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Make Sense of iPads, Celebrate Literacy, Tap the Cat in the Hat & More
October 1, 2013
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IN THIS ISSUE
 Grants, Competitions and Other “Winning” Opportunities
Resource Roundup
Online Education Plus
On-the-Go Learning
STEM Gems
“Worth-the-Surf” Websites
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In Partnership With: 
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Grants, Competitions and Other “Winning” Opportunities
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Strengthen High School STEM Teaching
The Knowles Science Teaching Foundation awards fellowships in the areas of biological sciences, mathematics and physical sciences to support high school math and science teachers from the onset of the credentialing process through the early years of their careers. The award includes professional workshops, materials grants and access to a teacher-to-teacher mentoring network, valued at $150,000. To be eligible, applicants need to have earned at least a bachelor’s degree in an area relevant to the subject they plan to teach before the fellowship begins in June. Candidates for Physical Science, Mathematics or Biological Science Teaching Fellowships must enroll in a secondary teacher credential program before the fellowship is awarded. Individuals who have completed the fourth year of a five-year combined bachelor’s and credential program by the start of the fellowship are also eligible to apply, as well as those currently enrolled in a teacher education program who will be first-year teachers in the fall of 2014.
Deadline: October 15, 2013, for applications
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Put Your World on a Map
The American Geosciences Institute (AGI) is sponsoring a photography contest to celebrate Earth Science Week 2013 (October 13–19). The photography theme for this year is Mapping My Community. The contest is open to interested persons of any age, who are US residents. Entries must be original, authentic, unpublished photographs that show how maps are used in the community. The winner will receive a cash prize of $300 and a copy of AGI’s Faces of Earth DVD. The winner’s name and photograph, as well as the names of the finalists, will be posted on the Earth Science Week website.
Deadline: October 18, 2013, for entries
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Decide How the Story Ends
In celebration of National Literacy Month, LEGO Education has announced a storytelling essay contest—It’s Your Adventure, Where Will You Go?—for grades 2–5. The contest encourages teachers to leverage LEGO Education’s StoryStarter to have students creatively construct and write a story’s beginning, middle and ending. Students participate by responding to an essay prompt with a 100- to 200-word creative story. Teachers work with students to build the story with StoryStarter LEGO bricks, upload photos of those builds into the StoryStarter Visualizer software and then write their story for submission. The grand-prize winner will receive a model build of their school mascot, and two runners-up will receive a $1,000 gift card.
Deadlines: Submissions due by 5 p.m. (CST), October 21, 2013; winners announced on November 4, 2013
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Enter The Big Deal Book of Technology Take-It-With-You Contest!
The Big Deal Book of Technology is a small book with BIG staying power! Our readers say that they keep their books close by as the go-to resource for the best curated mix of grant opportunities, newest apps, interactive web destinations and more. Now here’s another way to put this go-everywhere book to good use:
“Like” Big Deal Media on Facebook and then enter the Take-It-With-You Contest by posting a photo of you, with a copy of The Big Deal Book of Technology in hand, on our timeline. (Provide a brief description of the locale and, of course, your name!) If you don’t have a hard copy of the publication, you can download a copy (or just the cover) from http://www.bigdealbook.com.
Each month through October 31, 2013, we’ll give away one $50 gift card to Starbucks, Amazon or Barnes & Noble, to the photo capturing the most “likes” during the month posted. (Feel free to send a different photo each month.) We’ll announce each month’s winner on our Facebook page.
Click Here to Enter Take-It-With-You Contest
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Discover the Power of Technology
Samsung and its partners invite teachers to participate in Samsung’s 2014 “Solve for Tomorrow” Education Contest. The competition is intended to promote science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education, foster student interest in these subjects and illustrate the power of applying that knowledge to practical, real-world issues. In prior years, the focus of the “Solve for Tomorrow” challenge was on improving the environment in students’ local communities; this year the scope has expanded to any other way STEM can help improve their communities. Two hundred fifty-five state finalists will each receive two Samsung tablets, and 51 state winners (representing all 50 states plus Washington, D.C.) will each receive technology packages worth $20,000. From that pool of 51, the public will have an opportunity to choose the 15 national finalists (receiving technology packages worth $30,000) from February 14 to March 13, 2014. The five national winners will each receive a prize package valued at $146,000 and will be honored at an awards ceremony in Washington, D.C. The Environmental Innovation Award, a special prize valued at $50,000, will be awarded by the National Environmental Education Foundation (NEEF) to one of the 51 state winners.
