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 2,400 (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.
Bring Bing to the SurfaceEducators can earn credits for free technology for their classroom just by searching the web with Bing. It’s similar to participating in a frequent flyer program. Credits can be donated to help get free Microsoft Surface tablets for your school. Earning credits is easy. Simply search with Bing, try new features and take advantage of exclusive offers to see your credits start adding up. Status upgrades allow you to earn even faster. Try it now. It’s free.
Champion CreativityCrayola’s 2014 Champion Creatively Alive Children program provides grants for innovative, creative leadership team building within elementary schools. Each grant-winning school receives $2,500 and Crayola products valued at $1,000. In collaboration with the National Association of Elementary School Principals(NAESP), Crayola offers up to 20 grants. The scoring rubric is available online for applicants to review before submitting an application.
Deadlines: Applications will be accepted until 12:00 midnight (ET) on June 23, 2014. Every Early Bird application submitted before midnight on June 9, 2014, will receive a Crayola product Classpack.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rP0nA1x8PI
Plus: Crayola’s free Champion Creatively Alive Children series will help you implement arts-infused education in your school. Arts-infused education helps children acquire critical 21st century skills: creativity,critical thinking, collaboration and communication. The complete program includes seven videos andguides, along with a supplemental introductory leadership guide and additional resources to help you facilitate workshops and arts-infused education advocacy meetings—everything you need, from PowerPoint presentations to flyers, handouts and evaluation forms.
Provide Access to Good Books for ALL
Lois Lenski, children’s book author and 1946 Newbery medalist for Strawberry Girl, had a lifelong concern that all children have access to good books. In pursuit of this goal, she established a foundation to provide grants to agencies serving children in disadvantaged populations. The Lois Lenski Covey Foundation annually awards grants to libraries and (other institutions that operate a library) for purchasing books published for young people, preschool through grade 8. School libraries, nontraditional libraries operated by charitable [501(c)(3)] and other nontaxable agencies, and bookmobile programs are eligible. Grants for 2014 will range from $500 to $3,000 and are specifically for book purchases.
Deadline: June 16, 2014, for completed applications; grants to be awarded on or before December 15, 2014
Teach and Learn with the News
Every year since 2010, The New York Times Learning Network has invited teenagers to add The New York Times to their summer reading lists, and every year more and more youth have taken The Learning Network up on the offer. Each Friday, from June 13 through August 15, The Learning Network will pose the same question: What interested you most in The Times this week? Anyone between 13 and 19 years of age, from anywhere in the world, can post an answer, and contestants can choose from any Times article, essay, video, interactive or photograph published in 2014, on any topic they like—whether Ukraine, the universe or ugly “selfies.” Every Tuesday, The Learning Network will choose the winners and publish their responses on its blog.
Deadlines: Weekly through August 15, 2014
Energize Classrooms, Activate Minds
In a 1:1 iPad classroom, ClassFlow allows every student the opportunity to learn by doing and to show what they know. With ClassFlow, a free, cloud-based teaching and learning tool for K–12 classrooms, educators can create dynamic lessons, deliver interactive content across multiple devices (including tablets, laptops and interactive whiteboards and displays) and conduct real-time formative assessment. To get started with ClassFlow, simply register for free at ClassFlow.com.
Communicate in the Garden
The School Garden Curriculum from the University of Georgia’s College of Agricultural & Environmental Sciences includes lessons that use gardens to teach a wide range of topics from kindergarten through grade 8. The garden-based lessons are listed by grade level, and at K–5 they are further subdivided into earth science, life science and physical science topics. Grade 6 lessons are aligned with the earth science topics required at that level; grade 7 has life science lessons and grade 8 has physical science lessons.
Plus: Written as a University of California Master Gardener Program project, A Garden of Words/Un jardín de palabras is a free bilingual English–Spanish/Spanish–English dictionary that is intended as a tool to help both elementary school children and their teachers/leaders communicate in the garden. It is suitable for use in schools and in after-school, garden-based learning settings. The dictionary includes the most common gardening words and phrases. Also provided is a translated and converted metric/US units table. The language is color coded, with English words in green and Spanish words in orange. The publication is divided into two sections: English-to-Spanish and then Spanish-to-English.
Inspire Manufacturing Innovators of the Future
Alcoa Foundation and Discovery Education have launched Manufacture Your Future, a new online destination designed to inspire students in grades 6–12 to take the first step toward exploring and pursuing today’s manufacturing careers. The program provides middle school and high school educators, guidance counselors, students and families with hands-on resources that build excitement around postsecondarymanufacturing career opportunities. Manufacture Your Future encourages the development of critical thinking skills through real-world applications and offers standards-based Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM)–focused lesson plans, a manufacturing career guide, family discussion starters and a virtual field trip designed to give students an inside look at some of today’s most prominent manufacturing careers. Manufacture Your Future will launch its first virtual field trip on National Manufacturing Day, October 3, 2014. Students will get an inside look at careers in advanced manufacturing through an interactive event hosted live from an Alcoa facility.
Walk in Someone Else’s Shoes
A group of education researchers at Harvard University has developed a virtual simulation for “walking in another person’s shoes” to help students relate to one another better. The simulation is part of a project calledSocial Aspects of Immersive Learning (SAIL). The technical term is “social perspective taking,” and it means understanding another person by taking in their thoughts, feelings and motivations. To create an experience that will help build these types of positive relationships through nuanced social perspective, the research team created a scenario that involves a confrontation between a park ranger and a golf course owner who share land but disagree over how to use it. The simulation allows a participant to play the role of the golf course owner, walking around in his world, talking to his colleagues and getting a sense of his perspective and opinions about the world. The player then has the same experience walking in the shoes of the park ranger. Finally, the player is asked to negotiate from the perspective of the golf course owner with the park ranger over various differences of opinion related to how the land should be treated. Each of the points of negotiation have a money value attached, giving the player a stake in the outcome of the negotiations. The research team would like to hear from educators interested in getting involved in this project.
Enhance Text Engagement with Multiple Media
A team of researchers from the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California has created a model of what they call participatory learning, which engages students with materials on a personal level, often by incorporating different types of media into the classroom and offering varying points of entry to a text. Most recently, the team has put together a teacher’s strategy guide, Reading in a Participatory Culture: Remixing Moby-Dick in the English Classroom, and an interactive digital book,Flows of Reading, to provide models of their approach. The digital book allows readers to follow hyperlinks, enjoy embedded video content and add to an online space for related work. It broadens the model beyondMoby Dick and applies it to reading at all age levels, from a wordless picture book to the Hunger Games andLord of the Rings. It offers four pathways, or ways to view a text: Motivations for Reading, Adaptations and Remixing, Negotiating Cultural Spaces and Continuities and Space.