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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Let the Doodling Begin

From cave paintings to “selfies,” artists have always found creative ways of expressing themselves. Now, with their home page as the canvas, Google is asking students in kindergarten through grade 12 to do the same. The theme for this year’s Doodle 4 Google contest is What makes me … me. Young artists can doodle with any materials to show what makes them unique. The winner will receive a $30,000 college scholarship, and his or her work will be featured on Google’s home page for a day.

Deadline: December 7, 2015

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Inspire Young Journalists

The Journalism Education Association’s Linda S. Puntney Teacher Inspiration Award recognizes journalism teachers and advisers who have inspired others to pursue journalism teaching as a career and who has made a positive difference in the teaching community. A narrative of at least 500 words should explain how the teacher being nominated inspired the person making the nomination. Entries will be evaluated by a national panel of journalism educators. The winner will be recognized at the summer Journalism Education Association’s Advisers Institute luncheon where the winner will be asked to speak. The winner’s travel and hotel will be paid to attend the Advisers Institute. Honorable mentions may be given.

Deadline: December 15, 2015

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Get Support for a Lab Makeover

Shell and the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) have partnered to recognize outstanding middle school and high school programs for their exemplary approaches to science lab instruction utilizing limited school and laboratory resources. The Shell Science Lab Challenge will showcase the work of teachers, representing their schools, who submit innovative, replicable strategies to deliver quality lab experiences with limited equipment/resources, and award teachers/schools with additional tools, resources, and rich professional development opportunities needed to support high-quality science teaching and strengthen their existing capabilities. Applicants may be individual teachers or teams of teachers of science in grades 6–12, in the United States and Canada, representing their schools. To enter, applicants must submit a narrative detailing their science teaching strategies, current lab equipment and needs, and ideas for how they will use the updated lab space. Eighteen schools will be chosen from each NSTA district for a $3,000 prize. District winners will compete in the National Finals for one of five additional $5,500 prizes. One grand-prize-winning school will receive an additional $11,500, for an overall grand prize of $20,000.

Deadline: December 16, 2015

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Showcase Computing Skills

Each year the ACM/CSTA Cutler-Bell Prize in High School Computing recognizes the most talented high school students in computer science. To participate, students complete a challenge that allows them to showcase their computing skills. This year participants are asked to develop an artifact that engages modern computing technology and computer science. Judging will be determined on the ingenuity, complexity, relevancy, and originality of the project. Four winners will each be awarded a $10,000 prize. Plus, the winners will receive a trip to the ACM/CSTA Cutler-Bell Prize in High School Computing Reception in February 2016. During the event, the winning students will demonstrate their programs or briefly discuss why they chose to work on what they did and have an accompanying slideshow of screenshots from their project.

Deadline: January 1, 2016

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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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Encourage Understanding of Refugees

Published by the Cultural Orientation Resource Center, Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL), the Refugee Backgrounder provides resettlement communities with basic information about Syrian refugees. It includes a brief guide to Syria’s history, people, and cultures and looks at the current crisis in Syria and conditions faced by refugees. The backgrounder is intended primarily for those providing initial support and assistance to the newcomers. Teachers may use the backgrounder to educate students about a people whose plight they may have read about or watched on television. Readers may also include members of the general public interested in learning about their community’s newest residents.

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Foster Dialogue About Social Issues

PBS’s POV documentaries are a valuable resource for teachers and students. Did you know that more than 80 POV films are available to educators and librarians for free? Use the companion lesson plans to present POV films to your class. Host a free screening of POV films to encourage dialogue in your community around today’s critical social issues. Download POV’s step-by-step guide to organizing a screening.

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Spot Clues to Crack the Case

Historical Scene Investigation (H.S.I.) offers an engaging way for students to investigate history through primary documents and images. H.S.I. presents students with historical cases to “crack.” Each of the 13 cases provides students with clues to analyze in order to form a conclusion to each investigation. The clues for each investigation are in the forms of primary documents and images, as well as secondary sources. H.S.I. provides students with “case files” on which they record the evidence they find in the documents and images. At the conclusion of their investigation, students answer questions and decide if the case should be closed or if more investigation is necessary. Historical Scene Investigation was developed through a partnership of the College of William & Mary School of Education, University of Kentucky School of Education, and the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources program.

