Sketch to Connect, Slow the Summer Slide, Tour the White House & More
May 15, 2014
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IN THIS ISSUE
Grants, Competitions and Other "Winning" Opportunities
Resource Roundup
Powered-Up Professional Development
Mobile Learning Journey
STEM Gems
"Worth-the-Surf" Websites
Grants, Competitions and Other "Winning" Opportunities
Supplement Your Stretched Budget
GetEdFunding is a free and fresh website sponsored by CDW•G to help educators and institutions find the funds they need in order to supplement their already stretched budgets. GetEdFunding hosts a collection of more than 2,000 (and growing) 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. GetEdFunding offers customized searches by six criteria, including 43 areas of focus, eight content areas and any of the 21st century themes and skills that support your curriculum. After registering on the site, you can save the grant opportunities of greatest interest and then return to them at any time. This rich resource of funding opportunities is expanded, updated and monitored daily.
Click Here to Visit Website
Design to Change the World
A Tufts University dean and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) have launched a contest for young people, aged 13 and older, to devise apps to deal with global problems, such as health care, education and clean energy. Contestants aged 18 and older are invited to submit a working piece of software, but those between 13 and 17 don’t have to write code for the apps. Instead, they can come up with ideas for apps and present sketches to show how the apps might work. Entries will be judged through a variety of criteria, including ease of use, overall design, creativity and potential impact. Prizes will include an Apple iPad Air tablet and the chance to fully develop the app with assistance from an IEEE engineer. The contest will help launch a new IEEE service called App-E-Feat, which will hook up professional engineers with nonprofit organizations that need mobile apps to accomplish their missions.
Deadlines: May 19, 2014, for submissions; June 20, 2014, announcement of winners
Click Here for More Information
Move Beyond Words
The Dollar General Literacy Foundation’s Youth Literacy Grants are available to schools, public libraries and other nonprofit organizations to help students who are performing below grade level or experiencing difficulty reading. Grant funding is provided to assist in the following areas: implementing new or expanding existing literacy programs, purchasing new technology or equipment to support literacy initiatives and purchasing books, materials or software for literacy programs. The amount of the grant is $4,000.
Deadline: May 22, 2014
Click Here for More Information
Build a Safe Play Environment
Since 1995 the US Soccer Foundation has awarded grants to more than 600 nonprofit organizations in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The foundation’s Safe Places to Play grants support soccer programs and field-building initiatives in the United States that keep children in underserved communities active, healthy and safe. The Safe Places to Play grants are available in four categories: Synthetic Turf (up to $200,000), Lighting (up to $50,000), Irrigation (up to $15,000) and Sport Court (up to $60,000). Multisport field projects are eligible for funding, but such fields must be used a majority of the time for soccer. Multifield projects are also eligible, as are projects that must go through a bidding process. All Safe Places to Play grants (except for Irrigation) can be awarded for either indoor or outdoor field projects. Grantees have 12 months from the date of the award announcement to use their funding. A free downloadable guide provides information for potential applicants.
Deadlines: LOIs due by May 23, 2014, for June 1 Grant Cycle; LOIs due by September 24, 2014, for October 1 Grant Cycle
Click Here for More Information
Maximize Potential of Youth with Disabilities
The Mitsubishi Electric America Foundation Grants program is dedicated to helping young Americans with disabilities maximize their potential and fully participate in society. The foundation supports organizations and projects within its mission that have broad scope and impact and demonstrate potential for replication at other sites. A major program emphasis is inclusion: enabling young people with disabilities to have full access to educational, vocational and recreational opportunities and to participate alongside their nondisabled peers. Six to 12 grants are awarded each year. Grants range from $10,000 to $75,000 per year, for one to three years.
Deadlines: June 1, 2014, for concept papers; July 1, 2014, for full proposals
Click Here for More Information
Resource Roundup
Reflect on a Watershed Moment in US History
May 17, 2014, marks 60 years since the landmark United States Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education ended legal segregation in America. State-sanctioned segregation of public schools was ruled a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment and was, therefore, unconstitutional. This historic decision marked the end of the “separate but equal” precedent set by the Supreme Court nearly 60 years earlier and served as a catalyst for the expanding civil rights movement during the decade of the 1950s. A lesson from the National Archives examines the issues and events surrounding the May 17, 1954, United States Supreme Court unanimous ruling in this landmark civil rights case.
