Explore Civic Choices, Dig into Literature, Encourage Fitness & More
November 1, 2014
In Partnership With:
IN THIS ISSUE
Grants, Competitions and Other "Winning" Opportunities
Resource Roundup
Professional Learning Plus
Mobile Learning Journey
STEM Gems
Worth-the-Surf Websites
Grants, Competitions and Other "Winning" Opportunities
Serve in the National Education Arena
The US Department of Energy’s Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellowship Program provides a unique opportunity for accomplished K–12 educators in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics to serve in the national education arena. Fellows spend 11 months working in a federal agency or US Congressional office, bringing their extensive knowledge and experience in the classroom to education program and/or education policy efforts. To be eligible for the fellowship, applicants must be US citizens with a minimum of five years’ full-time classroom teaching experience. Applicants must also have been teaching full-time in a public or private elementary or secondary school for at least five of the last seven years in a science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM) discipline and must currently be employed full time in a public or private elementary or secondary school or district in the United States.
Deadline: Applications due by 5 p.m. (ET) on November 20, 2014
Click Here for More Information
Let Imagination Take Over
National Novel Writing Month happens every November! It’s a fun, seat-of-the-pants writing event where the challenge is to complete an entire novel in just 30 days. For one month, students and teachers get to lock away their inner editor, let their imagination take over and just create! That means participants begin writing November 1 and must finish by midnight, November 30. The word-count goal for the adult program is 50,000 words, but the Young Writers Program (YWP) allows 17-and-under participants to set reasonable, yet challenging, individual word-count goals. The Resources for Young Writers section of the site includes pep talks, workbooks, flyers, web badges and helpful links. The section also offers students ideas for meeting fellow student novelists. The Resources for Educators section offers teachers a free classroom kit, lesson plans and a Virtual Classroom “how-to.” Teachers will also find suggestions on how to connect with fellow educators.
Deadline: November 30, 2014, for completion of novel
Click Here to Visit Event Website
Plus: Check out this NaNoTeacher site for help bringing this writing experience to your students. The site includes sections on the role of technology, a daily agenda, issues to consider, publishing options and student testimonials.
Click Here to Visit NaNo Teacher Site
Click Here to Access Daily Agenda
Design, Build and Fly a Model Rocket
The Team America Rocketry Challenge (TARC), sponsored by the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA) and the National Association of Rocketry (NAR), is the world’s largest rocket contest. It was created in the fall of 2002 as a one-time celebration of the Centennial of Flight, but the enthusiasm about the event was so great that AIA and NAR were asked to hold the contest annually. Approximately 7,000 students from across the nation compete in TARC each year. Teams design, build and fly a model rocket that reaches a specific altitude and duration determined by a set of rules developed each year. The contest is designed to encourage students to study math and science and pursue careers in aerospace. The top 100 teams, based on local qualification flights, are invited to Washington, D.C., in May for the national finals. Prizes include $60,000 in cash and scholarships split between the top 10 finishers. NASA invites top teams to participate in their Student Launch Initiative, an advanced rocketry program. AIA member companies, such as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, have sponsored additional prizes, such as scholarship money and a trip to an international air show.
Deadline: December 12, 2014
Click Here for More Information
Get Insight into the Future Funding Landscape
On March 27, 2014, the GetEdFunding community on edWeb.net hosted a webinar entitled “The Funding Outlook in Education,” sponsored by CDW•G. This free webinar provided an update on the funding landscape for 2014. The presentation provided answers to the following questions: What does federal funding look like for the rest of the school year? Are there any new funds on the horizon? What are the latest funding trends in the states? What money is available now for the 2014–2015 school year? The webinar was recorded and is archived in the GetEdFunding community.
Click Here to Join GetEd Funding Community
Click Here to Access Free Webinar
Sponsored By:
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Resource Roundup
Get Help for IT
LapCabby has been doing things differently in IT storage for more than 25 years. Born in the UK, LapCabby’s range of laptop, netbook, tablet and Chromebook carts is a big hit in schools worldwide—and they’re now available in the US and Canada. The cleverly designed carts give you everything you need in the classroom: storage, safety, simplicity—even charging and syncing.
Click Here to Visit Website
Explore the Historical Context of "One Person, One Vote"
One Person, One Vote is a free documentary film presented online by Annenberg Classroom. In the documentary, Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Stephen G. Breyer and other experts discuss how the principle of one person, one vote emerged from a series of landmark decisions, including Baker v. Carr and Reynolds v. Sims, based on the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. On the Annenberg Classroom website, students can watch the 26-minute film with English closed captions. Teachers can also download a free Lesson Guide and Voting Rights Timeline.
