Reduce Cost and Complexity of Virtualization
Virtual Bridges is offering K–12 organizations free desktop virtualization licenses until June 30 through its Teacher’s Pet campaign. The program will provide 50 free licenses for the company’s Verde VDI Gen2, which couples virtual desktop infrastructure with an offline hypervisor for regular desktop virtualization computing and local virtualization for use when students and staff are unable to access the network. With the Teacher’s Pet program, districts will also receive single server deployment, remote installation, troubleshooting, email support, annual maintenance of all 50 seats for $2,000 and a 50 percent discount on any additional licenses purchased within 60 days.
Deadline: June 30, 2011 for program registration
Click Here for More Information About Verde VDI Gen2
Click Here for More Information About Teacher’s Pet
Click Here to Register for Program

Improve Instruction in Math and Science
The Toshiba America Foundation (TAF) makes grants for projects in math and science designed by classroom teachers to improve instruction for students in grades 6–12. TAF is interested in funding projects designed by teachers or small teams of teachers for use in their own schools. Find examples of successful projects online.
Deadline: Applications for $5,000 or less accepted on a rolling basis throughout the calendar year; applications for grants of more than $5,000 due August 1, 2011
Click Here for More Information

Boost Achievement with Technology
Education technology has been added to the list of competitive priorities for the U.S. Department of Education’s Investing in Innovation Fund (i3), while STEM and rural schools gain “absolute” priority status for 2011. The Investing in Innovation Fund provides competitive grants designed to encourage programs that boost student achievement and college readiness, improve science education, turn around low-performing schools and support teacher/administrator effectiveness. The 2011 i3 grant program will provide up to $150 million in funding to support “innovative approaches” to school reform that propose to improve student achievement and attainment, and boost engagement in learning. This year’s recipients will be awarded grants ranging from $3 million to $25 million, depending on type of grant awarded.
Deadline: Applications for the 2011 round of funding are due August 2, 2011, although the Department of Education has posted a notice “strongly” encouraging applicants to provide notification of their intent to apply by June 23 through a simple online form.
Click Here for More Information

Demonstrate Your Writing Artistry
The Norman Mailer Center and the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) have announced the 2011 Norman Mailer Writing Award for High School Teachers. Full- and part-time high school teachers are invited to enter the competition. One winner will be selected from five finalists to receive a $10,000 cash prize; travel and lodging to attend the Norman Mailer Center’s Annual Gala on November 8, 2011, in New York City; and a fellowship to the prestigious Norman Mailer Writers Colony during the summer of 2012. Submissions will be read by national panels of teachers and will be judged by how well they achieve several qualities, including the artful treatment of subject matter, originality, quality of insight, voice and style, and overall aesthetic, emotional or intellectual effect. Stories that receive high ratings from the teacher panels will be submitted to a distinguished panel of authors selected by the Norman Mailer Center, who will choose the winning entry.
Deadline: July 27, 2011
Click Here for More Information

Beat the Wordsmiths
The Quiddler school competition is a challenge for K–12 students to team up to compete with the best word sleuths in the country. Students form teams, which their teacher registers; each team is then assigned an ID. Each day a team member (or the teacher) prints out the current day’s puzzle worksheet from the competition’s Web site. The worksheet has the day’s puzzle letters on it and shows the highest score attained. If students create words from the letters that add up to within 10 points of that score, their team qualifies to enter for that day. If they do this once a week for 25 weeks, their school wins an assortment pack of games made by Set Enterprises. Top scores are posted daily, so students can see how well their team is doing.
Deadline: Competition runs annually from August through July
Click Here for More Information

Connect with Schools Around the World
Exchange 2.0 – Technology-enabled International Interaction was developed by Connect All Schools to help teachers use the Internet to “reach out” globally. The materials were initially prepared as part of the U.S. Department of Education’s inaugural International Education Week in November 2000. This third version of the online guide has been prepared as part of the Department of Education’s effort to expand global awareness through collaboration between students and teachers in the United States with their peers around the world. Each section of the guide provides links to elementary, middle school and high school projects and links to organizations that are involved in international education via the Internet and Web 2.0 tools.
Click Here to Access Free Guide

