Maintain Security While Providing Greater Access

Stoneware’s LanSchool delivers a unified workspace where teachers and students can access everything they need from wherever they are located. Users have freedom and flexibility to access resources from any device, extending education beyond classroom walls. LanSchool enables key initiatives such as personalized learning, 1:1/BYOD, and Common Core assessment delivery.

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Secure Students, Faculty, and Staff for FREE

With Avast for Business, network security has never been easier. Protect your school with Avast, the world’s most-trusted security. It’s free business-grade protection for PCs, Macs, and servers. You can add unlimited devices to your online account and manage your entire network from one central cloud-based console. It’s free forever, with no strings attached.

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Respond and Win!

As a recipient of Big Deal Media’s K–12 technology enewsletter, you are invited to tell Big Deal Media how you use this publication and how you participate in the purchase of technology products and services. (The survey will take about five minutes to complete.) Surveys submitted IN FULL by September 15, 2015, will be entered in a random drawing to win a $50 American Express gift card. Big Deal Media is giving away one $50 card for every 100 completed surveys.

Deadline: September 15, 2015, for completed surveys

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Connect and Debate Around the World

The Virtual Debate project began as a way to infuse technology into an authentic argumentative writing experience by giving students an audience. To get started with the Virtual Debate, students in two classes agree to engage with one another and select a topic based on their interests and passions. Past topics have included police presence in schools, competitive sports, and digital detox, to name a few. Once a topic is selected, the two sides face off in a coin toss through Google Hangouts to decide the pro and con sides. Students then conduct research and even have the opportunity to contact experts to formulate arguments. Teachers who wish to participate in the virtual debate will find minilessons, anchor charts, and other resources on the project’s website. The final debate is judged by experts from around the country and is recorded using Google Hangouts On Air so parents can tune in and see their child’s hard work. You can sign up and join the Virtual Debate project or connect with teachers and colleagues through Twitter to start your own Virtual Debate. Not only does the experience give students a competitive opportunity to share their argumentative writing, but it also hones their speaking and listening skills while having some fun.

Deadline: Ongoing

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Build a Global Community

The US Department of State has announced scholarships for American high school students to study abroad. The National Security Language Initiative for Youth (NSLI-Y) offers merit-based scholarships to study one of seven critical world languages: Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin), Hindi, Korean, Persian (Tajiki), Russian, and Turkish. The NSLI-Y program is designed to immerse participants in the cultural life of the host country, provide formal and informal language practice, and spark a lifetime interest in world languages and cultures. The Kennedy–Lugar Youth Exchange and Study (YES) Abroad Program offers merit-based scholarships to spend an academic year in countries that may include Bosnia and Herzegovina, Egypt, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Macedonia, Malaysia, Mali, Morocco, Oman, Philippines, South Africa, Thailand, Tunisia, and Turkey. This program increases understanding between people in the United States and people in countries with significant Muslim populations. Students live with host families, attend local high schools, do community service, and complete a capstone project. The Congress–Bundestag Youth Exchange (CBYX) Program offers merit-based scholarships to spend an academic year in Germany. The program was established in 1983 to celebrate German–American friendship based on common values of democracy. Students live with host families, attend local schools, and participate in community life in Germany. To receive printed brochures and/or posters about the State Department’s study abroad opportunities, send an email with your request to youthprograms@state.gov. To enjoy an international experience without leaving home, consider hosting a Department of State–sponsored exchange student.

Deadlines: Visit each scholarship’s website for information about starting an application or registering to be notified when the application becomes available.

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Click Here for More Information About Study Abroad Programs

Click Here for More Information About Hosting an Exchange Student

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Supplement Your Stretched Budget

GetEdFunding is a free 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 thousands of grants and other funding opportunities culled from federal, state, regional, and community sources 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.

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Grow Students’ Thinking

To help teachers ask questions that encourage student reflection and higher-order thinking, TeachThought has created a list of question stems appropriate for each of the six levels of Bloom’s taxonomy. The question stems can be used for any content area or discipline. For example, to encourage thinking at Bloom’s comprehension level, teachers might ask, “Can you retell ___ in your own words?” For the higher synthesis level, suggested stems might include, “What would you infer from ___?” and “What might happen if you combine ___ with ___?” TeachThought’s website provides a chart listing all the stems, as well as verbs to use in crafting questions at each level of the taxonomy (define, interpret, revise, and so forth).

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Dig Deep into Knowledge

In 1997 research scientist Norman L. Webb developed a process and criteria for systematically analyzing the alignment between standards and standardized assessments. Since then the process and criteria have demonstrated application to reviewing curricular alignment as well. This body of work offers the Depth of Knowledge (DOK) model employed to analyze the cognitive expectations demanded by standards, curricular activities, and assessment tasks: Recall & Reproduction, Working with Skills & Concepts, Short-term Strategic Thinking, and Extended Strategic Thinking. Each grouping of tasks reflects a different level of cognitive expectation, or depth of knowledge, required to complete the task. Webb’s DOK is preferred by The Common Core Institute and the Center for College & Career Readiness. The Common Core Institute has made available a freely downloadable Guide for Using Webb’s Depth of Knowledge model. The guide consolidates numerous tools educators use to implement the model for curriculum and assessment. It also compares Webb’s DOK with Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy.

