Donors Choose – and a good cause

When teaching graduate students at St Mary’s University of MN, Ben Knaus (my teaching colleague) and I work with learners who are working on a teaching license for a second career. We often find ourselves in conversations focused on funding and how to bring technology into our classrooms. One of the tools we mention is Donors Choose – a program which allows donors to read about projects teachers would like to do in their classrooms.

Ben teaches an AVID program for students in his innercity school and he recently launched a Donors Choose initiative to purchase Google ChromeBooks for his 30 students. You can read about his project on his initiative’s site. He did give his donors a heads up that the default process for Donors Choose is to have a percentage of the donation go to the site, not the project (important note: if you choose to make a donation and would like to have a lower amount/no amount, click where it says “optional donation” and change the amount so more can go to the project if you wish).  

If you need funding for a project, Donors Choose might be a good option to check out. And if in the next 39 days  you might be able to help Ben and his students, please click here to check out his project. Thank you for your consideration! 🙂

Spotlight on Youth

Tonight on the CBS Evening News, the closing segment showcased a special 13 year old who, 

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at the age of 9, started a business to help her family make it through some difficult times. There is an “On the Road” website but it doesn’t appear that the story about the Colorado girl is posted yet (though there are additional 

stories of more special young people). This story is really heartwarming and I encourage checking out iTunes 

and downloading the free video podcast of today’s episode of the CBS Evening News if it doesn’t appear on the website soon (within a couple of days). Typically CBS posts the Evening News podcasts in iTunes before 9am the following morning and they appear for about a week. It is well worth the time and effort.

Teaching US Government

Our US Government teachers are discussing what to do next year 

Imageas we go 1:1, especially what do we do about textbooks?  After some mining and sifting, I created this resource site for teaching US Government complete with online textbooks, reference materials, primary sources, multimedia resources, and additional internet tools. Perhaps you or someone you know will be able to benefit from it too.

Copyright Curriculum

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Teaching copyright. Do those two words make you shudder too?

So important yet so not flashy.  While searching for something else entirely, I came across this Teaching Copyright site, a part of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It has a solid collection of resources as well as a 5-lesson long set of curriculum which even includes a mock trial focusing on the issue of copyright violation, another option in the copyright bag-o-tricks!  

Oh, the image? Public domain from the Library of Commons! 🙂