Deadline: October 31, 2013
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Launch a Mission to Solve Real Problems
Sponsored by the US Army, eCYBERMISSION is a free web-based science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) competition for students in grades 6–9. The competition promotes self-discovery and enables participants to recognize the real-life applications of these disciplines. Using either scientific practice or the engineering design process, students grouped in teams of three or four propose a solution to a real problem in their community—to compete for state, regional and national awards that include up to $8,000 (maturity value) in US Savings Bonds.
Deadlines: Early registration: November 1, 2013. Team registration: January 15, 2014; teams that register before November 1 will receive a free STEM Kit. Visit the website for additional dates.
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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 1,700 grants and other funding opportunities culled from federal, state, regional and community sources and available to public and private, preK–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
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Sponsored By:
Resource Roundup
Put the Pedal to the Metal
One of the biggest questions math educators face when teaching higher-level high school content is, “How do I make this relevant? How do I make this matter to students?” Race 2 Achieve is a project-based math curriculum that is not only aligned to Common Core standards, but also focused on the interests of students. Through NASCAR engineering and Hendrick Motorsports, students not only learn key concepts; they also learn how to apply those concepts in a real-world scenario through the development of their own model racecars.
Click Here to Visit Website
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Bounce Ideas Around
Pinball is a suite of engaging tools from the BBC to help students brainstorm and generate new ideas. Each of the six Pinball tools—Firing Ideas, Making Quick Decisions, Playing with Images, Making Up Ideas, Lining Up Ideas and Unexpected Ideas—provides opportunities for students to create mind maps, outlines and slideshows with options for text and images. For students struggling to think of new ideas, each Pinball tool has a “Lucky Dip” button that serves up a random image or bit of text to prompt them. Free, printable step-by-step guides, with visuals, help students use each tool.
Click Here to Access Free Tools
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Improve Students’ Search Skills
Google in Education has created a series of lessons to help guide students to use search meaningfully in their schoolwork and beyond. On the Google Search Education website, you’ll find Search Literacy Lesson Plans and “A Google a Day” Challenges aligned to the Common Core State Standards. The search literacy lessons are categorized by subject area (Culture, Geography, History, Science) and search expertise (Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced). The classroom challenges help students put their search skills to the test and engage them in using technology to discover the world around them.
Click Here to Visit Website
Click Here to Access Free Lessons
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Encourage Digital Citizenship
Common Sense Media’s online glossary will help both teachers and parents—especially those who are new to 1-to-1 programs—discover the latest buzzwords used in today’s educational technology landscape and familiarize themselves with digital classroom tools. In addition, the Common Sense Media website provides a freely downloadable Family Media Agreement for K–5 and Customizable Device Contract, both of which are age-specific tools to help parents talk about technology guidelines at home and set up boundaries with which their children feel comfortable.
Click Here to Access Free Glossary
Click Here to Download Free Family Agreement
Click Here to Download Free Device Contract
Plus: Common Sense Media’s series of 1-to-1 Essentials – Educational Videos may be shared freely in professional development workshops, on your school’s website or at a family engagement night.
Click Here to Access Free 1-to-1 Videos
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Be a History Detective
Teachinghistory.org offers two online interactive posters that show students how to work like historians. “Doing History is Like Solving a Mystery” is an interactive poster for elementary school students. The poster uses images with notes to guide students through the process of developing good research questions and recording their ideas. “History is an Argument About the Past” is an interactive poster for middle school and high school students. The poster walks students through identifying primary and secondary sources of information and using that information to create an argument.
Click Here to Access Free Elementary Poster
Click Here to Access Free Secondary Poster
Plus: Use the Civil War Interactive Poster to begin a conversation with students about what we know about the past and especially about our nation’s most deadly conflict, the Civil War.
Click Here to Access Free Civil War Poster
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Online Education Plus
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Embrace Mobile Technology
Social media and mobile learning have changed teaching and learning in many ways, including increasing opportunities for interactions beyond the school building, according to a paper entitled “Mobile Learning: Transforming Education, Engaging Students, and Improving Outcomes” by Darrell West, a Brookings Institution scholar.