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Get Inspired by ET

Pop Chart Lab has created a poster that illustrates the parts of speech with the help of famous figures from movies, television, music, and literature. For example, Walter White breaks down concrete and abstract nouns. Dr. Who takes students on a tour through prepositions of time. Gizmo the Mogwai takes them on a transformative tour through adverbs. The hand-drawn classic characters contextualize the dusty rules of grammar in an appealing wall-worthy way. Students can use the poster as a reference and a means to get inspired by the likes of ET, Robocop, Holly Golightly, Ice Cube, Elvis, Dumbledore, and others. Cost: $29

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Solve Puzzles Collaboratively

In Arising from Injustice, an alternate reality game focused on the Japanese experience of internment camps during World War II, students are asked to investigate why Dr. Alice Sasaki had been found unconscious in her lab. To wake her from her coma, players must access her high-tech Memory History Cognition device and reconstruct her memories as a Japanese American in the 1940s. The modular, web-based narrative relates the story of the Japanese Americans with eclectic historical documents and media, including pictures, letters, journals, videos, and audio. Players progress from Pearl Harbor to postwar resettlement by solving puzzles, following clues, carrying out assignments, and sharing their findings on a group discussion board. Players evaluate and analyze primary documents to determine the social conditions that precipitated prejudice and discrimination against Japanese Americans. They also hone their media literacy skills by synthesizing their learning in collaborative media projects where they support their research with primary sources. All of these fit with Common Core standards. One of the most important lessons of the game is empathy. The game puts players in a situated learning environment where they must interact and empathize with various characters in order to succeed. To request this educational alternate reality game for your school, contact GameTrain Learning, the developer of Arising from Injustice.

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Explore the Science of Teaching Science

PBS LearningMedia and Smithsonian Science Education Center (SSEC) have partnered to bring the professional development series Good Thinking! to PBS LearningMedia’s on-demand service for educators. Drawing from peer-reviewed research in science, cognition, and pedagogy, Good Thinking! distills valuable findings from hard-to-access journal articles to promote effective classroom practices. The series is available on SSEC’s YouTube channel.

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Support Science Arguments with Evidence

“Evidence-Based Argumentation in Science,” a free, one-hour, on-demand web seminar hosted by the Literacy in Learning Exchange, addresses the call to guide students as they develop science arguments that are supported by research-based evidence. The presenters share examples of ways to teach students to glean appropriate evidence from informational texts and other resources, and methods for compiling and sharing evidence in a cohesive, academic manner in both written and oral formats.

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Make Thinking Visible

To help preschoolers develop a flexible understanding of number, researchers at Stanford University’s AAALab created Critter Corral, a freely available iPad app. The child’s goal is to help return a Wild West town to its former glory by helping the town’s businesses. In all of the games, the task is to create a 1:1 correspondence with a target amount. For example, to help a restaurant, learners count customers to tell the chef how much food to cook. If they count correctly, each customer happily gets one piece of food. If they count too few, the chef does not cook enough food, and some customers are left hungry. The learner can fix the problem by adding or taking away food. This kind of feedback focuses learners on the quantitative discrepancies, which is particularly helpful for relative magnitude concepts (for example, 3 is less than 5).

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Discover and Play in Nature

Disneynature Explore, a free app for the iPad and iPhone, is designed to help children learn about bears, butterflies, lions, chimpanzees, and sea turtles. The activities for learning about each animal include augmented reality components. The app also encourages students to go on nature walks with their parents. On the nature walks, students take pictures and record observations in their digital field journals.

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Walk Around the Real World

With FreshAiR, an Android or iPhone becomes a lens into the hidden world around the user, revealing stories and “Realities” created by others. Users select a Reality and walk around in the real world to experience their surroundings in a new way. Whether the Reality is a tour of a beautiful university campus, a historical landmark coming to life, a fast-paced new game, or an educational lesson, FreshAiR provides an augmented reality portal to hidden worlds. The app is offered by MoGo Mobile.

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Stimulate Girls’ Curiosity in STEM

GEMS (Girls Excelling in Math and Science) has been working since 1994 to increase interest in STEM for girls in elementary and middle school and to expose girls to the enjoyment and wonder of these fields. Educators can explore the pages on the GEMS website and find out about the organization’s purpose, history, activities, research, and resources for encouraging girls to maybe even start a club of their own. The website offers resources for starting a club, research on the impact of clubs such as GEMS, gender equity research, tips for teachers and parents, activities to encourage girls in math and science, and links for girls to explore.

