Monday, November 5, 2012

Get Ed Funding

GetEdFunding, sponsored by CDW-G, is a resource for finding free and fresh grant opportunities.  The site is dedicated to helping educators and institutions identify the funding they need when education budgets across the country are getting tighter and tighter.  There are currently more than 750 grants and opportunities from various levels and organizations available to various levels of education.  The grant opportunities are monitored, updated, and expanded on a daily basis.  There are 6 criteria that users can search by, which include 41 areas of focus, 8 content areas, and 21st century skills.  By creating an account users can save and organize the various grants of greatest interest.

If your school or district is looking for ways to create opportunities and has an experienced grant writer on staff, this would be a valuable starting point for your district.  Administrators looking to help their schools where funds are extremely limited would benefit utilizing GetEdFunding.  As new grants are made available, you can easily find them on the main page and provides an easy way for staying on top of new opportunities.

Another feature of the site are articles and resources related to educational technology.  There are currently four resources available for free that might be of interest as well.  GetEdFunding also allows searching by keyword, which would allow users to search for content and subject related grants and other funding opportunities. 

Election Websites

Finding valuable and unbiased information related to the election can often be a difficult task.  One of my favorite websites that I look at and check back to every week is All My Faves.  With the election right around the corner, information for before, during, and after the election will be important to educators across the curriculum.  All My Faves currently has a page dedicated to Politics, The Election, Democrats, and Republicans.  There is also information in each section dedicated to showcasing some of the most popular YouTube Channels and Twitter accounts.  I highly recommend this as a starting point for student projects, classroom discussions, and other activities related to the 2012 Election. 


Tuesday Teaching Strategy - 3-2-1 Assessment



3-2-1 Assessment

Chances are you have heard or done something similar to this instructional strategy in the past.  3-2-1 Assessment is a strategy where students take inventory of their own learning by sorting out what they know from what they have yet to master.  It can be used quickly to assess student understanding any time new information has been presented or a review of information is being presented.

In 3-2-1 Assessment, students will need to have either 3 index cards, 3 post-it notes, or in a modified version, a sheet of notebook paper with three separate columns.  On the index cards or paper, the students will need to write the following:
3. THREE things that they have learned and feel comfortable remembering.
2. TWO things that are not yet quite understood about content material
1. ONE question still outstanding about content material
            *NOTE – These can certainly be changed to match specific needs.

When finished, students can either attach the slips of paper to the bulletin board, a poster, or a piece of chart paper that has been divided into three columns for each part of the strategy.  The teacher can then review the notes to build a representation of a class’s understanding of the content material.  The results can either serve as a starting point to the next lesson, help extend a classroom discussion, redirect a planned course of instruction, or alert a teacher to a topic that requires re-teaching.

-       This could be beneficial for math teachers looking to find parts of problem solving that students are having difficulty with.
-       All teachers could use this prior to the review for an exam.
-       Science teachers could use this with an experiment so students can ask why something happened.
-       Social Studies teachers could use this to check for students understanding of relationships between events and time periods
-       English teachers could use this strategy following the reading of a short story and checking for symbolism in a poem
-       This strategy could be used during watching a film in class.