Recognize Successful Educational Technology Collaboration
CDW•G, in partnership with eSchool News, is sponsoring Collaboration Nation, an awards program that will recognize the nation’s finest examples of collaboration and successful educational technology projects. CDW•G will share the winning school and district’s keys to success and will award that school or district a grand prize of $50,000 to spend with CDW•G on products and services from partners such as HP, Lenovo, and Meraki. Schools and districts are invited to submit a nomination and short video on the Collaboration Nation website. The winning school or district’s nomination and video will demonstrate exemplary technology collaboration across departments and describe how the project had a measurable impact on teaching and learning.
Deadline: June 30, 2015
Click Here for More Information
Plus: Schools and districts are encouraged to be a part of the Collaboration Nation community on Facebook by sharing videos of collaboration successes. Each month from April through June, the school or district video that has the most shares on Facebook will win a $15,000 prize in products from Collaboration Nation partners such as HP, Lenovo, or Meraki.
Click Here to Access Collaboration Nation Facebook Community
Fuel the Creative Process, Tap Digital Media, Close the Gap & More
May 15, 2015
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IN THIS ISSUE
Grants, Competitions and Other "Winning" Opportunities
Resource Roundup
Professional Development Plus
Mobile Learning Journey
STEM Gems
Worth-the-Surf Websites
Sponsored By:
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Grants, Competitions and Other "Winning" Opportunities
Give Today, Thrive Tomorrow!
Learning Bird simplifies your school’s transition to digital learning with an approachable web application that brings 15,000 differentiated lessons to your students’ fingertips. The curated online library adapts to recommend the highest quality lessons in a variety of subjects, from mathematics and science to English and the humanities, for individual students. Students can easily search for lessons by keyword, topic, or textbook. Teachers can access the library to differentiate blended or flipped instruction using formative assessment and lessons from multiple perspectives, giving students a greater chance of finding explanations that work for them. Personal dashboards contain detailed and informative reports so that teachers can review the progress and engagement of their class, school, or district. Learning Bird also integrates with a school’s learning management system. For every high school or middle school that adopts Learning Bird between May 1 and June 30, 2015, an elementary school in the district will receive a free one-year subscription. Learning Bird’s education experts make implementation seamless so teachers can focus on giving the best education to their students. Book a demo and see Learning Bird’s future-ready solution in action.
Click Here for More Information
Weave Together Awareness and Advocacy
Middle school (grades 6–8) and high school (grades 9–12) students from around the world are invited to compete in the 2015 Ocean Awareness contest. The theme “Our Oceans, Our Plastic” invites students to explore and interpret the connections among the ocean, plastic pollution, society, and humans. Students should use creativity to make a work of art, poetry, prose, or film, weaving together ocean awareness, creativity, and advocacy. Advocacy requires problem-solving skills, creativity, communication skills, assertiveness, and most of all, knowing when to call the world to action. An individual or a group of any size may submit an entry. Any student may submit one entry per category. (A student may have a maximum of four different submissions, one in each category.) More than 25 categories of prizes are available; cash awards range from $100 to $1,500. The contest’s website provides tips and inspiration for students, resources for teachers, and ideas for meeting education standards with the contest.
Deadline: June 15, 2015, at 11:59 p.m. (ET)
Click Here for More Information
Bring to Light Hidden Artifacts
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has announced a grant program called Common Heritage, which will bring to light historical records and artifacts currently hidden in family attics and basements across the country and make them digitally available to the wider public and for posterity. NEH invites historical societies, libraries, archives, museums, colleges, and other local institutions to apply for the Common Heritage grant program, the first federal grant program of its kind. Grants will support daylong events, organized by community cultural institutions, in which members of the public will be invited to share materials important to their family or community histories, such as photographs, artifacts, family letters, and works of art. These items will be digitized, along with descriptive information and context provided by the community attendees. With the owner’s permission, the digitized materials will be made publicly available through the institution’s online collections. Contributors will receive a free digital copy of their items to take home, along with the original materials. Grants will also be used for public programming—including lectures, exhibits, discussion programs, and film screenings—that celebrates and expands knowledge of the community’s past and the diverse histories of its members. NEH’s Common Heritage program will award grants of up to $12,000 to community cultural organizations to coordinate community events and ensure that a wide range of historical materials can be digitized and contextualized through public programming.
Deadline: Applications for the initial cycle due June 25, 2015; first round of Common Heritage digitization days to take place in early 2016
Click Here for More Information
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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 laptop, netbook, tablet, and Chromebook carts are 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
Consider Challenges After an Earthquake
A 7.8 earthquake on April 25 battered the mountainous nation of Nepal, killing and injuring thousands, destroying entire villages, shattering treasured historic landmarks, and upending life for millions of people. The New York Times Learning Network provides an online lesson to help students learn more about Nepal and the challenges the Nepali people face as they try to recover from this devastating earthquake. The lesson suggests a variety of teaching activities that can fit into a single period and offers additional resources and ideas for classes that want to conduct more in-depth research.
