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April 15, 2011
Timely reminders, fabulous freebies, best sites & more "worth the surf"
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In Partnership With:
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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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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
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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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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
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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
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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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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
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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
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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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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
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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
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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
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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
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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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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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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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
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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.
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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
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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
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“ 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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a free
copy of The
Big Deal eBook of Resources for 21st Century Teaching & Learning.
Explore this collection of resources to help students locate, evaluate,
use and mange information efficiently; interpret and communicate
messages effectively; and master the digital tools to become informed
citizens and productive 21st century workers.
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Explore
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Wednesday
feature on
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Here you’ll find
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experiences and
resources
that incorporate 21st
century themes
and skills
into the study of core subjects.
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