Click Here to Access Free Lesson
Plus: The Brown Foundation and the National Park Service worked closely together to produce a curriculum to provide teachers with the resources needed to teach concepts of fairness and social democracy. The Brown curriculum kit includes a Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site handbook; a DVD with two short videos entitled Reading, Writing and Resistance and Dialog; and a CD-ROM entitled Brown v. Board of Education: Struggle for Equality, including a teacher’s guide. The CD-ROM poses thought-provoking questions, using both narration and historical photos. It is intended to aid students in understanding the Brown decision in both historical and contemporary contexts.
Click Here to Access Free Curriculum Materials
Click Here to Request Free Curriculum Kit
Cultivate Your Capacity for Integrated Teaching
Education Closet offers a sampling of its arts integration “seeds” to help you grow your program. Every Friday on its website, Education Closet presents 30 free lessons for kindergarten through high school from which to choose. Touching on such topics as fractions, poetry, the scientific method, history and “Green School” initiatives, the lessons are intended to help teachers get started with arts integration or to enhance a program already in place. The lesson seeds have been cultivated from across a variety of content and fine arts areas to showcase high-quality, rigorous integrated instruction. Within these lessons, you’ll find links to STEM and Common Core standards so you can ensure the very best and latest connections to relevant instructional strategies in visual arts, music, drama and dance.
Click Here to Access Free Weekly Lessons
Click Here to Access Free Visual Arts Strategies
Click Here to Access Free Music Strategies
Click Here to Access Free Drama Strategies
Click Here to Access Free Dance Strategies
Plus: A quarterly eZine for administrators, teachers and advocates of arts integration, VIA provides research, resources and articles on arts integration that are vital to every program’s success. Enjoy each copy for free!
Click Here to Access Free Quarterly eZine
Keep Children Learning During Summer
Summer Learning Day is June 20, and the National Summer Learning Association (NSLA) offers ideas for celebrating learning—from hosting a big event to spreading awareness through more budget-friendly activities. Whether your event is physical or virtual, you can celebrate Summer Learning Day anytime during the summer—not just on June 20. Put your event on the Summer Learning Day map to connect your work with the national field of summer learning. Tweet about summer learning on NSLA’s Twitter resource page. Post the Summer Learning Day webpage on Facebook or share it on Twitter using #SLD2014. Visit NSLA’s Summer Learning Day for Families page and distribute tip sheets to parents. And then post pictures and videos of your Summer Learning Day event on NSLA Facebook page or share them with NSLA on Twitter using #SLD2024.
Click Here to Join Summer Learning Day Movement
Click Here for Ways to Celebrate Summer Learning Day
Click Here for More Information About NSLA
Avert the Summer Slide
For the third year, Learning Upgrade is offering complimentary “Summer School” access to its web-based Common Core–aligned curriculum to all qualifying US schools and districts. Through the incorporation of songs, videos and games with extensive educational research, the company looks to support districts in their quest to halt the dreaded summer slide, without putting a burden on their budget. The complimentary summer licenses provide users full access to all of Learning Upgrade’s K–8 courses. Each web-based course can be used within a summer school setting or at home. The platform allows teachers to quickly and easily track individual student progress over the summer and provide immediate feedback to parents and students through web-based reports.
Click Here for More Information About K–8 Curriculum
Click Here to Sign Up for Free Summer Access
Sponsored By:
Powered-Up Professional Development
Get Smart About Delivering Digital Content
SEND (Smart Education Networks by Design) is a CoSN initiative that aims to help education leaders master the ability to design networks; develop the next generation of network infrastructure, which is necessary to support multiple mobile devices; and deliver digital content and administer online assessment. Components include Cyber Security, IT Crisis Preparedness, Broadband and Open Technologies.
