process. On the EPA site, you can listen to a recording or download and read the transcript of the April 6 conference call.
Deadline: May 2, 2011
Click Here for More Information
Nourish Students’ Potential
For more than 37 years, Campbell’s Labels for Education has been awarding free educational equipment to schools in exchange for proofs of purchase from the Campbell’s family of brands. Today more than 60,000 schools and organizations are registered with Labels for Education, benefiting more than 42 million students. Over the years, Campbell’s has provided more than $110 million in merchandise to America’s schools. Visit the initiative’s Web site to learn how you can help your school get involved. Also find tips and tools to manage and promote your school’s program, including information and resources in Spanish.
Deadline: Ongoing
Click Here for More Information
Click Here to Access Free Spanish Resources
Plus: Help your school earn even more with these bonus opportunities: Spring Double Submission (through May 31, 2011), Success Tips Bonus Offer, Show Off What You’ve Earned and Campbell’s Labels for Education Cookbook Promotion. Also encourage volunteers in your community and you could earn up to 2,000 bonus points in Labels for America.
Click Here for More Information
Plant Seeds That Grow Hope
Operation Green Plant grants, sponsored by the America the Beautiful Fund, is inviting applications for free vegetable, flower and/or herb seeds to help beautify roadways, parks and neighborhoods in school communities. To apply, applicants must write a short letter describing their gardening project, fill out the online application form and enclose a check for shipping and handling ($14.95 for the first 100 packets of seeds and $5.00 for each additional request of 100 packets of seeds).
Deadline: Ongoing
Click Here for More Information
Plus: America the Beautiful Fund is offering The Green Earth Guide, a CD-ROM containing illustrated gardening instructions and ideas on involving the whole community in your project. The guide is available for purchase at $12.95. For nutritional information, harvesting, storage and eating tips, Gardening for Optimal Nutrition, published by the Cortisa Press, is available in packets of 10, 30 and 250 for $10, $25 and $125, respectively.
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Awards, Competitions and Other “Winning” Opportunities

Win a 21st Century Classroom
CDW-G and Discovery Education have opened the ninth annual Win a Wireless Lab Sweepstakes, which will provide a $50,000 21st-century classroom to three grand-prize winners. Each classroom includes 20 notebook or tablet computers, an interactive whiteboard, student response devices, projector, document camera and more. Educators and school employees at public and private schools can enter once per day. From the entry page, participants can Tweet about the contest to earn an additional entry. New this year, the sweepstakes will capitalize on Twitter and Facebook to notify followers of special prizes awarded on select days throughout the contest period. To find out about these promotions, educators should follow @WinWirelessLab on Twitter and become a fan of Win a Wireless Lab on Facebook.
Deadline: May 2, 2011
Click Here for More Information
Hack into Education
Ten years ago, a teacher in the Bronx launched DonorsChoose.org. Since then, more than 165,000 teachers at 43,000 public schools have posted over 300,000 classroom project requests, inspiring $80,000,000 in giving from 400,000 donors. DonorsChoose.org has opened up that data and is inviting developers and data crunchers to make discoveries and build apps that improve education in America. Build the first mobile app for hyper-local education philanthropy and help to shape your school system’s budget by revealing what teachers really need. The Big Winner in the Contest for Developers and Data Crunchers will be chosen from the top finishers in each of these categories: Data Analysis, Javascript, .Net, PHP, Python, Ruby, Wildcard.
Deadline: June 30, 2011
Click Here for More Information
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Free and Inexpensive Resources