Click Here to Access Free Resources
Get to Know Poe
The idea behind the Pit and the Pendulum interactive comic is to make learning about Edgar Allen Poe and his literature fun, intriguing and experiential by taking advantage of modern social media and mobile phone technology to extend the universe of the story. The film, comic and websites provide deeper interactivity with which to plumb the historical backdrop of Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum, highlighting the characters and political and religious conditions that set the Spanish Inquisition into motion. The comic is full of hidden links. Some are found using the mouse cursor while viewing the pages, and some are in plain sight as QR codes, accessible with a mobile phone and QR code reader software. Used this way, the QR codes further expand the story with video, images, audio and more.
Click Here to Experience Interactive Comic
Tap the Scholarship Written About Shakespeare's Works
Understanding Shakespeare is a collaborative project between JSTOR Labs and the Folger Shakespeare Library. It’s a free research tool that allows students, educators and scholars to use the text of Shakespeare’s plays to quickly navigate into the scholarship written about them—line by line. Users simply click next to any line of text in a play, and relevant articles from the JSTOR archive immediately load. Currently, six plays are available in Understanding Shakespeare: Hamlet, Henry V, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night. All editions of the plays are from the Folger Digital Texts, which are electronic versions of the Folger Editions, the single most-used source for Shakespeare texts in US classrooms.
Click Here to Access Shakespeare Research Tool
Visit Food Producers from Around the World
Some children are unaware that fruit and vegetables are grown on farms and think that they just appear on the supermarket shelves—and they have no other experience or knowledge to contradict that belief. These children are unlikely to visit a farm or farmers’ market unless it is on a school trip. So, Tesco in the UK has launched its Eat Happy Project, and part of the resource is Farm to Fork Online Field Trips. During these free field trips, students will see how different foods are produced and supplied without leaving the classroom, while still being provided with the real-life context of a visit and interacting with the people involved in the process. The resources and activities before the event allow children to gain prior knowledge and background about the food they are studying, changing any misconceptions about where the food comes from. The Eat Happy Project is fully inclusive for all students, whatever their learning abilities are; it can be adapted to different age groups and differentiated where needed.
Click Here for More Information About Eat Happy Project
Click Here to Access Free Resources
Professional Learning Plus
Build a Digital Classroom
PBS LearningMedia is welcoming teachers and students in the new school year with the return of its “Get Your Tech On” initiative designed to support technology and digital resource integration in the classroom. Now through November 30, teachers can access free tech-themed content collections, how-to guides on building digital classrooms and professional development webinars. They can also enter to win weekly tablet giveaways. The “Get Your Tech On” content collection features themed resources designed to help teachers integrate digital media and technology into curriculum. From gaming and coding to 3-D printing, the Get Your Tech On professional learning collection offers more than 87,000 digital resources for preK–12 educators nationwide.
Click Here to Access Free Professional Resources
Engage Students in Conversation About Voting Rights
Facing History and Ourselves’ online workshop “One Person, One Vote: Why Should We Care?” is designed to help teachers engage students in conversation with one another about civic participation and voting rights. The workshop explores civic choices and the decisions people make about themselves and others in their community, nation and world. Discussion topics include the 1965 Voting Rights March from Selma to Montgomery in the United States and voting rights in South Africa during apartheid. Participants in the workshop watched and reflected on video interviews with five individuals from the United States and South Africa in which the speakers discussed their personal experiences with voting. Students then created their own video interviews with people from their own communities.
Click Here to Access Free Voting Rights Video
Mobile Learning Journey
Make Your Move for Fitness
Developed by The Cooper Institute of Dallas more than 30 years ago, FitnessGram is an assessment of fitness related to health (not athletics). The tests typically are taken at the beginning and the end of every school year to measure progress. FitnessGram tests for five components of fitness: aerobic capacity, muscular strength, muscular endurance, flexibility and body composition. In turn, it teaches students about those key ingredients to living a fit life. The program now includes a mobile application dedicated to the fitness-testing program. In response to the childhood obesity epidemic, The Cooper Institute—in partnership with NFL Play 60, the National Football League’s children’s fitness program—combined FitnessGram and its sister tests, ActivityGram and NutritionGram, into FitnessGram 10 in 2013. FitnessGram 10 includes the new apps, aligns FitnessGram standards with Centers for Disease Control values for BMI (body mass index) and includes improved technology that removes the need for the school to purchase servers and simply involves information technology staff installing software programs.
Click Here to Visit Website
Click Here to Access Free Teacher App
Click Here to Access Free Student App
Bring the National Parks into the Classroom
National Parks by National Geographic lets students explore US national parks easily on their iPad or iPhone. This free app includes numerous features: global and interactive map views with filtering by activity and seasonality; a personalized user space to track favorite parks, activities, itineraries, photos and more; thousands of points of interest, all tagged with GPS coordinates for easy planning and locating; the top must-sees and must-dos for each park, curated by National Geographic editors; stunning photo galleries for each park, plus rare vintage images from the National Geographic Archive; photo tips from National Geographic photographers; sharing through Facebook, email and Twitter; and collectible park stamps.
