Provide Underserved Children with Access to Good Books
Lois Lenski, children’s book author and Newbery medalist, had a lifelong concern that all children have access to good books. In pursuit of this goal, she established The Lois Lenski Covey Foundation, which annually awards grants for purchasing books published for young people, preschool through grade 8. The foundation provides grants to libraries or organizations that serve economically or socially at-risk children, have limited book budgets and demonstrate real need. Grants for 2012 will range from $500 to $3,000 and are specifically for purchasing children’s fiction or nonfiction books. The library-grant program does not provide grants for book-donation programs, classroom collections, atlases, dictionaries, basal readers or similar texts, workbooks or similar instructional tools or for textbooks or encyclopedias. Grant applications for audio books will be considered only in the cases of children with special needs, where audio books would be particularly appropriate in addressing those needs.
Deadline: June 15, 2012
Click Here for More Information

Turn Afterschool Activities into Cool Rewards
The Afterschool Awards is a nationwide contest spotlighting afterschool achievements for elementary, middle school and junior high students. IZOD, JCPenney and NOW Music have teamed up to bring students a chance to turn their afterschool passion into cash for their future education. Students are invited to enter Afterschool Awards for a chance to win up to $10,000 in scholarship money. Students can enter in one or more of these categories: Sports, Community Service, Science and Music & Arts.
Deadline: June 25, 2012
Click Here for More Information

Work Together to Propel Improvement in School Performance
To advance community partnerships and citizen service that will support school improvement, the US Department of Education, working with the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships and the Corporation for National and Community Service, has launched Together for Tomorrow. Through this effort, they are committed to changing the relationship between schools and community partners, both faith-based and secular, and helping those partners and stakeholders move from education outsiders to education insiders. The initiative also promotes a community culture where education improvement is viewed as everyone’s responsibility. Nonprofit organizations, schools, school districts or institutions of higher education; other entities, including businesses and units of government, are encouraged to partner with eligible applicants on Together for Tomorrow Challenge submissions. The award includes an invitation for up to two representatives from the organization to attend a Together for Tomorrow–related event in Washington, D.C., with the White House, the US Department of Education and the Corporation for National and Community Service; inclusion in the Together for Tomorrow online learning network; and national recognition.
Deadline: June 29, 2012
Click Here for More Information

Showcase Innovative Media Literacy Practices
The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Media Literacy Award will be presented to an individual, team or department that has implemented and refined exemplary media literacy practices in their school environment. The award showcases NCTE members who have developed innovative approaches for integrating media analysis and composition into their instruction. The award selection process will be based on a portfolio review by a selection committee. The key elements of the portfolio should demonstrate analysis, evaluation and creation of media; reflective processes used by instructor(s) and participants; and growth of media literacy instruction in the course/department. The award winner will receive a cash award of $2,000.
Deadline: June 30, 2012
Click Here for More Information

Honor Outstanding High School Journalists
The Dow Jones News Fund’s National High School Journalism Teacher of the Year program identifies outstanding high school journalism teachers who have done exemplary work in the previous academic year. The winning teacher will address the Journalism Education Association/National Scholastic Press Association, the Columbia Scholastic Press Association, American Society of News Editors, and college journalism educators. He or she will receive a laptop, travel and lodging expenses, a per diem for substitute teacher fees, and will write a quarterly column for the fund’s newspaper. The winner will also attend a seminar at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Florida. A senior student at the winning teacher’s school will receive a $1,000 scholarship to study journalism based on his or her performance in a writing contest held at his or her school. A student at each Distinguished Adviser’s school will receive a $500 scholarship as well. The Teacher of the Year and Distinguished Advisers receive free subscriptions to The Wall Street Journal Classroom Edition.
Deadline: July 1, 2012
Click Here for More Information