Teach in Three Dimensions
When working with children and trying to further their skills in visual literacy and digital media literacy, sometimes 2-D just isn’t enough these days. Moviesandbox is an open-source, real-time 3-D animation tool that allows you to quickly sketch and animate 3-D characters and props. Its focus is on ease of use and modularity. The idea is that you can simply draw objects in 3-D space and animate them later on with the built-in timeline. You can download the prerelease version at no charge.
Click Here to Download Free Animation Tool
Find and Use Free Technology
Every day Free Technology for Teachers suggests free Web sites and resources that teachers can use in their classrooms. The site is actually a blog authored by Richard Byrne, a history teacher at Oxford Hills Comprehensive High School in South Paris, Maine. You’ll also find eight free, downloadable ebooks that will give you a sense of what the blog is all about: The Super Book of Web Tools for Educators; How to Do 11 Techy Things in the New School Year; Google for Teachers: Books, Docs, Maps and More; Google for Teachers II; Google Earth Across the Curriculum; Beyond Google: Tips and Tools for Improving Internet Search Experiences; Twelve Essentials for Technology Integration; and Making Videos on the Web.
Click Here to Access Free Downloadable Guides
Help Children Understand and Respect Diversity
Out on a Limb: A Guide to Getting Along is an interactive online guide designed by the Urban Programs Resource Network at the University of Illinois to help children learn to manage conflicts peacefully while also having a lot of fun with Maria and her friends. The activities are designed primarily for third graders, but they can be used to entertain and educate youth from the second and fourth grades as well. The online guide is accessible in English, Spanish and Arabic.
Click Here to Access Free Online Guide
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Mobile Learning on the Move

Combine Imagination and Technology
Timbuktu, an iPad-only news magazine for children, combines colorful graphics and an entertainment-style format to present the news to an under-18 audience. Timbuktu is the brainchild of an Italian publisher who believes that children comprise a growing audience of mobile consumers who deserve their own publication. Presenting the news in an entertaining fashion, Timbuktu combines imagination and technology to display news and stories through the most advanced methods of education.
Click Here to Download Free App
Ride an Alligator to the Zizzer-Zazzer-Zuzz
The beloved classic Dr. Seuss's ABC is now available as an omBook for the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch from Oceanhouse Media. New features only available in this omBook include professional narration, background audio and enlarged artwork for each scene. To promote reading in young children, individual words are highlighted as the story is read, and words zoom up when pictures are touched. The app is based on the complete, original Dr. Seuss’s ABC book, not the shorter ABC board book. Listen to a sample and check out the other Dr. Seuss apps, including the free apps for Green Eggs and Ham and The Cat in the Hat.
Click Here to Download Free Apps
Guess What’s Being Built
Creationary is a Lego build-and-guess game that challenges students’ imagination, creativity, building and predicting skills with more than 300 bricks and accessories. The free touch-screen drawing program enhances eye–hand coordination and social skills as students work with one another or their teacher to complete a final project. With the LEGO Creationary app, students can guess what’s being built on an iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch. And they can share their scores with friends via email or on Facebook.
Click Here to Download Free App
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Of Special Interest

Get a Hall Pass to Dollars and Sense
The National Constitution Center plans to make Income Tax Day (Monday, April 18, 2011) fun for students with the free webcast Constitution Hall Pass: Dollars and Sense. The webcast, along with pre- and post-show questions to encourage class discussion, will be open all day. Also, from 7:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., constitutional experts and education staff will live-blog to offer insight into the history of Income Tax Day and its current relevance and to answer questions.
Click Here to Visit Web Site
Take a Fresh Look at the Civil War
Records left by the participants themselves—letters, orders, maps, telegrams, photographs and broadsides—and preserved in the National Archives provide new insight into the Civil War. To complement these primary sources, the Archives education specialists have produced articles with companion lesson plans related to Civil War history. Teaching with Documents contains reproducible copies of primary documents from the holdings of the National Archives and Records Administration and teaching activities correlated to social studies standards that include cross-curricular connections. Offerings include “Fugitive from Labor Cases: Henry Garnett (1850) and Moses Honner (1860)”; “The Civil War as Photographed by Mathew Brady”; “The Fight for Equal Rights: Black Soldiers in the Civil War”; “Letters, Telegrams, and Photographs Illustrating Factors That Affected the Civil War”; “Confederate Sympathizers in New Mexico During the Civil War”; “Georgia: The Atlanta Campaign of 1865—The Camera at War”; “Teachable Texts from the National Archives at New York City”; and “The Union Blockade: Lincoln’s Proclamations.” To help students explore these collections, have them use the links Search for documents, Collect favorites and Create a poster, movie or pathway challenge.
Click Here to Visit Web Site
Click Here to View All Resources
Gaze Upon Time
Portrait photographs of the young men who fought in the Civil War, as well as their wives and children, are the subject of a major exhibition at the Library of Congress. Nearly 30 ambrotype and tintype photographs showing both Union and Confederate soldiers are on display in Washington, D.C., and can be viewed online. The Civil War portraits depict ordinary men and their loved ones, and some rare images of African American soldiers.
Click Here to View Photo Collection
Plus: Some images can be seen through Flickr Commons, where viewers can assist in identifying individuals and photographers based on such clues as painted backdrops and regimental insignia.
Click Here to Visit Flickr Commons Web Site
See Democracy in Action
Facing History and Ourselves offers a free study guide, Democracy in Action, to accompany the powerful American Experience film Freedom Riders. The film will air on PBS on May 16, 2011 in honor of the 50th anniversary of this historic milestone in the civil right movement. Freedom Riders tells the story of a courageous band of civil rights activists who challenged segregation simply by traveling side by side on buses and trains through the Deep South in 1961. The study guide prompts students to consider the relationship between the political context in which the Freedom Rides took place and the stories and motivation of those students who became Freedom Riders. Facing History will host workshops in eight U.S. cities and will conduct two online webinars during the Fall of 2011 to assist teachers in planning creative lessons and units around the guide. Visit the Facing History Web site to download the PDF of the guide and view clips from the film along with other educator resources.
Click Here to Visit Web Site
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STEM Gems

