Create a Culture of Reading

As budget cutbacks increase, funding for libraries is often the first thing to go. The nonprofit Kids Need to Read was established to fight this scarce funding by sending exciting new books to under-funded schools and libraries across the United States as well as to other organizations that provide literacy support to children, particularly disadvantaged children. The booklist is carefully structured to include low-level, high-interest books to grab the interest of reluctant readers as well as material that is appealing to disadvantaged children.
Deadline: Ongoing
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Click Here to Review Booklist

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Brighten Your Students’ Education

Clorox Power a Bright Future grants provide necessary resources to help support school programs that enrich children’s lives. There are three grant categories: “Learn,” which includes education-focused programs, such as establishing a school recycling program; “Play,” which includes sports and exercise-focused programs, such as building a playground; and “Create,” which includes arts-focused programs, such as establishing an after-school music program. Anyone at least 18 years old at time of entry can nominate an accredited K–12, public or private school program for a chance to win a $50,000 grant or one of three $20,000 grants.

Deadline: September 27, 2010 for nominations

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Plus: Try your luck at the daily instant win game and play for your chance to win a $175 gift card to Barnes & Noble, Michael’s, Lakeshore Learning or Dick’s Sporting Goods as well as free Clorox product coupons.

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Plant the Seeds of Learning

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has announced it will award $1 million in grants for eligible high-poverty schools to start community gardens. The goal is to teach students about gardening and nutrition and to provide fresh produce for school meals. Some of the harvest may also be given to students’ families as well as to local food banks and senior-center nutrition programs. The grant is available to public and not-for-profit organizations. Grant applications may be submitted by email to: FY2010Prop_PeoplesGarden@fns.usda.gov or through www.grants.gov. The Request for Applications is available online at http://www.fns.usda.gov/fns/outreach/grants/garden.htm.

Deadline: November 8, 2010

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Love Your Library

The I Love My Librarian Award recognizes the accomplishments of exceptional public, school, college, community college or university librarians. Up to 10 winners will be selected to receive a $5,000 cash award, a plaque and $500 travel stipend to attend an awards reception in New York City hosted by The New York Times. In addition, a plaque will be given to each award winner’s library. The award is administered by the American Library Association with support from Carnegie Corporation of New York and The New York Times.

Deadline: September 20, 2010 for nominations

Click Here to Nominate a Librarian

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Turn Lemons into Literacy

Lemons for Literacy, in partnership with Reading Horizons, aims to help cure illiteracy by providing free literacy materials to people in need. It is designed to be a fun way for students to build their vocabulary while giving them the opportunity to help others increase their reading skills. Here’s how it works: Every time students answer an online vocabulary question correctly, they will be squeezing lemonade to fill a glass. Five squeezes fill the glass, and five glasses fill a pitcher! The featured donation site needs a certain number of squeezes to receive the desired products they are in need of. For help in answering a question, students simply click the button that looks like a speaker, and they will be able to hear the word pronounced correctly and used in a context sentence.

Click Here to Play Free Vocabulary Game

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Unleash Students’ Imagination

Destination ImagiNation, Inc. is a nonprofit organization that provides educational programs for students to learn and experience creativity, teamwork and problem solving. Every year the organization reaches 100,000 students across the United States and in more than 30 countries. Destination ImagiNation, the core program, is an after-school activity in which students work in teams to solve mind-bending Challenges and present their solutions at Tournaments. Teams are tested to think on their feet, work together and devise original solutions that satisfy the requirements of the Challenges. Participants gain more than just basic knowledge and skills; they learn to unleash their imaginations and take unique approaches to problem solving. On the site, you’ll find Quick Links to an application for starting a team, white papers, connections to standards, Coordinator Guide, Parent Guide and video introducing the program—and more.

Click Here to Visit Web Site

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Head Back to School

The Verizon Thinkfinity Web site contains tens of thousands of free parent-friendly resources, in-class activities and homework help searchable by grade level, keyword or subject. The Back-to-School feature contains dozens of educational resources across the academic disciplines. Among the resources included in the Back to School feature are Figuring in Football in which students examine geometric figures on a football field and search for congruent and similar figures. In The Legend of Sleepy Hollow lesson, students explore Washington Irving’s classic and ponder the mystery of what happened to Ichabod Crane. And in the Mars 500 Mission, students listen to a podcast and learn about a crew of six volunteers who have embarked on a simulated 520-day mission to Mars.