Click Here to Access Free Online Lesson
Connect Art with Literature
The Arts and the Common Core Curriculum Mapping Project has created a guide utilizing the arts in a Common Core curriculum. Because Common Core promotes the importance of all students studying the arts, the guide highlights places where teachers can enhance their English language arts instruction by connecting a genre or particular text, or a theme of a unit, to works of art, music, or film. The guide suggests, for example, that students study self-portraiture when they are encountering memoirs. Students might compare a novel, story, or play to its film or musical rendition. Where a particular period of literature or the literature of a particular region or country is addressed, works of art from that period or country may also be examined. In each case, connections are made to the relevant Common Core standards.
Click Here to Download Free Guide
Engage Effectively in the Digital World
Living Online is an interdisciplinary curriculum for the digital age. The curriculum is designed primarily for high school students, but it can be adapted for younger students, too. Its teaching modules—from “Privacy” and “A is for Algorithm” to “Digital Activism” and “Cyberpsychology”—can be integrated into various subject areas. Other units under development include “Remix Culture,” “Gaming in Education," and “Reality—Virtual/Actual.” The curriculum’s first unit—“Identity”—gives students insight into how their identities may be unconsciously shaped by digital media and online socialization. The module highlights opposing perspectives on the topic. In the unit titled “Economy of the Internet,” students learn about the role of advertising in the World Wide Web: how websites generate money by attracting visitors and then sell those visitors’ personal data. The unit called “Diversity of Thought: Breaking Out of the Bubble” invites teens to analyze debates about whether digital technology makes users more open-minded or more enclosed in their worldviews, while that on “Digital Disruption” uses case studies, such as Netflix and Uber, to explore how these forces destruct and create. The website presents a curriculum overview, sample lessons, and an online form for requesting the curriculum.
Click Here to Access Curriculum Resources
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Professional Development Plus
Turn Data into Action
CoSN, in partnership with AASA and Gartner, Inc., has released the Closing the Gap Professional Development Toolkit to provide educators with a curricular plan and set of resources needed for using educational data to improve instructional practice and student outcomes. The toolkit offers a step-by-step curriculum and a cadre of professional development resources designed for district and school leaders to facilitate their training of other district and school leaders. The curriculum and other resources will help you to transform your school into a data-driven learning environment.
Click Here to Access Free Toolkit
Cultivate Curiosity
S.T.E.M. Magazine focuses on issues and resources to support educators with the priority of inspiring and fueling the creative process of curriculum presentation while also addressing the personal needs associated by the pressures of instruction, testing preparation, class discipline, and district demands. The magazine provides clarity on the subjects of how to incorporate STEM into every class, how to encourage the creative process, and how to cultivate curiosity in both the teacher and the student. In addition, the publication strives to inform educators about the urgent need for this inclusion in light of their responsibility to equip students fully for their careers. S.T.E.M. Magazine also invites educators to submit STEM articles monthly to be shared with thousands of other teachers worldwide.
Click Here to Access Sample Issue
Integrate STEM Principles with the Arts
STEAM is an educational approach to learning that uses science, technology, engineering, the arts, and mathematics as access points for guiding student inquiry, dialogue, and critical thinking. STEAMed magazine is a free quarterly digital publication that contains high-profile features, educator essays on ways that STEAM is changing their classrooms and schools, and interactive product reviews to help make STEAM practical and engaging for students. On EducationCloset’s STEAM portal, you can browse, download, and print this quarter’s edition.
Click Here to Access Free Magazine
Mobile Learning Journey
Experience Mobile App Design
MIT App Inventor is a free blocks-based programming tool that allows everyone, even novices, to start programming and build fully functional apps for Android devices. Newcomers to App Inventor can have their first app up and running in an hour or less and can program more complex apps in significantly less time than with more traditional, text-based languages. Initially developed by a team from Google Education, App Inventor runs as a web service administered by staff at MIT’s Center for Mobile Learning—a collaboration of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the MIT Media Lab. MIT App Inventor supports a worldwide community of nearly 3 million users representing 195 countries worldwide. An open-source tool, App Inventor seeks to make both programming and app creation accessible to a wide range of audiences.
Click Here to Get Started Building an App
Inspire Creativity
With the free Shadow Puppet Edu app, students can create an audio-narrated slideshow with images taken from their iPhone or iPad or grabbed from the web. The creator can type text and draw on the slides too.
Click Here to Visit iTunes App Store
Plus: The free Seesaw app for the iPad and iPhone enables students to create a digital journal of their learning, embed examples of their work into it, and then easily share it with parents and others.
Click Here to Visit iTunes App Store
Mix Information and Storytelling
The Global iBook series is an ongoing project set up by Meg Wilson, a special education teacher and Apple Distinguished Educator. The project brings classrooms around the world together to create an ebook in the app Book Creator for iPad. The aim is to give students and educators from across the globe the opportunity to collaborate and create something unique and creative using only the iPad.