Click Here for More Information
Stretch Students to Read Complex Texts
Disciplinary Literacy: Navigating Literacy Contexts Across Secondary Schools is a web seminar sponsored by the Literacy in Learning Exchange. In the webinar, the presenter describes the difficult navigating work that young people have to do as they move across the many different literacy contexts of their lives—particularly the context of secondary school—and how teachers can support students in that work. The presentation is the eighth in a nine-part series on the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts (CCSS/ELA), provided by TextProject. All presenters served in an advisory capacity to the CCSS/ELA development team. Earlier presentations are housed on TextProject’s YouTube channel, and guides for some of the earlier webinars are available for use in professional development or teacher education.
Click Here for More Information About Disciplinary Literacy Event
Click Here to Access Previous CCSS/ELA Web Events
Nurture and Develop Teacher-Leaders
Discovery Education has launched Digital Leader Corps (DLC), a new professional development service that supports school systems as they develop teacher–leaders to serve as change agents powering their district’s digital transition. The new professional development model builds and nurtures a network of teacher–leaders to design and implement successful and innovative teaching strategies that can be shared with their peers. Featuring a combination of professional learning, pedagogy and tools, DLC helps participating educators learn to integrate educational technologies and digital media into classroom instruction. A new innovation included in DLC is educator-created, student-centered Learning Labs. In these labs, teachers bring to life new teaching strategies and practice and adapt their skills in a classroom setting before sharing their successes broadly with their colleagues.
Click Here for More Information
Mobile Learning Journey
Investigate Chemical Reactions
Chemist is one of the only virtual chemistry labs for tablets that enables users to conduct chemistry investigations and explore chemistry reactions with different lab tools. Students can try mixing chemicals by pouring them into beakers or test tubes. They can heat the chemicals with a Bunsen burner or put a piece of cesium into water. The 3-D stage enables the parallax effect from different angles. Chemist has a built-in database with more than 200 chemical reagents, and additional reagents will be offered periodically through the online CloudLab database for testing more chemical reactions. Developed by Thix, the app is available for iPad and Android tablets. Cost: $4.99
Click Here to Visit iTunes App Store
Click Here to Visit Google Play Store
Paper the Web
Teens who love to sketch can sketch away using FiftyThree’s Paper, a free sketching app for the iPad. Known for its simplicity as well as its sharing functionality, the app provides built-in tools that let students share their sketches on Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook as well as connect with others who sketch using the #MadeWithPaper hashtag. Students can also submit their sketches to FiftyThree’s website and see what others are creating with the app. Cost: Free
Click Here to Visit Website
Click Here to Visit iTunes App Store
Plus: FiftyThree’s Paper Stacks is the first Tumblr themed app designed for touch. Developed in collaboration with ALLDAYEVERYDAY, Paper Stacks offers users a new way to showcase their ideas and inspiration discovered across the web. Built from the ground up for touch, Paper Stacks lets users swipe images aside and enjoy photo sets presented in paper stacks. Users can select up to five posts to feature in the top carousel. They can tag posts with “featured” to display in landscape and portrait views. Paper Stacks also has a multicolumn detail view for source, descriptions and comments. The app includes preset fonts, background photo upload as well as two-color and layout options. Cost: Free
Click Here to Preview and Install Free Tumblr App
Talk to Tell a Story
The free Adobe Voice iPad app makes it easy for students to create beautiful picture stories. This recently released app allows users to record their voice, import pictures and write text to create a short video. The app contains a huge gallery of more than 25,000 images, icons and music tracks that students can use in their stories if they don’t have media of their own. To create their stories, students start by selecting a story template. (They can change the template at any time.) Then they construct their story by recording their narration for a frame and adding an image or text to the frame. They can import their own image, take a picture with their mobile device’s camera or select one of the stock images that Adobe Voice provides. When they add text to a frame, Adobe Voice automatically resizes the text and adds cinematic motion and a soundtrack. Students can change the music by tapping the edit option and selecting a different track. Cost: Free
Click Here to Visit iTunes App Store
STEM Gems
Solve a Science Mystery Together
Mosa Mack: Science Detective is a series of short, animated science mysteries to expose all students to the thrill of problem solving. At six minutes an episode, Mosa Mack: Science Detective is designed to engage students quickly with fun, youth-relevant mysteries that align with Common Core learning standards and Next Generation Science Standards. At the end of each episode, students are left with a question to solve. Teachers can download customizable discussion guides for each episode, selecting one geared toward large group discussion, small group work or individual writing worksheets. Future episodes will touch on physics, biology, chemistry, computer science, space exploration, Earth science, technology and more. The pilot episode is now live.