Click Here to Access Free Lessons

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Present the Human Past As a Single Story

World History for Us All is a free, Web-based curriculum that has two major elements: a logical conceptual framework of guiding ideas, objectives, rationales, themes and historical periods; and a rich selection of units, lessons, activities, primary documents and other resources linked to the overarching conceptual structure. The curriculum proposes the idea that humankind as a whole has a history to be investigated and that a world history course may be more than a study of various “cultures,” each disconnected from the others. The framework’s unified chronology organizes the human past into nine Big Eras, each encompassing changes around the globe. The curriculum does not use civilizations as the main units of history, but developments within major societies are richly explored.

Click Here to Access Free Curriculum

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Make a Point—Visually

Create a Graph, an online tool on the NCES Kids’ Zone site, can be used to make five kinds of charts and graphs: bar graphs, line graphs, area graphs, pie charts and XY plots. The site also includes fun examples, such as a star shape with data, as well as examples related to education, such as U.S. public school membership, and statistics, such as percentage of students who reported being bullied at school.

Click Here to Access Free Online Tool

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Find a Path to Improve 21st Century Teaching

Stumped by STEM? Make it easy for your teachers to integrate STEM into what they’re already teaching with Learning.com’s Web-delivered math, science and technology curricula. Get easy-to-use tools to create and integrate your own best practices to share among your school community and make STEM come alive for your students. Visit Learning.com to see how easy it is to create project-based learning STEM activities or cross-curricular STEM lessons with engaging and easy-to-use solutions.

Click Here to Visit Web Site

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Prepare Students Today for the Challenges of Tomorrow

The new National Education Technology Plan emphasizes the importance of giving students opportunities to learn on their own—something technology facilitates and something many students are already doing. Browse the plan online by section—Executive Summary, A Nation on the Move, The Revolution Is Under Way, Impact of No Child Left Behind, The Future Is Now: Action Steps—or download the complete plan from the U.S. Department of Education’s Web site.

Click Here to Download Technology Plan

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Debate It. Discuss It. Understand It.

The Bill of Rights Institute offers a variety of educational resources free of charge. Weekly eLessons offer 20-minute discussion guides for middle school and high school history and government teachers. Each eLesson includes a lively background reading, discussion questions and extension options. The Institute also offers complete lesson plans based on primary source documents. Browse the Constitution Day, Bill of Rights Day and Primary Source Activities sections to access these resources, which include interactive Flash presentations, lesson plans, readings and activities.

Click Here to Access Free eLessons and Activities

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Plus: The Founders Online section of the site features compilations of multimedia educational resources for 12 Founders. The Founding Documents section includes the text of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Short descriptions of landmark Supreme Court cases related to the Bill of Rights appear on the Landmark Supreme Court Cases page.
Click Here to Access Founders Online Resources
Click Here to Access Founding Documents

Click Here to Access Supreme Court Cases

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Bring the Founders’ Ideas to Life

EDSITEment is a free educational resource from the National Endowment for the Humanities. It provides lesson plans and links to student interactive sites and reviewed Web sites in four humanities areas: U.S. History & Social Studies, Literature & Language Arts, Foreign Language and Art & Culture. There are 24 lessons for Constitution Day; many are available in Spanish.
Click Here to Visit Web Site

Click Here to Access Constitution Day Resources

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Engage Students in Civic Learning

The National Constitution Center presents a variety of methods and materials to aid teachers in their mission to inspire active citizenship in their students. The Center offers lessons, aligned with national standards, for every grade level. Browse the selection to discover how you can engage your students and enhance classroom instruction.

Click Here to Visit Web Site

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Plus: Be sure to check back for new additions and the Featured Lesson Plan of the Month.

Click Here to Access Free Lesson Plans

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Ignite Children’s Imagination

Random House Children’s Books, together with Dr. Seuss Enterprises, has launched the all-new Seussville, the official online home of Dr. Seuss. The enhanced interactive site showcases the whimsical books and classic characters of the beloved Theodor Seuss Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss. The Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham, Oh, the Places You’ll Go!—all of Dr. Seuss’s books—leap to life in this completely new Web site designed to ignite a child’s creative thinking and imagination. Lush animated environments offer an exploratory experience, and visitors to the site will uncover a wealth of innovative games and information—including a comprehensive character guide, searchable book catalog, an authoritative author section featuring a new biography and galleries of Dr. Seuss’s early sketches and artwork, parent and teacher resources, a customizable avatar activity and more.

Click Here to Visit Web Site

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Plus: A new Seussville Facebook game is set to launch in September. Similar to Farmville, the game will allow players to accumulate votes by completing a variety of Seuss-themed activities in pursuit of becoming the Mayor of Seussville. Fans can sign up on Seussville.com or by “liking” the Seussville fan page (Facebook.com/DrSeussBooks) on Facebook. Fans can also follow Seussville on Twitter at Twitter.com/Seussville.