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Turn STEM into STEAM

Khan Academy has launched a new online curriculum, Pixar in a Box, which analyzes how Pixar Animation Studios fuses art, technology, science, engineering, and mathematics to develop animated cinema. Created with middle school and high school students in mind (but available to everyone), Pixar in a Box’s interactive exercises, in-depth video lessons, and hands-on activities span the production process. The mostly math-based lessons currently available include how combinatorics are used to create crowds, such as the swarm of robots in Wall-E; how parabolas are used to model environments, such as the forest in Brave; and how weighted averages are used to create characters, such as Buzz Lightyear. The lessons also convey how linear and cubic interpolation are used to animate characters; how trigonometry is used to create the worlds in which Pixar stories take place; and how simultaneous equations are used to paint all of Pixar’s images. The videos include the voices (and personal stories) of authentic Pixar people working in authentic workplaces on movies that already form the mythic storyboards of children’s lives and often their career aspirations. Future lessons will venture beyond math into science, the humanities, and the arts.

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Perform a Cheer for Science

The Science of Cheerleading is a free ebook that explains the physics and engineering principles behind cheer routines and stunts. The book was created by the founder of Science Cheerleader, an organization of 300 current and former NFL and NBA cheerleaders who are pursuing science and technology careers. Each chapter of the ebook includes a brief video of a Science Cheerleader introducing the chapter’s topic; a brief video of youth cheerleaders performing a science cheer about that topic; text, illustrations, and some engaging examples; a two- to three-minute video of an interview with a Science Cheerleader so students learn more about her connections to science and cheerleading; highlighted science terms, with more information in the Glossary; and highlighted cheer terms, with a Glossary link to explanations of the cheer terminology. Many physics principles are highlighted as well, along with examples from cheerleading and other real-world applications: Newton’s Laws of Motion, changes in velocity and acceleration, angular momentum, terminal velocity, compression and tension, center of gravity versus center of mass, and kinesiology (how muscles work). In addition, the ebook provides basic information on other relevant scientific topics, such as nutrition, computer science, acoustics, and weather. A high-level look at several science careers is also included. The Science of Cheerleading is available as a free downloadable ebook, or as interactive or noninteractive PDFs.

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Click Here to Download Interactive PDF

Click Here to Download Noninteractive PDF

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Push Science to Its Limits

NASCAR teams push science to its limits to eke out the tenths or hundredths of a second that separate the winner from the also-rans. The Science of Speed video series, produced for the National Science Foundation uses the elements of NASCAR to show that a racecar really is a science experiment on wheels. Students will learn how science makes cars powerful, agile, fast, and safe—and how these same principles affect their own cars. The series is comprised of 12 episodes, ranging from Drag & Drafting to Momentum & Time—all of which may be viewed free of charge:

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Connect with the Constitution

September 17 is Constitution Day in the United States. If you’re looking for an activity to do with your students on that day, consider joining Discovery Education for two live virtual events. The first event is a town hall meeting with Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. Justice Breyer will answer questions from students at 12 p.m. (ET) during the virtual event. The second event is a virtual tour of the National Constitution Center. The virtual tour will include a conversation with Judge Marjorie O. Rendell of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. This virtual event will start at 1:30 p.m. (ET).

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Present the News with a Hip-Hop Vibe

Flocabulary, creator of educational hip-hop videos, activities, and assessments, has launched The Week in Rap Junior, a weekly program that engages elementary students in cross-curricular learning through age-appropriate news stories. All units in the new series start with an educational hip-hop video, offering students a selection of news stories and focusing on age-appropriate vocabulary pertinent to each story. With emphasis on creating connections to elementary science and social studies curricula, the program draws on global and domestic news to build on students’ existing knowledge while introducing new themes and concepts, from countries and cultures to innovations and discoveries. Activities included in each edition are inspired by stories highlighted in the week’s video and provide opportunities to develop core skills such as reading, writing, and critical thinking. Each weekly unit also includes an interactive challenge to engage students in the creative process. A winner will be chosen each week and featured in an upcoming video. Educators can sample the first editions of The Week in Rap Junior series for free.

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Shape Understanding of Emancipation

University of Richmond’s Visualizing Emancipation aggregates and visualizes various information related to slavery during the American Civil War: its legality according to the US government, movements of US Army regiments, and documentation of the institution’s destruction. Learners can view maps based on particular options, such as Union Army Location, or filter by a source (for example, personal papers) or event (African Americans helping the Union). Visualizing Emancipation is well suited to high school instruction. In addition to the events, which play out like a movie, educators can use lesson plans keyed to the Common Core State Standards.

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Plus: Developed by a faculty member at George Mason University, The Spread of U.S. Slavery complements Visualizing Emancipation. Whereas one shows the systematic elimination of slavery during the war, the other underscores its steady growth between 1790–1860. The Spread of U.S. Slavery’s intuitive interface lets learners adjust the timeframe and toggle between views of census data (for example, the enslaved and free populations) to visualize slavery’s prevalence. A special feature lets learners cursor over particular counties for granular census data. The tool can help educators dispel the myth that slavery was ebbing before the outbreak of the American Civil War.

Click Here to Access The Spread of U.S. Slavery Web Page

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