Click Here to Visit Website
Click Here to Visit iTunes App Store
STEM Gems
Take a Virtual Field Trip to the Polar Bear Capital of the World
This fall Polar Bears International is again offering live virtual events called Tundra Connections. Throughout November, teachers can connect their classes to one of the live Tundra Connections broadcasts. During these live sessions, students will have the opportunity to ask questions and learn from some leading experts on polar bears and Arctic climate change. Through these experiences, students will learn about the animals of the Arctic and how they have adapted to survive in the harsh Arctic climate. Students will also see and hear about how climate change is affecting the animals of the Arctic. This year a set of broadcasts are devoted to STEM topics. Those broadcasts will include information about the technology that scientists use to track and count polar bears. Find the full schedule of virtual events on the Tundra Connections website.
Click Here to Visit Website
Collaborate to Investigate Weird and Unusual Phenomena
PBS KIDS has announced the premiere date for its newest series, Odd Squad. The live-action series will premiere Wednesday, November 26, 2014, on PBS KIDS with a special one-hour broadcast of two back-to-back episodes, along with integrated digital and offline content. The television series will air on weekdays following the premiere (check local listings). The series follows two young government agents, Olive and Otto, who use math skills and collaboration to investigate weird and unusual phenomena. Odd Squad is designed to help children aged 5–8 learn math through a math concept embedded in each of their cases. The series emphasizes problem solving, teamwork and perseverance. Each episode features a new mystery, which Olive and Otto solve by working together. Furthermore, there is frequently an “all is lost” moment in which the trail runs cold or a hypothesis turns out to be incorrect. Instead of giving up, the heroes redouble their efforts and reexamine the evidence, which leads them to the correct answer. The specific math skills covered in Odd Squad fall into the following categories: Numbers and Number Operations, Geometry and Spatial Sense, Measurement, Data and Algebraic Thinking. The series is part of a multiplatform media experience that will feature interactive content online and on mobile, including games, parent resources, apps and more.
Click Here to Visit Website
Put Your Students' Future in Motion
Honeywell and NASA are celebrating 10 years of collaboration with FMA Live! Forces in Motion, an award-winning, hip-hop physics education program that inspires middle school students to learn and enjoy math and science in a compelling, fun and memorable way. The popular show, which will visit its 1,000th school during this special tour, has been performed before 400,000 students in all 48 contiguous United States as well as in Mexico and Canada. Honeywell and NASA have joined to bring FMA Live! Forces as part of its continued commitment to provide science, technology, engineering and math (STEM)–focused education assistance to students from military families. The United States Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) has provided data to assist in identifying highly military-impacted school districts for consideration for scheduling of FMA Live! Forces in Motion tours. Over the course of 10 weeks, the show, under the direction of Honeywell Hometown Solutions, will reach 55 public, private and military-connected middle schools in seven west coast and southwest United States, including Seattle, Washington; Portland, Oregon; San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego, California; Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona; Santa Fe, New Mexico; Denver and Fort Carson, Colorado; and Salt Lake City, Utah. The program will also be back on tour in the spring throughout the eastern part of the United States.
Click Here to Visit Website
Worth-the-Surf Websites
Take Students Beyond the Walls of the Classroom
The White House and Discovery Education have expanded the popular “Of the People: Live from the White House” virtual field trip series. Offering upper elementary, middle and high school students unique access to White House and government officials as well as subject matter experts, Of the People will bring a series of 30-minute virtual events hosted by a student and broadcast live from the White House and other special locations to classrooms nationwide. The series, which launched last year, will build on its success for the 2014–2015 school year with topics such as civics, history and STEM. These unique virtual field trips take students beyond the walls of their classroom to places that they would not normally get to experience. Each installment of the virtual field trip series reinforces critical learning concepts outlined in their subject curriculum. All installments in this series and archives will be available on Discovery Education’s website and will be supported with digital video and other learning tools to enhance student engagement.
Click Here to Visit Website
Read Your Way Around the World
Novels on Location helps readers find novels according to the story’s geographical settings. When you visit Novels on Location, you can find novels by clicking on the placemarks that you see or by using the location search bar in the upper right corner of the site. You can also contribute to Novels on Location by simply entering a location and then entering the title and author of your favorite book set in that location.
Click Here to Visit Website
Investigate How the World Has Changed in Your Lifetime
Your Life On Earth, a feature of BBC’s Earth website, shows you how the world has changed during your lifetime. Enter your birthdate, and Your Life On Earth will show you how much the world’s population has grown, how many new species have been discovered, how many earthquakes and volcanic eruptions have occurred since you were born—and much more!
Click Here to Visit Website
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