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Nurture Leadership Qualities

Girls Thinking Global (GTG) has launched an online professional learning community on edWeb.net to help educators and organizations connect and converse about ways to nurture leadership qualities in adolescent girls and young women. The GTG community will host a series of free webinars to share stories and ideas for initiatives that will make a difference in girls’ lives. The webinars will feature many diverse voices addressing these issues, including girls and young women; teachers, administrators, and educators at all levels; organizations providing services and educational programs; and parents and community leaders. The community’s first webinar, “Fostering Leadership in Women and Girls,” will take place on December 2, 2015, from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. (ET). The founders of Girls Thinking Global will use Real Women, Real Leaders, a book they recently co-edited, to lead a conversation on some of the latest research on the strengths of women as leaders, as well as real-life experiences of women who have achieved significant leadership roles in education and business.

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Promote Literacy Through Discussion and Debate

Sponsored by Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education (HGSE), Learning to Talk by Talking is a new online professional development module for both educators and parents. Based on the research of HGSE Professor Catherine Snow, one of the world’s leading experts on language and literacy, the module provides a developmental approach to language and literacy from birth to the teen years. Snow’s research shows that talking with children leads to a larger vocabulary, and that leveraging this broader vocabulary through further discussion and storytelling leads to improved literacy outcomes. The module is a mix of self-paced learning, facilitated group discussion, and job-embedded learning that will help educators and parents develop and support the literacy skills of children. Participants will learn tools and tips from the online lessons that they can weave directly into practice in their classrooms or schools, or at the dinner table. The program will take place online, December 10–15, 2015.

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Partner with Parents

On December 15, 2015, from 4:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. (ET), the GetEdFunding community on edWeb.net will host a free webinar, sponsored by CDW•G, titled “Partnering with Parents to Secure Grant Money.” In this webinar, the presenter will discuss how to work with parent partners to vet, write, and submit foundation grant proposals. The webinar will include information on how to effectively collaborate with a parent partner to expedite the grant-writing process; how to develop a systematic approach to identifying potential funding opportunities for your classroom or school; and how teachers, administrators, and parent partners can work together to address grant application guidelines and requirements. The presenter will also field questions from attendees after the presentation.

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Ensure Success for All Students

On January 18, 2016, from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. (ET), Big Deal Media’s Amazing Resources for Educators community on edWeb.net will host an interactive, collaborative webinar, sponsored by Quill.com, titled “Ensuring Success for All: Strategies for Bringing Out the Best in Students in Poverty, and Students Who Struggle with Language and Learning.” In this webinar, the 2015 National Teacher of the Year will share her experience in Title I middle and high schools, as well as her work with refugee students, English language learners, and students in remedial classes. Bringing together the various strands of differentiation, RTI, and other protocols, this session will help teachers and administrators create effective learning experiences for students. The webinar will deliver both practical strategies and inspiration to educators and administrators working toward success for all of their students. Participants’ questions will be answered during the live, interactive session, and the webinar will be recorded and archived for members of the Amazing Resources for Educators community to access after the event.

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Develop Flexible Understanding of Number

Researchers at Stanford University’s AAALab created Critter Corral, a freely available iPad app, to help preschoolers develop a flexible understanding of number. The child’s goal is to return a Wild West town to its former glory by helping the town’s businesses. In all games, the task is to create a 1:1 correspondence with a target amount. For example, to help the 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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Make Fitness Fun

Sworkit Kids from Nexercise is a new iOS and Android app designed to get children moving with short, fun exercises. The app features workouts of five to 30 minutes in length (users select the length). Each workout has a mix of fun exercises, such as diagonal hopping, crab walking, and hopping on one foot. Users can choose exercises, or they can let the app create a sequence of exercises for them.

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Explore a Minecraft World Through Code

Microsoft and the nonprofit group Code.org have released a computer-coding tutorial built around Minecraft. The 14-level tutorial was created for the third annual Hour of Code, which will take place this year during the week of December 7–13. Designed for users as young as six years old, the new tutorial introduces players to basic coding skills by inviting them to explore, mine, and build in a specially designed, two-dimensional Minecraft world. Players generate computer code in the process of plugging together “drag-and-drop” blocks of commands that guide the onscreen characters.