Energize Students with Interactive Techniques
Kevin Yee, a professor at the University of Central Florida and assistant director of the university’s Karen L. Smith Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning, offers advice on how teachers can make their lessons more interactive. Yee is the author of “Interactive Techniques,” a collection of more than 100 teaching strategies—compiled from different sources—that aim to energize students and engage them in lessons. Some of the techniques involve technology. For example, in Follow the Leader, one student is appointed as tweeting “chairperson” responsible for posting the most important concepts discussed in the day’s class on Twitter. Other students follow the Twitter feed and “retweet” any discussions or disagreements. Other techniques are very “low-tech.” For example, in Pass the Chalk, one student is given a piece of chalk or a soft toy; whoever has it must answer your next question. That student then passes it on to the student of his or her choice.
Click Here to Download Free Collection of Interactive Techniques

Get to the Core
MasteryConnect recently released a free app with searchable Common Core Standards for K–12 mathematics and language arts. You can quickly find standards by subject, grade or subject category (domain/cluster). Download the free app in Apple’s iTunes App Store or the Android Market.
Click Here to Visit iTunes App Store
Click Here to Visit Android Market

Plus: Learn more about MasteryConnect’s free Web-based solution for teachers to track common core standards and parents to follow along.
Click Here to Visit Web Site

Try a Revolutionary Way to Teach History
Mission US, from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, is a multimedia project featuring free interactive adventure games set in different eras of United States history. The first game, Mission 1: For Crown or Colony?, puts the player in the shoes of Nat Wheeler, a 14-year-old printer’s apprentice in 1770 Boston. As Nat navigates the city and completes tasks, he encounters a spectrum of people living and working there when tensions mount before the Boston Massacre. Ultimately, the player determines Nat’s fate by deciding where his loyalties lie. Mission 2: Flight to Freedom, which focuses on resistance to slavery, is the next game to be launched. Other missions, as well as a broadcast special, are planned for release in 2012.
Click Here to Access Free Game

Plus: The Web site provides information and materials to support the use of Mission 1 in your classroom. You can freely download all the teacher materials as a Word document or PDF file.
Click Here to Access Free Teacher Materials

Help Support Safe Schools
What role can young people and adults play to help prevent incidents of bullying? How should they respond when bullying happens? And what kinds of choices help create and sustain schools that are safe for everyone? Facing History and Ourselves turned interviews with middle school students, psychologists and educators into a new online resource, Bullying: A Case Study in Ostracism, to explore those questions. The Web site shares details of this middle school story, including interview excerpts from the students involved and more than 30 video clips of psychologists and educators who address the incident and the larger issues the case raises. The Ostracism Case Study grew out of the Harvard–Facing History and Ourselves research on improving intergroup relations among youth.
Click Here to Access Free Resource

Encourage Summer Reading
What are you going to read this summer? Find great global literature for all ages in this resource guide compiled by the librarian at Primary Source. The Global Literature Resource Guide includes “Award-Winning Resources,” “Books for K–5,” “Books for 6–8,” “Grades 9–12 & Adult” as well as “Graphic Novels.”
Click Here to Access Free Guide

Plus: See “31 Days of Teens’ Top Ten” list of books on The Hub blog from the American Library Association’s Young Adult Library Services Association. Teens’ Top Ten is a “teen choice” list, where teens nominate and choose their favorite books of the previous year. Nominators are members of teen book groups in 15 school and public libraries around the country. Nominations are posted on Support Teen Literature Day during National Library Week, and teens across the country vote on their favorite titles each year. Encourage students, aged 12 to 18, to read all 25 books this summer and then get ready to vote for the 2011 list, August 22 through September 16. The winning books will be announced during Teen Read Week.
Click Here to Access Free Booklist

