Free DVD - America, The Story of Us

On April 25th the History Channel is premiering a twelve hour mini-series title America, The Story of US. History Channel is offering schools the opportunity to get a free copy of the series on DVD. To get the DVD your school's principal must submit a request through the History website. The DVD's will be shipped in August, just in time for the new school year. Learn more about the series and watch a preview here.













Thanks to Eric Langhorst (Speaking of History) for the info about this free DVD.

Certificate Street - Free Certificate Templates

Certificate Street, formerly My Award Maker, provides an abundance of free templates for creating award certificates. There are six categories of awards templates offered on Certificate Street; Sports, School, Special Occasion, Business, Blank, and Relationships. Certificate Street also offers a gallery of newsletter templates. All the templates are available as free editable PDFs.

Applications for Education
I haven't been in an elementary school classroom since I was in elementary school, but one of the things I remember about my days in elementary school is that my teachers made a lot of award certificates. I don't know if all elementary school teachers make award certificates. For those teachers that do give out award certificates Certificate Street could be a handy resource.

Here are some related items that may be of interest to you:
Free Prezi Templates
Send Holiday Greetings with Google Templates

Web2.0 & Students with Disabilities

Many web2.0 sites have great potential for students with disabilities. Many of these sites help meet the concepts of Universal Design for Learning (UDL). UDL is a framework curricula that enable all individuals to gain knowledge, skills, and enthusiasm for learning. Using multiple means of representation, multiple means of action & expression, and multiple means of engagement you can create lessons & curriculum that all learners can participate in. For more information visit the CAST.org website.

Many web2.0 sites are great ways to meet UDL goals and many of these site are easily adapted for use by students with disabilities. Tar Heel Reader is a free, online book creator. The site has over 8,000 books on many topics. Many of these books have been written by students. Some features of Tar Heel Reader are integration with Flickr for photos and Text-to-Speech capabilities for completed books.

Voicethread, a site mentioned on this blog numerous times, is a great way for students to express themselves. I've used it to allow students with disabilities the opportunity to present, even if they have limited verbal skills. Using the record feature they can pre-record comments, then play them back to present their information. It's been a great tool to share what they know! Since other can leave comments too, it becomes an interactive tool, and what student doesn't love to have their parents, grandparents or friends comment on their work.

These are just a couple of examples of web2.0 sites that help meet UDL guidelines. If you are interested in more please check out my blog - Teaching All Students.

Patrick

Patrick Black is a special education teacher in Mt. Prospect, IL. As a self described "Geek", he writes the blog Teaching All Students about integrating assistive technology and students with disabilities.

Freezly Helps You Locate Free Stuff

Last week my blog post 5 Ways to Get Free Stuff for Your Classroom was the most popular post of the week. That tells me that there are many of you like me that relish the opportunity to get free things. Freezly is a new service that searches Twitter for free product give-aways. Some of the give-aways are contests while others are just straight give-aways. I read about Freezly on Mashable and I encourage you to check out Mashable's post for more information about how Freezly finds these freebies.

Teaching With SMARTBoard Video Podcasts

Teaching with SMARTBoard is a great video podcast that I stumbled upon early this week. As you would expect from the title, Teaching with SMARTBoard is about tips, tricks, and lessons for teaching with SMARTBoard. This video podcast is produced by two mathematics teachers from Naperville, Illinois. While the focus of the podcasts is about teaching mathematics with a SMARTBoard, the concepts in many of the episodes can be applied to other content areas. Along with each episode there is a PDF of the material covered that episode. You may also want to explore the resources section of Teaching with SMARTBoard for additional ideas.

Here are some related resources that may be of interest to you:
Do You Use a SMARTBoard?
An Almost Free Smart Board

Blank Sheet Music and Other Music Resources

Yesterday, through Fred Delventhal's blog, I came across a link to free printable sheet music. Blank Sheet Music.net allows you to create your own blank sheet music. Before printing you can select the key signature, time signature, number of staves per set, sets per sheet, and the cleff.

Applications for Education
Blank Sheet Music could be a handy resource for music teachers, particularly music theory and music composition teachers. I remember my high school band teacher bemoaning the inflated cost of sheet music. Blank Sheet Music could be a cost saving resource for music educators.

Here are a couple of other music education resources that I've mentioned in the past.
Beethoven's Baseball from the Dallas Symphony Orchestra
Ed Tech Musician Podcast

Free Stuff for New Teachers

The Discovery Education Network has many good resources for new educators and veteran educators. Visitors will find tutorials/ suggestions for improving teaching practices, lesson plans, and links to blogs about using technology in the classroom.

New Teacher Survival Central on the Discovery Education Network is giving away prizes to new teachers every week. The prizes generally include DVDs or software. In addition to the weekly prizes there is a grand prize that weekly entrants are eligible to win. The grand prize is valued at more than $7000. If you're not a new teacher, don't worry, there is a chance for you to win too. If you refer the grand prize winner you will also win a prize valued at $6500. Click here for more details and to enter the contest.