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Tackle Creative Challenges

How does mathematics relate to Pixar animation? Khan Academy and Pixar recently released an engaging interactive lesson series called Pixar in a Box. The series includes lessons for all grade levels. Each lesson demonstrates how a concept introduced in school is used for creative benefit at Pixar. Teachers looking for more information should check out the Educator’s Guide, which provides examples and ideas for implementation.

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Explore Ideas in Collaboration

Inquiry maths is a model of teaching that encourages students, aged 11 to 16, to regulate their own activity while exploring a mathematical statement (called a prompt). Inquiries can involve a class on diverse paths of exploration or in listening to a teacher’s exposition. In inquiry maths, students take responsibility for directing the lesson, with the teacher acting as the arbiter of legitimate mathematical activity. Students learn to ask questions, make conjectures, plan and monitor their activity, explore ideas in collaboration, identify when they need new knowledge, ask the teacher for instruction, explain their reasoning, and prove their results. The site presents inquiry prompts for topics related to the math curriculum for students, notes and resources for each inquiry, a guide to inquiry maths lessons, suggestions for teachers to create their own prompts, regulatory cards to help students direct lessons, and articles and posts on inquiry maths.

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Develop Peacemaking Skills

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Dr. Judith Myers-Walls, Professor of Human Development and Family Studies at Purdue University, was getting ready for work and watching the morning news when she saw the tragic events of that day unfold. She had significant experience with preparing materials to help parents and other adults talk to children about media events such as those. So that morning, she sent out the paper “Talking to Children When the Talking Gets Tough” over several listservs and promised more specific pieces later that day. However, instead of continuing to send out more email messages, she created a website called Terrorism and Children. Purple Wagon is the latest iteration of the website that was born that day. Purple Wagon offers research-based information, recommendations, and activities to help children understand political violence, cope with fears and sadness when groups are in conflict, and learn how to make peace. The website provides teachers with helpful information and resources that they can use to discuss values related to current issues. The Classroom Activities and Resources section includes curriculum guides that can be used in classrooms with children and youth of various ages. The Additional Links category provides links to websites of practitioner, professional, and civic organizations that continuously launch peace actions. The site also includes a section of Resources for Military Families.

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Click Here to Download “Talking to Children” Paper

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Provide Insight into Community Perspectives

Free and open, the Chronicling America database provides access to more than 10 million pages of historic newspapers published from 1836 to 1922. Including national, state, and local news, the site enables users to search newspaper pages for specific keywords and phrases, limited by dates, places, and/or language. These newspapers are made available as part of a joint program between the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress begun in 2005. Currently memory institutions from 38 states participate in the program and select newspapers from their archival collections to digitize to technical specifications established by the Library of Congress. In addition to the newspapers, Chronicling America provides access to more than 250 brief topic guides, a directory of US newspapers published since 1690, and information about library holdings, as well as links to digital versions, when available.

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Explore the Art of Conflict

The Newberry Library’s Digital Collections for the Classroom website features primary sources from the Newberry’s holdings, contextual essays, and discussion questions. Newberry Teacher Consortium collaborates with scholars, university faculty, and classroom teachers to develop the collections in this growing resource for classroom use. The collections are designed to be incorporated easily into classroom instruction and support the development of skills emphasized in the Common Core State Standards. Each collection includes high-resolution digital images of documents ranging from maps, photographs, and cartoons to poems, speeches, and travel narratives, as well as contextual introductions, discussion questions, and bibliographic information. Users can search, view, and download individual items or entire collections. They can also build collections of their own using the “Create” feature.

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Examine Clues of Climate Change

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) developed A Student's Guide to Global Climate Change to help provide students (and educators) with clear, accurate information about the causes and effects of climate change—as well as the steps we can all take to help address the problem. The site offers several planned activities, such as Take a Climate Change Expedition, Learn the Impacts, and Calculate Your Emissions. An Educator Resources section includes seven lesson plans tied to A Student’s Guide to Global Climate Change, tips for using the website, and links to additional websites and resources.

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