Curb Bullying and Harassment, Retain Free Speech
Court rulings have provided precedent about how K–12 students may express their opinions—even potentially offensive ones—on campus, but a new set of guidelines attempts to provide further clarity for school administrators under pressure to curb bullying and harassment. The new guidelines, entitled “Harassment, Bullying and Free Expression: Guidelines for Free and Safe Public Schools” and produced by the American Jewish Committee and the Religious Freedom Education Project/First Amendment Center, state that while students have a right to attend school without feeling threatened, schools should not censor a student’s right of free speech unless it is substantially disruptive to the education process. More than a dozen groups have endorsed the new guidelines, including the American Association of School Administrators, National School Boards Association, National Association of State Boards of Education and several religious organizations.
Click Here to Access Free Guidelines

Provide Exemplary Arts Education—Online
The Juilliard School in New York City and Baltimore’s Connections Academy have announced a partnership designed to provide online music education to K–12 students. In the fall, the Juilliard eLearning program will offer standards-based courses in elementary, middle and high school music. Future plans for the program include courses in music and dance theory and history as well as live online music lessons. Connections and Juilliard will offer the online music education courses to the 40,000-plus students in its network. But it will also market the courses directly to students and educational institutions interested in partaking in an online Juilliard education experience. Connections and Juilliard will develop courses at first based on the national standards in elementary, middle and high school music. Juilliard has left open the possibility that more courses and features will be added in coming years, such as music theory, music history, drama history or dance history. Live online music lessons and virtual “master classes” could come to the platform too.
Click Here for More Information

Take Multiple Paths Through Fictional Stories
Playfic is a platform for writing and playing interactive fiction. Interactive fiction (also known as “text adventures”) is a genre of game that uses no graphics or sound but instead uses text to tell a story in an interactive world. Playfic is based on Inform7, which uses “if, then” logic to allow users to create their stories. In planning and writing their stories, students can include multiple paths for readers to pursue as they progress through the stories. Readers navigate through the stories by entering directional commands such as “go north” and “go south.” Writing stories on Playfic requires creativity and logical reasoning. While writing their stories, students can click on a preview. If students have errors in the logic, Playfic will point out the errors and explain them so that students can correct the errors in logic.
Click Here to Access Free Tool

Discover Books for Teens with a Compelling Angle
What Kids Can Do (WKCD) presents a summer reading list for teens with a compelling angle: 16 immigration stories of hardship and hope, identity and transformation. You’ll find titles that mix humor with coming-of-age stories and narratives that break hearts. Two of the books—The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and Hope in the Unseen—don’t involve journeys between countries, but across vast cultural divides within America. Teenagers with immigrant backgrounds may find their own reflections, whether their journey to America began in Mexico or China. American teens who have only known the United States as home will learn about the brave journeys of peers who often came to this country with all their hopes in one suitcase. The list is available as a free, downloadable PDF on the WKCD website.
Click Here to Access Free Reading List

Relate American History Through Music
History Happens is a collection of music videos about characters from American history. The goal is to inform and inspire young people that an individual can make a difference—as evidenced by the many acts of courage, endurance and passion that make up the American story. At present the site presents nine original music videos: “Remember the Ladies” (women’s history), “On an Underground Railroad” and “Don’t Look Back” (African American history), “Kennesaw Line” (Civil War history), “Pearl Harbor” (World War II history), “Immigration Island” and “Lady Off the Shore” (immigration history), “Fight No More Forever” (Native American history) and “Jack Jouett’s Ride” (Revolutionary period).
Click Here to Access Free Music Videos

Plus: Three Methods for Teaching the Social Studies to Students through the Arts, written by Ron Morris from Ball State University and Kathryn Obenchain from the University of Nevada, Reno, makes the case for using the arts (including music, drama, painting and sculpture) in the social studies curriculum. The authors describe how students can construct new knowledge by using three artistic methods: (1) scripted, (2) interpretative and (3) original.
Click Here to Access Free Article

Help Students Become Critical Thinkers and Independent Learners
With the materials on Google’s Search Education website, you can help your students become skilled searchers, whether they’re just starting out with search or ready for more advanced training. Downloadable lesson plans will help you develop your students’ search literacy, and A Google A Day challenges will put their skills to the test. The 15 free lesson plans are aligned to ISTE NETS, Common Core and American Association of School Librarians standards. The lesson plans are arranged according to skill level in five categories: choosing search terms, understanding results, narrowing results, searching for evidence and evaluating credibility of sources.
Click Here to Visit Website
Click Here to Access Free Lessons

