The Music Is Revolution Foundation makes mini-grants for activities designed by teachers to implement, support, and/or improve their ability to provide quality music education for their students. Funds may be used for supplies, materials, equipment, transportation for a field trip, and/or to bring a performer or musical group to the school.

The Civic Ventures Community College Encore Career project will award $25,000 to eight community colleges developing innovative encore career programs in education, health care, nonprofit leadership, and the environment.

Curriki is soliciting elementary and middle school content in ELA, math, science, and social studies. Projects must provide or develop comprehensive resources for substantial units of study, develop or post open source curriculum in an area of need, deliver all content resources as open source, use best practices in pedagogy and instructional design, and participate in a Curriki training. To apply, eMail projects to projects@curriki.org.

High school seniors who have learned English as a second language are invited to apply for the Rosetta Stone $3,000 Communicate and Connect ESL Scholarship essay contest. Students, who are full-time high school students and hold citizenship status or a work or student visa, must submit an essay of no more than 500 words discussing out learning English as a second language impacted his or her life.

Elementary, middle, and high school science teachers in the United States, U.S. territories, and Puerto Rico area sked to apply – individually or in teams, submitting project proposals that demonstrate creativity, involve risk-taking, possess a visionary quality, and model a novel way of presenting science. Proposed projects should promote exciting and innovative activities to motivate students in science.

State Farm and the National Youth Leadership Council are asking high school students to develop a campaign to address the issue of teen driver safety in their communities. The top 20 schools will receive $5,000 to help cover expenses to attend the National Service-Learning Conference, where they will showcase their work. The top winner will be presented with a $10,000 grant to continue their teen driver safety efforts.

Since 2002, Premier Assistive Technology Inc. has been offering its full suite of Accessibility Suite software products to educational and nonprofit organizations through its Breaking Down Barriers to Assistive Technology grant program, which has benefited more than 1,800 school districts nationwide. To help meet the reading and writing challenges of all students, including English Language Learners and those with learning disabilities, the program offers a range of software that reads digital text aloud, provides study efficiency tools, and converts hard copy text to digital format. The grant includes an unlimited institutional license to install all applications on all workstations/networks in a district. Grant applications take two to three weeks to process.

There’s been lots of hype about the fact that the latest variant of the Conficker worm is set to start communicating with other computers on the Internet on April 1–like an April Fool’s Day time bomb with some mysterious payload.  But security researchers say the reality is probably going to be more like what happened when the clocks on the world’s computers turned to January 1, 2000, after lots of dire predictions about the so-called millennium bug. That is, not much at all.

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Students and other researchers soon will have one less reliable source for digital information: Microsoft Corp. is to exit its Encarta encyclopedia business later this year after losing ground over the years to freely available reference material on internet sites such as Wikipedia, Reuters reports. "People today seek and consume information in considerably different ways than in years past," the software maker said in a notice posted on its MSN web site. Microsoft, which slashed 5,000 jobs earlier this year to cut costs and warned that its profit and revenue would fall over the next two quarters, said it will stop selling Encarta software products by June.
Encarta web sites worldwide, except Encarta Japan, will be discontinued on October 31, and Encarta Japan will cease after December 31, the company said.

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