Supplement Your Stretched Budget
GetEdFunding is CDW-G’s new website to help educators and institutions find the funds they need to supplement already stretched budgets. GetEdFunding is a free and fresh resource, which hosts a collection of more than 850 grants and opportunities culled from federal, state, regional and community sources and available to public and private, prekindergarten through grade 12 educators, schools and districts, higher education institutions and nonprofit organizations that work with them. The site offers customized searches by six criteria, including 41 areas of focus, eight content areas and any of the 21st century themes and skills that support your curriculum. Once you are registered on the site, you can save the grants of greatest interest and then return to read about them at any time.
Click Here to Visit Website

Rap Up the Year
In partnership with Flocabulary, creators of the Week in Rap and the Year in Rap, The New York Times Learning Network is running a contest inviting students aged 13–25 to submit their own 2012 Year in Rap lyrics. Students should choose at least four important New York Times stories from one of these news categories: World, US, Business, Technology, Science, Health, Sports, Arts, Fashion, Obituaries. In writing their raps, students can focus on a smaller topic found within a section in The Times rather than covering the full range of news from a section. For example, they can write a rap based on just the 2012 presidential election or Hurricane Sandy rather than on a range of national news this year. Students’ raps should be 12 to 16 lines long. The top five raps, as judged by The Times and Flocabulary staff, will be featured on both The Learning Network web page and on Flocabulary.com.
Deadline: Lyrics must be posted on The Learning Network website by January 7, 2013
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Plus: Flocabulary has supplied a lesson plan and rubric to help you guide your students through the rap-writing process. The site also includes an interview with a music teacher who took the contest last year a step further on her own as well as a Soundcloud file of the results.
Click Here for Free Lesson Plan
Click Here to Listen to Interview

Build Bridges of Mutual Understanding
The Kennedy–Lugar Youth Exchange and Study (YES) Abroad Program is offering scholarships to American high school students to spend the 2013–2014 academic year in countries that may include Bosnia & Herzegovina, Egypt (tentative), Ghana, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mali (tentative), Morocco, Oman, South Africa, Thailand and Turkey. This post–9/11 program focuses on increasing understanding between people in the United States and countries with significant Muslim populations. YES Abroad students serve as “youth ambassadors” of the United States, promoting mutual understanding by forming lasting relationships with their host families and communities. Participants live with a host family, attend a local high school, acquire leadership skills and engage in activities to learn about the host country’s society and values while helping to educate others about American society and values. For more details, click on any of the participating countries listed on the website. The YES Abroad program is administered in partnership with the US Department of State by a consortium of nonprofit organizations led by American Councils for International Education and including AFS-USA, AMIDEAST and iEARN-USA.
Deadline: January 10, 2013 for applications
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Take the Science Fair into Cyberspace
The US Army’s eCYBERMISSION is a free, web-based Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) competition in which students in grades 6–9 compete against other students in their grades for state, regional and national awards. Teams consisting of three to four students and a team advisor work to solve problems in their community utilizing the scientific method, scientific inquiry or engineering design process. Up to $24,000 in US EE Savings Bonds will be awarded in the competition. At the state level, first-place winners will each receive $1,000 in US EE Savings Bonds; at the regional level, $2,000 in US EE Savings Bonds; and at the national level, $5,000 in US EE Savings Bonds. (All Savings Bonds are valued at maturity.)
Deadline: January 15, 2013 for team registration; see website for complete competition schedule
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Get Students Thinking Critically About National Issues
C-SPAN’s StudentCam is an annual national video documentary competition that encourages students to think seriously about issues that affect their communities and the nation. Students are asked to create a short (five- to eight-minute) video documentary on a topic related to the theme “Message to the President”: What’s the most important issue the president should consider in 2013? The competition is open to all students in grades 6–12. Students in grades 6–8 compete in the Middle School category; students in grades 9–12, in the High School category. Students may compete individually or in teams of either two or three members. Seventy-five student prizes and 11 teacher prizes, totaling $50,000, will be awarded in the two separate categories.
Deadline: Documentaries must be uploaded and received at C-SPAN by midnight on January 18, 2013. Winners will be announced on the StudentCam website on March 6, 2013.
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Support Students in Pursuit of Technology Careers
High school seniors from across the country will have a chance to vie for scholarship money in the Investing in Our Future competition from eSchoolView. Awards will be given in two categories, Web Design and Web Technology, for a total of eight scholarships with the following breakdown: One – $5,000, Two – $2,500 and Five – $1,000. The Web Design Contest is for high school seniors interested in pursuing graphic design, web design or other arts. Students entering the design contest are required to develop a home page and one interior page for a website. The site should be related to a school class or club and should reflect a collaborative effort between the “client” and the designer. The Web Technology Contest asks students to develop creative ways to use web technology in education. Students who enter the technology category are asked to develop and describe creative uses for web technology in education. Each contest—for which students will also be required to submit videos detailing their work—will be graded by a panel of education professionals. Schools do not need to be eSchoolView clients for their students to be eligible to enter. Students may submit up to three entries in each category.
Deadline: February 1, 2013 for entries; winners notified in March 2013
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Enhance Learning Through Discovery
Smithsonian Quests is a digital badging program that connects and rewards classes as they learn through discovery and collaboration. From the art world to the zoo, from underwater to outer space, from current problems to future solutions, students can explore their interests and make connections across subjects. For the badge H2O Hero, for example, students learn about water-saving steps. They calculate their own “water footprint” by considering all the different ways they use water directly and indirectly and then brainstorm advice to share with friends and family. Try these fun projects with your students in the new year.
Click Here to Register for Free Online Program