Click Here to Download Mobile Learning Paper
Plus: This recent blog post in Education Week includes examples of how teachers are using Twitter and Facebook to publicly share students’ work, using sites such as Pinterest to share lesson plans and ideas with fellow educators, creating blogs and connecting with parents.
Click Here to Access Blog Post
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Thrive in a Connected World
Online communities and learning networks are helping educators learn together, reduce isolation and collaborate with extended networks of colleagues. The US Department of Education (ED) has declared October as Connected Educator Month, aimed at broadening and deepening educator participation in online communities and networks while providing opportunities for education leaders to work together to move forward faster. Connected Educator Month will be celebrated with a month of online events and activities sponsored by more than 150 major national education organizations, communities and companies. Check out the Connected Educator calendar and join in the many special activities being held this month.
Click Here to Visit Website
Click Here to Access Calendar
Plus: The US Department of Education has released a video highlighting popular educators on Facebook, Twitter and other digital spheres. The goal is to call attention to the different ways online communities and learning networks can connect educators and aid them in collaborating with and learning from peers.
Click Here to View Video
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Lead Change in Changing Times
EdTechTeacher is hosting two iPad Summits to help educators work to identify and share best practices for integrating iPads in the service of learning. The first summit will take place in Boston, Massachusetts, November 13–15, 2013; the second summit will occur in San Diego, California, February 3–5, 2014. Registration is now open.
Click Here to Visit Website
Plus: EdTechTeacher has been leading the way with its iPad professional development programs, which include free webinars, blog posts, summer workshops, onsite workshops and the T21 iPad program.
Click Here for More Information
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On-the-Go Learning
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Make Simple Sense of iPads
Many schools fail to set up good support networks or provide the sensible professional development required to use them effectively. This is the gap Richard Wells hopes to fill. Wells is a former IT engineer from the United Kingdom, who now serves as head technology director at a state secondary school in New Zealand. His blog, iPad4Schools, discusses simple, sensible steps to using the iPad in your school and its obvious effect in delivering 21st century, student-centered learning. One of his recent posts, “A Teacher’s 3 Twitter Accounts,” offers ideas for how iPad teachers can get the most from Twitter.
Click Here to Visit Blog
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Tap Seuss-ian Software
Random House Children’s Books is publishing 41 books by Dr. Seuss as ebooks this fall. The first wave of books, released on September 24, includes The Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham, Oh, the Places You’ll Go!, The Lorax and One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish. More ebooks will be released on October 22, and the final round will be published on November 5. Each of these ebooks will preserve Dr. Seuss’s original layouts and the beloved illustrations from their print editions. In addition, they will be published simultaneously as Read & Listen editions that feature new audio recordings of the full text.
Click Here to View Complete Release Schedule
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Sponsored By:
STEM Gems
Learn in the Cloud
Rourke Educational Media provides many options for e-content, both in the classroom and in libraries. Rourke’s e-Learning content features standards-based educational e-Books that can be used by many students and teachers simultaneously. Rourke’s e-content is leveled to obtain the proper Guided Reading Level (GRL) and correlated content to meet Common Core State Standards as well as individual state and national standards. The company’s technology programs are cloud based giving access from web-connected devices at home or school. There are no renewal or subscription fees. Teacher’s notes and teacher’s guides are also available.
Click Here to Visit Website
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Calculate Zombie Contagions
The National Academy of Sciences and Texas Instruments have collaborated on a program, STEM Behind Hollywood, which uses zombies to spark students’ interest in science, technology, engineering and math. The activities center on the math and science behind Hollywood themes, such as zombies, superheroes, space and forensics, and they give students the chance to solve problems just like real-life scientists, using the concepts behind their favorite movies and TV shows. The software, available to teachers for free during a trial period, includes exercises to reverse-engineer zombie brains and use math to calculate the spread of contagions.
Click Here to Visit Website
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Make Math Learning Real
Real World Math is a collection of free math activities for Google Earth designed for students and educators. In the virtual world of Google Earth, concepts and challenges are presented in meaningful ways that portray the usefulness of the ideas. Students will find downloads for more than 30 activities, videos and instructional tutorials for Google Earth and SketchUp. The goal is to take the math students have learned in class and develop it further with problem-solving activities. Teachers have access to lessons and additional material to integrate these activities effectively. The core of the site is mathematics for grades 4 and up, but many lessons lend themselves to interdisciplinary activities. The approach to mathematics is student centered and task oriented; it embraces active learning, constructivism and project-based activities. Higher-level thinking skills, such as analysis, synthesis and creativity, are encouraged as well as technology skills and social learning.