Click Here to Visit Website
Protect a Fragile Ecosystem
In TyrAnt, a newly developed game with a purpose, players take the reins of running a leafcutter ant colony, ultimately aiming to gather enough food for the larvae to hatch into flying ants and expand the colony elsewhere. The game shows how ant civilizations function and thrive, while challenging players to balance limited resources among gathering food, defending territory from invaders and maintaining the ants’ home base. Students can dispatch three types of ants through touch-screen controls: soldiers, who fight off encroaching enemies; foragers, who gather food; and miners, who expand the ants’ underground empire. In carefully managing the ants and resources, students begin to see how ants communicate and work together in large numbers to survive in biologically diverse and fragile ecosystems. TyrAnt starts at a basic, comprehensive pace and steadily ups the difficulty by introducing more and more obstacles and dangers. TyrAnt has already been rolled out to US schools as part of the Amplify pilot program and is set to launch later in 2014.
Click Here to Visit Website
Uncover the Cause of a Mysterious Death
ChemCollective’s free Mixed Reception game is set in a research group that is developing an antivenom for spider bites. In the opening scene, Nelson Pogline, a talented graduate student, dies unexpectedly at a university reception. In their role as detectives, students must use chemistry concepts to determine if this was murder and if so, to solve the case. They can interview suspects using QuickTime movies, investigate the crime scene for clues with QuickTime Virtual Reality images and analyze the evidence from the crime lab. The activity requires basic knowledge of formula weight, chemical reactions and the scientific method. Additional concepts include molecular recognition, limiting reagents and mass spectrometry. The Flash-based software is suitable for chemistry students at the high school and college levels. The game was developed by ChemCollective with students from the Departments of Chemistry and Drama at Carnegie Mellon University. The game can be run from ChemCollective’s website or downloaded to a computer for offline use. It can be used as a homework assignment for individual students or as an in-class group activity. Solving the case takes between 40 and 50 minutes.
Click Here to Access Free Game
Imagine the Impact
Black Girls CODE aims to increase the number of women of color in the digital space by empowering girls of color, aged 7 to 17, to become innovators in STEM fields, leaders in their communities and builders of their own futures through exposure to computer science and technology. By reaching out to the community through workshops and after-school programs, Black Girls CODE introduces computer-coding lessons to young girls from underrepresented communities in programming languages, such as Scratch and Ruby and Rails. Black Girls CODE has set out to prove to the world that girls of every color have the skills to become the programmers of tomorrow.
Click Here to Visit Website
"Worth-the-Surf" Websites
Make Reading a Part of Everyday Fun
Biblionasium is a free social-reading site designed for elementary and middle school students. On the site, teachers and students can create and share their bookshelves and write reviews of books they have read. Students can make recommendations and track their reading. Teachers can see their students’ reading histories and track their progress. The site allows teachers and students to create groups, bookshelves, recommendations and reviews for outside audiences. It allows for authentic reading experiences that encourage students to be lifelong readers.
Click Here to Visit Website
Integrate Performing Arts and Technology
Global Writes is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to promote literacy, communication and collaboration among young people through the integration of performing arts and technology resources. The organization leads or assists in the development and support of projects and programs with local school districts, independent schools, government agencies and other nonprofit groups. Through its programs and projects, Global Writes creates opportunities for students to develop as creative writers and to share their original pieces in workshops and through performance. The organization promotes the use of a variety of digital technologies, including videoconferencing and web collaboration tools, to provide venues for sharing and performing that bridge the boundaries of school, community, region and even nation.
Click Here to Visit Website
Take a 3-D Virtual Tour of the White House
As part of President and Mrs. Obama’s commitment to open the White House to as many Americans as possible, a partnership with the Google Art Project allows Google’s 360º Street View cameras to capture the rooms that are featured on the public White House tour. Now anyone, anywhere can experience the history and art of the White House via their computer.
Click Here to Visit Website
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