Zoom In, Zoom Out, See All Sides
The 3DToad website hosts images that viewers can zoom in on and rotate 360 degrees. The site is designed to provide educators and students with images that are useful for instruction. The galleries include images related to history, geology, chemistry, skeletons, fossils and more. Click and hold on any image to rotate it. Double-click to zoom in on it. A concise caption accompanies each image.
Click Here to Access Free 3-D Images

Access the News in Kid-Friendly Language
Teaching Kids News (TKN) features timely and relevant news stories written on a level that students can comprehend. Beyond making the vocabulary accessible, TKN provides context for everything in each news story so students can understand what’s going on and why. A set of discussion questions, writing prompts, reading prompts and vocabulary words accompany each daily news stories. The curriculum connections encourage students to think critically not only about the story itself, but also about the way the story is presented. Does the journalist have a bias? What is it, and how might the story be written differently by another journalist? TKN is based in Canada, but the news stories are relevant regardless of where students live.
Click Here to Access Free Daily News Stories

Transform Core Practices Through Arts Integration
Education Closet is where arts integration, innovation and education converge. Developed by Susan Riley, an Arts Integration Specialist in Maryland who has also taught K–5 General/Vocal Music, the lessons in the Education Closet focus on arts integration, Common Core State Standards, 21st century learning skills and technology. For example, a seventh-grade lesson features use of the stippling technique as a way to convert graphical data into meaningful context. The lesson has been designed using seventh-grade Common Core math standards for statistics, as well as seventh-grade visual arts standards. Plus, the lesson has been developed keeping the STEM practices in mind, so it can easily be turned into a full-blown STEAM lesson. Another lesson, for high school students, uses the drama technique of “hot-seating” to explore the complex relationships of the Second Continental Congress on July 1, 1776—immediately in advance of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. In this lesson, students investigate one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence before the day arrived and become an advocate for that person’s position. The “hot-seat” technique is used during the Class Congress as a way for students to explore and truly feel what it might have been like in that hot room on July 1, 1776. The lesson correlates with tenth-grade Speaking and Listening Common Core Standards with Drama processes to produce a fascinating account of what could have been in 1776. Find these and other arts integration lessons for K–12 in the Education Closet—all organized by grade level or grade cluster.
Click Here to Access Free Lesson Plans