Write a Fractured Fairy Tale
Students aged 8 and up can learn about fractured fairy tales and write their own with the Fractured Fairy Tales interactive on the ReadWriteThink Web Site. First students read a short version of Jack and the Beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood or The Princess and the Pea. Then they choose which part or parts of the story they want to change—the characters, plot, setting, point of view, problem or ending. And finally they use those changes to write their own fractured fairy tale.
Click Here to Access Free Interactive

Camp Out with Other Educators
A growing number of EdCamps—voluntary, teacher-driven conferences—are being held across the United States, drawing teachers to participate in a less-structured form of professional development than districts typically offer. The camps are free and do not have keynote speakers, or sometimes schedules, but teachers are allowed to sign up and speak about topics that interest them.
Click Here for More Information

Tune In to Hear from Education Experts
ASCD’s Summer Boot Camp webinar series will commence on June 14 and run through August 23, 2011. New and veteran educators are encouraged to tune in throughout the summer for this lineup of free, hour-long webinars on topics ranging from the new teacher toolkit to effective supervision. All sessions are intended to support educators as they ramp up for the 2011–2012 school year. Listeners will hear from education experts, including education researcher and writer Robert Marzano, neurologist and teacher Judy Willis, Twitter #ntchat founder Lisa Dabbs and other prominent voices in education. ASCD members and nonmembers can sign up online for one or all of these free webinars.
Click Here to Sign Up for Free Webinars

Find Out Why Teachers Really Matter
American Teacher, a new documentary film produced by author Dave Eggers and former teacher Nínive Clements Calegari, seeks to counteract popular misconceptions about the teaching profession. The documentary, which is narrated by Matt Damon, portrays five high-performing educators from different parts of the United States as they face daily challenges and manage the logistics of their lives. The film intersperses the teachers’ stories with commentaries and statistics on teacher pay and workloads, rising attrition, falling student achievement and the notable differences in ways teachers are treated and supported in academically high-achieving countries, such as Finland, Singapore and South Korea.
Click Here for More Information

Plus: The nonprofit 826 National, the brainchild of Dave Eggers and Nínive Clements Calegari, cultivates writing skills in young students across the country through project-based learning. Focusing on K–12 students, the organization provides free writing workshops and one-on-one tutoring. The group also works with more then 60 schools, giving students the opportunity to participate in educational fieldtrips and to publish their work in book form. Since its inception in 2002, 826 National has grown to maintain eight locations in the United States and has served more than 23,000 students.
Click Here to Visit Web Site

Breathe Life into Your Science Teaching
Whether you want to teach young students about the inner workings of the eye, explore bioethics or teach lessons about neurobiology, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Office of Science Education offers modules that include detailed lesson plans with objectives, activities and assessment suggestions; texts for students and bibliographies for teachers; videos; and other materials that will help you breathe life into science lessons. Teachers can go deeper in their content knowledge by exploring the historical documents and research gathered in the teacher’s guide available with each lesson, while students participate in the lesson’s interactive Web activities. The Web site also features a “career finder” resource to help young people match their skills and interests to careers in the health and science fields. The LifeWorks application includes more than 100 career descriptions and interviews with adults who discuss their own paths to professional success, and a college and career planning guide helps students understand what types of skills they must master to prepare for higher education and a career in the health and science fields.
Click Here to Visit Web Site

Read the Research for Free
The National Academies Press (NAP) has made more than 4,000 of its science e-books free for downloading. For more than 140 years, the National Academies—National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine and National Research Council—have been advising the nation on issues of science, technology and medicine. Like no other collection of organizations, the Academies enlist the nation’s foremost scientists, engineers, health professionals and other experts to address the scientific and technical aspects of society’s most pressing problems. The results of their work are authoritative and independent studies published by the National Academies Press. Visit the NAP homepage and experience the new opportunities available to access these publications free of charge. There, you can sign up for MyNAP; subscribers will get all of NAP’s content delivered to them online for free.
Click Here to Visit Web Site