Develop Children’s Natural Wonder
In 2008, the Jim Henson Co. and KCET/Los Angeles developed Sid the Science Kid for PBS KIDS. It was the first science show targeted at preschool-aged children. In each show, the title character asks a child’s typical question, such as “Where did my snowman go?” and discovers the answer in the course of the program. The Sid the Science Kid Web site is designed to further develop children’s natural wonder and build a strong foundation for early science exploration. Complementary online and offline activities motivate children to practice and internalize scientific methodology: Observe! Compare! Contrast! Describe! The site, which is crafted to support a collaborative learning experience between child and adult, offers features that help adult mentors to support and participate in children’s learning process.
Click Here to Visit Web Site
Learn Science with the “Science Guy”
KING-TV, Seattle’s NBC affiliate, first aired Bill Nye the Science Guy by the Cornell University engineer in 1993 while he was moonlighting as a stand-up comic. The show won 18 Emmys in its five years on air and has spun off several science shows, such as the Science Channel’s 100 Greatest Discoveries, The Eyes of Nye on PBS and Planet Green’s Stuff Happens. One section of the series Web site includes Home Demos, experiments students can try at home. Another section offers Episode Guides, a collection of lessons that helped to create each Bill Nye the Science Guy show. Also featured are some videos, with more being added in the coming weeks, as well as a number of Printable One Sheets. The latest project, Solving for X, is a collection of pre-algebra and algebra problems. Students can also challenge themselves by trying the Pop Quiz.
Click Here to Visit Web Site
Find Simple Science Ideas in Literature
The SimplyScience blog is for anyone who loves books and wants to include more science into their children’s literature and lessons. The blog reviews newly published children’s books, along with some old friends, and suggests simple science ideas that can be incorporated into your lessons that accompany the books discussed. Each week you’ll find fresh ideas that can help you add more science to your library or classroom activities. The blog’s host, Shirley Smith Duke, taught science and ESL in elementary, middle school and high school for 25 years and then began to write for children.
Click Here to Visit Web Site
Relive the First Human Spaceflight
The free online film First Orbit recreates the first human spaceflight, which took place 50 years ago on April 12, 1961. The film combines audio and video from Yuri Gagarin’s original 108-minute voyage with new footage from the International Space Station that matches the path of Gagarin’s orbit.
Click Here to View Free Film
Provide Individualized Math Practice
Designed for grades 1–6, Britannica SmartMath provides online math practice that adapts to each student’s ability. Unlike traditional math practice, SmartMath builds formative assessment into the learning process. Students who do well see more challenging questions, and students who struggle see progressively less difficult questions until they achieve success. With SmartMath, students spend more time on task because they are working at their own level and having fun, significantly improving their math skills and test scores. Try it out, for free, online.
Click Here for More Information
Click Here to Try Free Demo
Plus: Check out insideBritannica, a free monthly newsletter that includes tips to help librarians, teachers and students make use of the many educational resources in Britannica Online. Read previous editions of insideBritannica and learn more about this resource.
Click Here to Sign Up for Free Newsletter
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“Worth-the-Surf” Web Sites