Build College-and-Career-Ready Literacy Skills
The Literacy Design Collaborative (LDC) is a loosely affiliated group of partners in education charged with designing model Core Curriculum units of study to ensure that secondary teachers have strong supports for teaching literacy in content areas. The free downloadable Guidebook is the main document used to explain LDC. The free LDC Template Tasks are fill-in-the-blank “shells” built off the Common Core standards. They allow teachers to insert the texts to be read, writing to be produced and content to be addressed. When filled in, template tasks create high-quality student assignments that develop reading, writing and thinking skills in the context of learning science, history, English and other subjects. LDC Modules help teachers teach students to succeed on assignments created using LDC Template Tasks. The modules are built on a common “chassis” so instruction can be shared across a wide variety of grades, content areas and instructional approaches. “Anatomy of a Module” is a print-ready handout that gives an overview of the LDC Modules. The handout is available to freely download in color or black and white.
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Transition into a New Era of Teaching and Learning
The EduCore website offers a range of resources that help teachers shift instruction to align with the Common Core standards. In the Literacy Tools section, the Introduction and Supplemental Resources tab leads to videos of teachers who have used tools created by the Literacy Design Collaborative (LDC) to create compelling projects. The Math Tools section offers many secondary-level formative assessment lessons, as well as a webinar series on tools created by the Math Assessment Project. Under the Video Library tab, you’ll find webinars by experts who explore such topics as text complexity, the principal’s role and differentiation.
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Go on a Common Core Treasure Hunt
Courtesy of the Kansas State Department of Education, Treasure Hunt through the Common Core State Standards leads teachers through the standards documents to locate answers to 19 questions, such as What are the three factors used to measure text complexity? or What three text types are covered in each of the Common Core writing strands? The treasure hunt is an engaging way for teachers to become familiar with the new standards.
Click Here to Download Free Treasure Hunt

Meet the Standards Today with the Teaching Tools of Tomorrow
ePals has created a digital space to help teachers get to the heart of the matter in implementing the new Common Core State Standards. The Common Core Implementation Center is designed by teachers for teacher with free teaching resources ready to use in the classroom. Innovative classroom projects weave multiple Common Core ELA Standards into authentic learning experiences. A searchable, growing library of ready-to-go projects, teaching tools and lessons engages students and improves CCSS learning. A self-directed learning community offers direct access to experts through forums, blogs and articles, research-based teaching technique tutorials and a teaching strategy index. And open forums and galleries make it easy for teachers to share and connect to classrooms.
Click Here to Visit Website

Improve Accessibility and Efficiency of Online Assessments
The Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium has released guidelines for school computers, tablets and other devices that will be used for online testing under the Common Core State Standards. Under the guidelines, devices must have 10-inch screens, a keyboard, Internet access and the ability to disable certain functions that could be used for cheating during assessments. The full Smarter Balanced Technology Strategy Framework and Systems Requirements Specifications report can be accessed online.
Click Here to Access Systems Requirements

Share Understanding of Subject Matter
ReadWriteThink’s Trading Cards app for the iPad offers a unique way for students to share their understanding of various topics, to build study aids for school or to create their own fictional world of characters. Students can create trading cards for any number of categories. For example, students can build a collection of cards for characters from their favorite book, landmarks in their favorite city, events from a period in history they find interesting or vocabulary words by school subject. Each category has specific guiding questions for creating an information-rich trading card. Completed trading cards can be shared via email, printed or saved to the iPad’s camera roll. The app is available free of charge from the International Reading Association (IRA) in the iTunes App Store.
Click Here to Access Free iPad App

Plus: ReadWriteThink’s Trading Card Creator on the web offers the same creation features that are found in the iPad app.
Click Here to Access Free Web Tool

Teach a Robot to Move
Cargo-Bot is an engaging game for the iPad that challenges students to learn principles of logic and programming. The object of the game is to program a robot to complete increasingly complex sequences of tasks. Students start by programming the robot to move one box from point A to point B. After successfully programming the robot to move the box, students advance to programming more complex tasks, such as a repeating loop of movements and staggered movements. Cargo-Bot is the first game to be programmed entirely on the iPad. The app can be downloaded free of charge in the iTunes App Store.
Click Here to Visit Website
Click Here to Access Free App