Create Engaging Interactive Multimedia Presentations
Nearpod is a free iOS app that teachers can use to create quizzes, polls and multimedia presentations that can then be shared directly with students who have the Nearpod student app installed. Teachers can view students’ responses individually or as a whole class. Nearpod has four free tools to create, engage and assess: Content Tool, Nearpod Teacher, Nearpod Student and Reporting Tool.
Click Here to Access Free Teacher and Student Apps

Engage Students in a 21st Century Learning Environment
GoClass is a free classroom application for the iPad that allows teachers to create lessons using different forms of media, project those lessons with a compatible projection system and broadcast specific media to students’ iPads. Teachers can annotate on images and draw diagrams or write chemical equations using the Scribble feature. The annotations and diagrams can then be broadcast to students’ devices in real-time. In addition, GoGlass can serve as a formative assessment tool: students join a session started by the teacher, view and interact with images and documents shared by the teacher and respond to questions.
Click Here to Access Free iPad App

Keep in Touch with Students and Parents
SchoolRack is a free service that allows teachers to build and host their own classroom websites. Unlike free website solutions targeted toward a general audience, SchoolRack has features designed specifically for educators. For example, on their website, teachers can post assignments with full descriptions, expectations and deadlines. SchoolRack offers students and parents free accounts to communicate and hold discussions with teachers outside of class. Once students and parents have activated their accounts, teachers can use private messaging to keep in touch with individuals or groups.
Click Here to Create Free Classroom Website

Plus: Check out the Teacher’s Corner, a blog featuring tips and tricks for using SchoolRack.

Reach Every Student with Hands-on Science Learning
Learning.com’s Aha!Science provides students with the foundational science skills they need in order to be successful in middle and high school. This hands-on supplementary curriculum supports learners and educators with multiple styles of instruction to benefit every student. The program provides educators with instruction and implementation models that make teaching difficult concepts easier, resources to support instruction and reporting capabilities to monitor student progress.
Click Here for More Information

Put Forensic Skills to the Test
Rice University has partnered with CBS, the American Academy of Forensic Sciences and the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History to produce educational web adventures based on the CSI television series. The web adventures are designed to teach students the process of forensic investigation and problem solving. Four CSI web adventures are available: Case One: Rookie Training (Beginner), Case Two: Canine Caper (Intermediate), Case Three: Burning Star (Advanced) and Case Four: Bitter Pill (Advanced); Case Five is in development. The web adventures are available in English, Spanish and German. Also find an Educators’ Guide with education activities free to download. Students will see how bone length can be used to calculate height. They can also create their own bill for forensic testing, solve forensic logic problems—and more. A Family Guide has some fun, safe forensic activities that students of all ages can do at home—from blood spatter analysis to DNA extractions. In addition, a collection of free online activities test students’ powers of observation as well as their skill at handwriting analysis and even their detective abilities.
Click Here to Access Free Web Adventures
Click Here to Access Free Resources

Predict Winners and Losers in Election 2012
NBC Learn and Carnegie Learning are teaming up to produce Decision 2012: Election Math, a collection of free online math education resources related to the 2012 election season, developed especially for middle and high school teachers and students. The resource collection illustrates campaign math and statistics, such as predicting winners through sampling; voter math and statistics, for analysis of voting-age populations, registered voters, demographics and turnout; the math of representation, looking at congressional representation and apportionment of electoral votes; and winning math and statistics, comparing winners and losers over time by political party, candidate ages, home states and popular and electoral votes. Beginning in summer 2012, Decision 2012: Election Math will appear as a Free Resources Special Collection, with streaming videos on nbclearn.com, linked to interactive math problems on carnegielearning.com.
Click Here for More Information