Recreate the Historic Midnight Ride
On the Web site for The Paul Revere House, in Boston, Massachusetts, students can take a virtual tour of the route Paul Revere took on his Midnight Ride, April 18 and 19, 1775, learn the true details of Revere’s famous ride and separate fact from fiction. They can also meet re-enactors who portray Paul Revere and other Revolutionary characters, watch artisans demonstrate colonial crafts, hear performers play early American music—and more.
Click Here to Visit Web Site

Bring the Nation’s Artistic Heritage to Your Students
Picturing America, from the National Endowment for the Humanities in cooperation with the American Library Association, brings the nation’s artistic heritage—our paintings, sculptures, architecture, fine crafts and photography—to all Americans. The program uses art as a catalyst for the study of America—the cultural, political and history threads woven into our nation’s fabric over time. Collectively, the masterpieces in Picturing America, used in conjunction with the Teachers Resource Book and program Web site, help students experience the humanity of history and enhance the teaching and understanding of America’s past.
Click Here to Visit Web Site

Plus: Each year public and school (K–12) libraries can apply for a We the People Bookshelf, a free set of classic books based on themes central to American history and culture. Applications are accepted online between September and January.
Click Here for More Information

Journey Through a History of Spanish America
The Vistas project at Smith College in Massachusetts seeks to bring an understanding of the visual culture of Spanish America to a broad audience. Spanish America was an extensive region—covering much of the Americas, running from California to Chile from the 16th century to the early 19th century. Its visual culture was forged in urban centers, religious and frontier communities, and indigenous towns. The Vistas Web site offers easy access in English and Spanish to key components of this project. The Web site provides a gallery of more than 100 color images, interpretive essays and a searchable bibliography on visual culture. The site also includes a glossary of English and Spanish terms related to Spanish American history.
Click Here to Visit Web Site in English
Click Here to Visit Web Site in Spanish

Explore a Chinese House
Yin Yu Tan, a late Qing dynasty merchants’ house, was originally located in southeastern China. Re-erected at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, Yin Yu Tan is now open to visitors. Explore the house online to discover this rare example of the region’s renowned architecture and to learn about the daily life of the Huang family, who lived in Yin Yu Tang for more than 200 years. The Peabody Essex Museum’s Web site takes you on a virtual tour of the house with print and audio narratives, pictures, videos and copies of correspondence sent between family members.
Click Here to Visit Web Site

Plus: Check out this Primary Source World activity, which includes questions and documents related to the house to make connections between geography and Chinese culture for students in grades 5–12.
Click Here to Access Free Activity

Record What You See in Nature
The biology Web site iNaturalist.org is a place where you can record what you see in nature, meet other nature lovers and learn about the natural world. To help save the 6,813 known species of amphibians (and those that haven’t been identified by science yet), iNaturalist.org recently launched the Global Amphibian Blitz, a citizen science–social networking drive to gather information on amphibians around the world. Participants are being asked to photograph frogs they encounter and then upload their photos to the iNaturalist site along with GPS information on where the photos were taken. (The iNaturalist iPhone app can automatically add that GPS information.) iNaturalist.org was founded as a master’s degree project in 2008 by Ken-ichi Ueda and two other University of California Berkeley students. Its most recent project prior to the Amphibian Blitz was a citizen science effort to identify the range and characteristics of redwood trees. For an introduction on participating in the Global Amphibian Blitz, check out the video on the site.
Click Here to Visit Web Site

Starting June 16, 2011, K12TeacherStore.com will provide a 15% discount on all eBooks published by The Teaching and Learning Company (TLC). TLC offers more than 280 eBooks on innovative teaching methods and strategies in regular and enhanced formats, including the popular Four Square Writing and Math Phonics series and practical, ready-to-use materials on such topics as writing notes to send home to parents and rewarding students’ achievements. To take advantage of this offer, which expires June 27, 2011, activate coupon code NTL138 in your shopping cart. Visit the Web site to see TLC’s offerings.
Deadline: Click Here to Visit Web Site
http://www.inaturalist.org/

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