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Get Smart About Art

Admission is free at the Smart Museum, where your students will be welcomed by the smARTkids, four students of upper-elementary and middle-school age. When students click on the girl at the left, she takes them to meet an artist, visit a studio and see some great art. The boy next to her shows students different ways to look at art and how to tell a story using art. Teachers can use the Hands On art activities to look at the Artwork of the Month and see how it relates to history and social studies. The art includes photography, sculpture, painting and other genres. The smARTkids site was developed by the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, to help children—particularly those aged 7–12—discover ways to look at, think about and respond to art. Although some smARTkids activities are structured, most promote open-ended exploration of art. Visit the site with your students to learn the language of art, understand that artworks invite multiple interpretations and see how art is created for a wide variety of personal and social purposes.

Click Here to Visit Web Site

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Bring Art Alive

The Museum of Modern Art’s popular Behind the Scenes online video series focuses on the workers’ perspective, be it the artists, their assistants or performers. The UK’s Tate Channel, home of TateShots, presents videos about modern and contemporary art in general, including a selection of films by artists in their collection, documentation of public programs and artist interviews. Smaller institutions are producing innovative video and Web sites as well: ArtTube features videos about art and design produced by the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, and the highly praised ArtBabble, founded by the Indianapolis Museum of Art, shows a selection of art videos produced by various arts organizations and is becoming the most important public online database for free art-related videos.
Click Here to Visit Behind the Scenes
Click Here to Visit Tate Shots
Click Here to Visit ArtTube

Click Here to Visit ArtBabble

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Explore a Zone of Human Interaction

The Indian Ocean in World History is a resource for middle school and high school teachers and students studying world history, geography and cultures. The Web site is a map with overlays for each of seven world eras, showing pictorial icons and routes linked to images and texts that explore long-term interactions in the Indian Ocean. The icons represent places, routes, travelers, objects, trade goods, documents, technologies and geographic features. To facilitate interpretation of the primary sources, the map key includes a set of skills lessons with questions to ask about each type of icon. Each map is associated with a timeline that anchors world events during the seven eras.

Click Here to Visit Web Site

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Take a Virtual Tour Through the Ages

From Prehistory to the Modern Age, history and the lives of humans in times past are presented on this site by the most accomplished of specialists, in a presentation accessible to everyone. This collection of Great Archeological sites is edited by the Ministry of Culture and Communication in France. The collection begins with Prehistory and moves through the Neolithic, Old Kingdom, Protohistory, Antiquity, Middle Ages, Modern and Across the Ages.

Click Here to Visit Web Site

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Embark on the Legendary Titanic

Stroll on the decks of the largest virtual ship ever built and enjoy meeting fellow passengers from all over the world. That’s the invitation from Activeworlds Europe, which relaunched the Titanic on April 15, 2005 to demonstrate the huge possibilities of their interactive multiuser 3-D Internet technology. Titanic 3D offers you the possibility to communicate and walk around with the other visitors from all over the world in a prestigious and romantic environment. Who knows whom you may meet!

Click Here to Visit Web Site

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Return to the Deep

A team of scientists has launched an expedition to the Titanic to assess the deteriorating condition of the world’s most famous shipwreck and create a detailed 3-D map that will “virtually raise the Titanic” for the public. The expedition to the site 2½ miles beneath the North Atlantic is the most advanced scientific mission to the Titanic wreck since its discovery 25 years ago. The 20-day expedition left St. John’s, Newfoundland on August 18 under a partnership between RMS Titanic Inc., which has exclusive salvage rights to the wreck, and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. The expedition will not collect artifacts but will probe a 2- by 3-mile debris field where hundreds of thousands of artifacts remain scattered. On this site, you can join the Expedition Titanic as they virtually raise the Titanic preserving her legacy for all time.

Click Here to Visit Web Site

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Discuss the Evolution of New Technology

edWeb.net, a professional social network for the education community, has announced the launch of a new community, Exploring eBooks for K–12. This is a forum where educators and industry executives can connect and collaborate together to discuss the evolution of this new technology and its potential for use with students and in the classroom. Anyone involved in education is invited to join the Exploring eBooks for K–12 community.

Click Here to Join eBooks Community

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Sign up at The Big Deal Book Web site for hello!, a free monthly 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.

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Get free unlimited online access to all the print content in 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.

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Register online to download the Fall 2010 Big Deal eBook for Educators of English Language Learners. Inside this free eBook, you’ll find links to resources to engage your English language learners.

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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!

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Browse The Big Deal eBookstore! Find thousands of titles from your favorite educational publishers.

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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.

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