Pay it Forward: Paid Summer Opportunities for Teachers

[tweetmeme]Dear Literacy is Priceless Readers,

I am writing to share a paid summer opportunity that I think you and/or your colleagues and graduate students may be interested in.

As you know, one of the organizations I work with is a non-profit called Curriki. Curriki’s mission is to provide free high quality and open source education resources to teachers and students around the globe regardless of their social and economic circumstances. To give you a sense of Curriki’s impact here are a few stats:

• Curriki currently has 35,000+ resources that have been contributed by publishers, professional developers and passionate educators. The resources are reviewed by expert teachers as well as the community.
• The site receives 1.6+ million unique visitors/year from every country on the globe. Our largest user groups are educators in the US, India, Pakistan, South Africa, the UK and increasingly in the Middle East that then go onto using the resources with millions more students year after year.
• To read stories about Curriki’s user community in the UAE, India, US, Morocco and more, visit the Curriki stories page.

This summer Curriki is providing paid stipends to educators that would like to contribute high quality instructional units to Curriki.org that will then be provided for free to schools in need of instructional resources. If you know of people that would be interested, I would be grateful if you could pass along the opportunity below. Feel free to post the information on Twitter and Facebook as well.

Thanks!

Anna

Founder, Bon Education

@bon_education

Share your lessons with the world and get paid with Curriki’s Summer of Content

For the third annual Summer of Content effort, Curriki is soliciting premium content for Grades 6–12 in science, technology, and math, and for content in ELL / ESL for all grades.

Do you have an instructional unit (or units) you’re proud of that you’d like to publish and get paid for? Interested in earning money this summer to develop a new unit that will be shared with a global audience?

This year, the Summer of Content Awards will be granted to student-focused units which include support material for teachers. In other words, we are looking for activities, webquests, worksheets, quizzes, and games that will engage students and help make Curriki a destination for students as well as teachers.

Apply by July 9, 2010. Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis. To learn more visit:

http://www.curriki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Demo/SOCForm2010

Images CC via here, here and here.

Teaching educators and students to be critical consumers of the web

[tweetmeme]Recently while leading a workshop on digital citizenship and safety in Ras al Khaimah, we did an exercise where teachers had to evaluate several websites to determine the trustworthiness and validity of the sites’ information. In particular we spent a long time comparing two websites (website 1 and website 2) on Martin Luther King and discussing why website 1 is a terrible source of information and why website 2 is more reliable (based on clues like content, images, references, URLs, webmasters, etc.).

After the workshop, one of the ICT teachers in the class shared with me some of the websites she asks younger students to evaluate as part of their unit on digital citizenship and safety. Ask your students to take a look at the video above and this website on the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus. What aspects of the video and website are giveaways that the information may not be true?!

Anna

@bon_education

P.S. Once your students are good at evaluating website validity and trustworthiness, try this unit on Digital Image Manipulation in the Mass Media. Your students will be amazed at the amount of digital editing that goes into creating advertisements like the one below.

50 Best Blogs for Literacy Teachers (and a brief update)

[tweetmeme]Wow! The month of April flew by with hardly an extra moment to blog on Literacy is Priceless! This has been an incredible month between:

• Hosting my mom (an amazing Spanish teacher) on her very first trip to the Middle East!  ¡Viva Dubai!
• Attending the Gulf Comparative Education Symposium in Ras al Khaimah, UAE
• Presenting on How to Build Online Education Communities and OERs (like Curriki) at the Global Forum on Technology and Innovation in Teaching and Leading in Dubai, UAE
• Participating on a panel about OERs in the Middle East and giving OER policy recommendations to the EU at the 8th Communia Workshop in Istanbul, Turkey
• Creating and leading a 3-day workshop with my amazing co-leader Chris titled, “Innovating with Microsoft Tools” for Microsoft and the Bahrain Ministry of Education in Manama, Bahrain
• Helping prepare the Gulf region finalists for the Microsoft Imagine Cup
• Leading the 21st Century Teaching Scholarship Program for the Sheikh Saud bin Saqr al Qasimia Foundation in Ras al Khaimah, UAE

Now that I have a moment to sit down and write, I want to extend a huge thank you to Online University Reviews for including Literacy is Priceless on their list of 50 Best Blogs for Literacy Teachers. This is definitely a list to bookmark! In particular, make sure to check out two of my favorites on the list:

• Larry Ferlazzo’s Website of the Day – This practical blog is a must read for ELL teachers and education technology enthusiasts alike. Larry is also an amazing edutweeter @Larryferlazzo.
• Grammar Girl – When do you use who versus whom? Lay versus lie? Effect versus affect? We all need @GrammarGirl!

To great travel, interesting education conferences and literacy!

Anna

Founder, Bon Education

@bon_education

Bon’s on Facebook!