See the Roots of Revolution Through the Eyes of Egyptian Youth
Join a free, live, international discussion with more than a dozen of Egypt’s young leaders as they share their experiences, hopes and aspirations for their new Egypt. The online discussion will take place on Monday, May 2, 2011. A group of youth from Boston, Massachusetts, will inspire the discussion by asking questions of the Egyptian youth leaders. Your school or classroom can log on, witness and participate in this discussion of the fight for freedom and democracy. The discussion will be facilitated by Professor Denis J. Sullivan, director of the International Affairs program and the Middle East Center for Peace, Culture and Development at Northeastern University. The event is sponsored by Empower Peace.
Click Here to Register for Discussion and View Log-on Schedule
Plus: If schedules don’t permit you or your students to participate in the live webcast, you can view the recorded event at your convenience starting Tuesday, May 3, 2011.
Learn About the Building Where Democracy Happens
The U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., is a symbol of the American people, a showcase of history and the meeting place of the nation’s leadership. The Capitol also houses an important collection of American art, and it is an architectural achievement in its own right. Visit the Architect of the Capitol (AOC) Web site to learn the story of the Capitol and its architect. In the Capitol Campus Multimedia section of the site, you can enter the Virtual Capitol, take an interactive look at Capitol Hill and view stunning 360º views of the Hill. You can also view videos on the AOC’s YouTube channel. Among the featured videos are Sustainability at the Capitol, a Capitol Campus Flyover, Sunset at the Capitol, the Capitol Building and the Jefferson Building Murals. This section of the Architect of the Capitol Web site also offers downloadable, high-quality digital images in JPEG format. The images are in the public domain.
Click Here to Visit Web Site
Click Here to View Capitol Campus Multimedia
Plus: The Statue of Freedom stands at the very top of the dome of the Capitol. This statue was designed in the mid-1850s, as arguments between Northern and Southern states reached a zenith. The statue was raised to the top of the Capitol dome in 1863, during the Civil War. Nestled within the history of this statue is a curious item: In 1859, at a crucial moment in its construction, a dispute brought everything to a halt. The responsibility of resolving the crisis fell to an enslaved black man named Philip Reid. The National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) has made available a lesson entitled “Philip Reid and the Statue of Freedom” to help students learn about this enslaved American and his key role during the construction of the Statue of Freedom.
Click Here to Access Free Lesson
Become Part of the Narrative
Inanimate Alice” is an example of transmedia—a story that unfolds over time and on multiple platforms. “Alice” connects technologies, languages, cultures, generations and curricula within a sweeping narrative accessible by all. Set in the early years of the 21st century, “Inanimate Alice” tells the story of Alice and her imaginary digital friend, Brad. In episode 1, Alice is living with her parents in a remote region of Northern China. Over the course of the remaining episodes, each a self-contained adventure, students see her develop into a talented animator and designer with the biggest games company in the world. Through text, sound, images, music and games, the story of Alice becomes increasingly interactive and gamelike, reflecting Alice’s own developing skills as a game designer and animator. Episode 2 takes place in Italy, episode 3 in Russia, episode 4 in Hometown; coming later are episodes 5–10. As Alice’s journey progresses, new storylines appear elsewhere, providing more details and insights, and enriching the tale through surprising developments. Students are encouraged to co-create developing episodes of their own, either filling in the gaps or developing new strands. The free, downloadable education pack directly involves teachers and learners in the “Inanimate Alice” experience. The pages include lessons on using a digital story to explore character development and paragraph structure and making connections with the story and the medium. Students apply knowledge through high-order thinking skills and emphasize the value of collaboration in a real-world context. The comprehensive lessons are aligned to the Common Core State English Language Arts Standards in the area of Reading Literature. The episodes are available on all devices capable of running Adobe’s Flash Player, and the content is multilingual, including Spanish.
Click Here to Visit Web Site
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Bookmark These!

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