Click Here to Visit iTunes App Store
STEM Gems
Spread Hope Locally and Globally
The High Hopes Project is a model STEM learning project available to K–12 teachers and students locally and globally. The project involves launching high-altitude balloons that can reach altitudes of 100,000 feet (30,500 meters) or higher. The launches are taking place this spring. The balloon payloads will include student-designed science experiments and engineering designs as well as experiments and activities in which students from around the world will be able to participate, using online applications such as video streams, blogs, wikis, Twitter, and other social media. The “High Hopes” messages will be printed on biodegradable paper and sent aloft with the balloon. The messages of hope will be released at altitude by a student-designed payload so that they will be spread all over the world.
Click Here to Visit Website
Click Here for Information on How to Participate
Dispel Stereotypes of the High-Tech Industry
Microsoft’s DigiGirlz High Tech Camp invites girls in grades 9–12 to listen to executive speakers, participate in technology tours and demonstrations, network, and learn through hands-on activities in workshops. This year camps will take place on various dates throughout the summer in Charlotte, North Carolina; Fargo, North Dakota; Reno, Nevada; Redmond, Washington; Las Colinas, Texas; and St. Louis, Missouri. The deadline for applications varies by location.
Click Here to Visit Website
Inspire the Next Generation of Cyber Stars
The GenCyber program provides summer cybersecurity camp experiences for students and teachers at the K–12 level. The program’s goals are to help all students understand correct and safe online behavior, increase diversity and interest in cybersecurity and careers in the cybersecurity workforce of the nation, and improve teaching methods for delivering cybersecurity content in K–12 computer science curricula. GenCyber camps are open to all student and teacher participants at no cost. Funding is provided jointly by the National Security Agency and the National Science Foundation.
Click Here to Visit Website
Click Here to Access 2015 Camp List
Make Learning Mutual
Having students teach pushes them to think about a topic’s underlying concepts and connections in order to gauge what another student knows and to build on that understanding. To boost this metacognitive effect, a team at Vanderbilt University has made a teachable agent for science lessons that displays every step of its thought process onscreen as it learns. They call the tool Betty’s Brain. To teach Betty about ecosystems, for example, a student builds a map of ecosystem knowledge in her “brain” by linking together words—such as the names of various plants, animals, and nutrients—with lines indicating specific kinds of relationships (this eats that, or this causes that). Gradually Betty’s brain becomes filled with an onscreen diagram of systems, such as food webs, water flows, and nutrient cycles. When Betty is quizzed by another avatar named Mr. Davis, the words and the links between them are highlighted in a sequence as she considers her answers. When Betty “messes up,” students can see precisely which connections led her down the wrong path. To help debug a faulty brain, students can click into Mr. Davis’s online library of scientific information—background support, or scaffolding—that teachable agents need in order to be effective. If you’d like to try using the Betty’s Brain program, register on the Vanderbuilt website. Several lessons are available in the system for trial.
Click Here to Visit Website
Click Here to Register for Latest Version of Betty’s Brain
Worth-the-Surf Websites
Explore Photography As a Cultural Practice
Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library contains more than 73,000 items, including 57,000 photographic prints, as well as thousands of books, pamphlets, maps, and theater broadsides. These materials document American history from the Civil War through the end of the nineteenth century and record the emergence of photography as a distinctive cultural practice. Among the jewels of the collection are photographs of Abraham Lincoln, including an 1863 Alexander Gardner imperial albumen portrait and Mathew Brady’s Cooper Union portrait. The collection’s significance also lies in the tens of thousands of portraits of American politicians, army officers (of both the Union and the Confederate forces), writers, actors, singers, scientists, African Americans, and Native Americans. A daguerreotype of Susan B. Anthony hints at the great number of women whose portraits appear in the collection. The library includes examples of works from most photographers who were active in nineteenth-century America.
Click Here to Visit Website
Engage in Active Listening
Listen Current makes it easy to bring authentic voices and compelling nonfiction stories to the classroom. The website curates the best of public radio to keep teaching connected to the real world and build students’ listening skills at the same time. Listen Current offers three- to five-minute video clips along with a full set of lesson plans and worksheets. The in-depth lesson plans for current events, science, social studies, and English language arts include a listening guide with transcripts, vocabulary, class activities, and additional resources. The premium version provides ELL support for many lessons, including close listening strategies, Tier 2 vocabulary (words students need to understand for academic success), and a speakers’ guide.
Click Here to Visit Website
Read Today's Front Pages
The Newseum’s innovative Digital Classroom features interactive timelines, archival videos and downloadable historic front pages with cross-disciplinary lesson plans for middle school, high school and college teachers and students. Primary sources, interactives, videos and lesson plans bring history, journalism, and the First Amendment to life for students. The Newseum offers lesson plans in three areas: Media Literacy, History, and Civics. For example, in the lesson titled News Confusion: What’s News (media literacy), students play a sorting game to figure out what types of stories and events are “news,” and they begin to explore how news is different in different places. In Blogging the Bill of Rights (civics), students consider how the framers of the First Amendment might have used the Internet and modern communication to spread their ideas and messages. Students then create a mock blog for one of the framers. And in Taking Exception: Modern First Amendment Rights Issues (history), students read about modern First Amendment court cases and then take a position and argue the case.
Click Here to Visit Website
Click Here to Access Free Lesson Plans
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