Let Students Show Off Their Creativity
DIY is an online community in which students (identified only by an animal character and nickname) can upload videos and pictures of their creative projects to the DIY website or their iPhone/iPod Touch. The digital portfolio can then be viewed by friends and relatives, who can comment on students’ creative work by giving it one of four stickers: Awesome, Beautiful, Favorite and Genius.
Click Here to Visit Website

Discover a Web of Interesting Books
Hosted by Scholastic, You Are What You Read is a place where students can share information about their favorite books. After creating a simple profile, participants name the five books that mean the most to them. Members of the network can then see who else likes the same books and discover other books that might also interest them. The site offers resources that you and your students can access without joining and creating a profile. In the Bookprint section, famous people have listed their favorite age-appropriate books. The Book Links feature offers webs of books that are related to each other. For example, if you enter the title Green Eggs and Ham, a web of books that are likely to interest students is generated. Click on any book title in the new web to generate yet another web of related titles.
Click Here to Visit Website

Share Learning Resources on a Pinboard
Learnist is a new site (still in beta) that aims to be like Pinterest but for sharing learning resources. On Learnist, you can create pinboards of materials organized around a topic. You can create multiple boards within your account and make your boards collaborative. You can pin images, videos and text to your boards by using the Learnist bookmarklet, by manually entering the URL of a resource or by uploading materials to your boards. Learnist is still in a closed beta period, so you will have to apply for an invitation. Once you’re in, you can start following members of your professional learning community and collaborating on the collection of resources that are beneficial to you and your students.
Click Here to Visit Website

Travel the Ancient Roman Empire
Stanford University has combined historical research, mapping and web technology to bring ancient Roman Empire travel to the Internet. A cross-disciplinary team has created and launched ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World. With it, a user can determine how long it will take to travel from any point in the Roman Empire to any other, as well as calculate the cost of transporting goods and people. The time period the system centers on is about 200 CE, when Roman power was at its highest and the empire’s extent was greatest. ORBIS’s cartogram allows the user to select one main city—Rome, Constantinople, London or Antioch—and a season and then choose either the fastest routes or the cheapest ones. The map changes dynamically according to those choices and rearranges the spatial relationships to reflect them. Suddenly London zooms away from Rome, actually moving off the map—it’s nearly impossible to get there during the winter due to Atlantic storms. With another set of choices, Corinth meets Antioch in the center of the map; it’s a cheap destination during the summer.
Click Here to Visit Website

Zoom Around Wonders of the World
Patrimonium-mundi.org is undertaking an ambitious project to capture and share 360-degree panoramas of all of the UNESCO World Heritage sites. Currently, Patrimonium-mundi.org is up to 277 panoramic images of World Heritage sites. Visitors can rotate all of the images; some of the images allow visitors to zoom in and zoom out to look at the details of the sites. Each image is accompanied by a brief description of the World Heritage site. Visitors can locate panoramas by browsing the world map or by searching for a site in the search box. They can also click on the logo in the bottom left of the web page to randomly travel through space and time to the most significant places on Earth.
Click Here to Visit Website
Click Here to Locate Panoramas on World Map

Browse K12TeacherStore.com for a wide variety of products published by leading K–12 education companies, all of them delivered digitally. Many of the ebooks can be used on interactive whiteboards and various mobile reading devices. All of the books whose covers you see displayed are on sale at a 15% discount. To stay informed about what’s going on with ebooks in K–12 schools, sign up for the free enewsletter, K12 TeacherFile.

Get a free copy of The Big Deal eBook of Resources for 21st Century Teaching and Learning: From the 3Rs to the 4Cs. Explore this collection of resources to help students move beyond the 3Rs and embrace the 4Cs—Communication, Collaboration, Critical Thinking and Creativity—the 21st century skills cited by industry as keys to innovation and invention in an increasingly challenging global economy.

Sign up at The Big Deal Book Web site for hELLo!, a free quarterly 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.

Download a free eBook of the popular print edition of 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.

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!

Browse the new Big Deal eBookstore, in partnership with K12TeacherStore.com! Find thousands of titles from your favorite educational publishers.

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.