Investigate How the Brain Functions
3D Brain is a free Android app that students can use to learn about the parts of the human brain. Students use their touch screen to rotate and zoom around the interactive brain structures. They will discover how each brain region functions, what happens when it is injured and how it is involved in mental illness. Each detailed structure comes with information on functions, disorders, brain damage, case studies and links to modern research.
Click Here to Access Free App

Explore Environmental Search Trends
Using Google Green, students can build a “green search scrapbook” that highlights the top environmental search trends of the year. They build their scrapbook by responding to seven prompts. For example, the first prompt is, I would never have guessed that ... to which students respond by selecting one of 10 search topics presented to them. After they make a selection, students search for information about that topic.
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Bring the Past Alive in Your Classroom
Colonial Williamsburg’s new Electronic Field Trips are live, interactive lessons that explore the contentious election of 1800, Native American relations, music in 18th-century culture, the slave trade, the mercantile system and the way apprentices became tradesmen. Although aimed at grades 4–8, the cross-curricular lessons can be used with a variety of grade levels as well as English language learners. Three eight-minute acts are online and on-demand all school year long. They also are available live by television broadcast, satellite or streaming video on scheduled dates during the school year. In addition, students can become part of the broadcast: they can call in during the program and one hour afterward, email a character/expert during the week of the live broadcast, submit a pre-taped video to the show in advance or share what they’re working on via live video chat. Online teacher materials include a topic-specific background article, lesson plans, timeline, glossary, primary sources literacy lesson, bibliography for teachers and students, web links, related national standards and searchable state standard correlations for grades 4–8. See the 2012–2013 schedule and view a sample act from The Will of the People.
Click Here to Visit Website
Click Here to View Sample Field Trip

Join a Network of Student Journalists
ePals has launched News Now, a new learning center dedicated to helping high school students learn professional news and editorial reporting skills. The center provides resources aligned with “real world” journalism practices and communications standards, such as the Common Core Standards in the United States. Collaboration is at the heart of News Now, with students encouraged to contribute articles and critique and share comments with peers from around the world. A series of topic areas and “assignment desks,” organized by genre, allow students to publish and learn simultaneously as they create and post their own work alongside that of professional journalists.
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Browse K12TeacherStore.com for a wide variety of products published by leading K–12 education companies, all of them delivered digitally. Many of the ebooks can be used on interactive whiteboards and various mobile reading devices. All of the books whose covers you see displayed are on sale at a 15% discount. To stay informed about what’s going on with ebooks in K–12 schools, sign up for the free enewsletter, K12 TeacherFile.

Download a free eBook of the popular print edition of The Big Deal Book of Technology for K–12 Educators. Explore the many opportunities to fund your special programs, access timely reports and articles, locate free and inexpensive resources and identify engaging interactive Web sites.

Get a free copy of The Big Deal eBook of Resources for 21st Century Teaching and Learning: From the 3Rs to the 4Cs. Explore this collection of resources to help students move beyond the 3Rs and embrace the 4Cs—Communication, Collaboration, Critical Thinking and Creativity—the 21st century skills cited by industry as keys to innovation and invention in an increasingly challenging global economy.

Sign up at The Big Deal Book Web site for hELLo!, a free quarterly ELL e-newsletter that includes a wealth of information on interactive resources for students, teachers, librarians, principals and others involved in the education of English language learners.

Join The Big Deal Book of Technology’s “Amazing Resources for Educators” community on the edWeb to get more frequent updates on grant deadlines, free resources and hot new sites for 21st century learning. And, of course, you can share any great new resources that you’ve unearthed!

Browse the new Big Deal eBookstore, in partnership with K12TeacherStore.com! Find thousands of titles from your favorite educational publishers.

Explore the Web Wednesday feature on www.bigdealbook.com. Here you’ll find new interactive experiences and resources that incorporate 21st century themes and skills into the study of core subjects.