Click Here to Visit Website
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Use Forensic Science to Problem Solve
Rice University has partnered with CBS, the American Academy of Forensic Sciences and the National Science Foundation to produce web adventures based on the CSI television series, but prior knowledge of the television series is not required. The web adventures are designed to teach students the process of forensic investigation and problem solving. There are four cases, or levels, to the CSI web adventures. In Case One: Rookie Training, students learn the underlying science of different forensic disciplines, such as forensic biology, ballistics, toxicology and medical examination. In Cases Two, Three and Four, students apply what they learned in Rookie Training to solve a crime. They also explore new areas of forensic science, including fingerprint analysis, digital forensics, fire investigation and facial reconstruction. Students collect and analyze evidence from a crime scene, question suspects and present their findings to solve the case.
Click Here to Visit Website
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“Worth-the-Surf” Websites
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Explore the Historical Backdrop of Classical Music
The San Francisco Symphony’s Keeping Score website is designed to give students of all musical backgrounds an opportunity to explore, in depth and at their own pace, the music and life of eight classical music composers: Gustav Mahler, Hector Berlioz, Charles Ives, Dmitri Shostakovich, Ludwig van Beethoven, Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland and Piotr Tchaikovsky. Extensive audio, video and critically acclaimed interactive material explore each composer’s scores and pertinent musical techniques as well as the personal and historical stories behind them. The site is designed to appeal particularly to high school music appreciation students and their teachers, and its interactive learning tools offer a unique and in-depth online learning experience. The site also includes a historical timeline that takes students deeper into the individual composers’ political, social and cultural milieus as well as free downloadable lesson plans created by teachers who have experienced the Keeping Score Education program.
Click Here to Visit Website
Click Here to Access Free Interactives
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Connect Ideas in Historic Documents
Imagination and vision played critical roles in the creative act of forming a self-governing United States of America. The Library of Congress’s Creating the United States website offers an opportunity for students to learn in a fresh new way how the founding documents that emerged from this period were forged out of insight, invention and creativity, as well as collaboration and much compromise. The site features three interactives that invite students to connect particular phrases and ideas set down in the Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights with the texts that preceded these historic documents.
Click Here to Visit Website
Click Here to Access Free Interactives
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Interact with the World’s Constitutions
Constitute is a new website developed by the Comparative Constitutions Project (CCP) that lets users search the constitutions of almost all the independent states in the world. You can interact with the world’s constitutions in a few different ways: The Comparative Constitutions Project has tagged passages of each constitution with a topic—for example, “right to privacy” or “equality regardless of gender”—so you can quickly find relevant excerpts on a particular subject, no matter how they are worded. You can browse the 300+ topics or see suggested topics while typing in the search bar (which also lets you perform free-text queries). If you want to view results for a specific region or time period, you can limit your search by country or by date. To save for further analysis, you can download excerpts from multiple constitutions and click the “pin” button next to each expanded passage you want to save. You can then view or download and print your pinned excerpts. Currently Constitute includes the constitution that was in force in September of 2013 for nearly every independent state in the world. Certain countries whose constitutional order consists of multiple documents, or whose constitutions are in transition, are temporarily omitted. Soon the site will include many of these cases as well as a version of every available constitution ever written since 1789. The Comparative Constitutions Project (CCP) is directed by scholars at The University of Texas Department of Government, The University of Chicago Law School and University College London, in cooperation with the Cline Center for Democracy at the University of Illinois.
Click Here to Visit Website
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BOOKMARK THESE!
Big Deal Media provides timely, relevant resources in a rapidly changing educational environment, created with insight and attention to detail by seasoned educational publishing professionals and practicing K–12 educators. “Like” Big Deal Media on Facebook to learn how other educators are using Big Deal Media resources and to share your own ideas and experiences.
Join The Big Deal Book of Technology’s “Amazing Resources for Educators” on the edWeb to get frequent updates on grant deadlines, free resources and hot, new websites for 21st century learning. And, of course, you can share any great new resources that you’ve unearthed!
Explore the Web Wednesday feature on Big Deal Media, where 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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