Here are some resources on grants that I’ve gathered in Delicious, a social bookmarking tool that I use to store and share resources: http://delicious.com/district6/grants Some of the grants in this collection have already expired, but are probably up for renewal soon.

There are several great resources that will help schools and teachers find funding and technology for their classroom. There are Donor Matches, Grant Resource Sites, and even a social network for finding grants.

Donor Matches

There are a few sites that allow teachers to put in their requests in a database on a website, where donors can then contribute to help them out. The more well known of these sites is Donors Choose, but I just heard about another, specifically geared for teachers with technology requests on Wes Fryer’s Technology Shopping Cart Podcast, called Digital Wish. It works the same way as Donors Choose, but teachers can go “shopping” for technology needs. Also, I have bookmarked another donor match site called Adopt a Classroom. I haven’t really heard much about this site, but it looks promising.

Grant Resource Sites

Other grant resources are websites that have a collection of educational grants to choose from. I regularly scan sites like Grant Wrangler, ESchool News Funding, and LACOE’s Grants and Funding Site to see what’s available. Additionally, LAUSD’s Grants Assistance Unit offers a regularly updated list of grant resources. Follow the directions on their site to sign up for grant alerts and applications. All of these sites offer deadline grants, as well as ongoing – foundation type grants. They are a great place to start searching for grants that will suit the needs of your school.

Grant Social Network

Grant Wrangler has also started up a social networking site on Ning so that grant seekers and grant givers can interact. You can join at http://mygrantwrangler.ning.com/

Grant Seeking Guidelines

The most important goal to keep in mind when purusing a grant is that it’s not about the technology or goodies that can be bought with a grant, but it’s more an opportunity to do things differently and out of the box to address the learning needs of our students. Once you’ve established what your need is and how you are going to address it, you need to make sure you have buy-in from the staff for the plan you have. I learned a great deal about grant writing from a presentation on grant writing at our District 6 EdTech Cadre meeting a few years ago. It was facilitated by Ms. Pat Sanford of Tech Ed Services. She gave me permission to record and publish her presenation as a podcast. It’s worth a listen for some great tips on grant writing: Grant Writing Workshop. Ms. Sanford refers to a handout during her presenation. If you would like a copy of the handout, please leave a comment on this blog post, and I will be able to send you that information.

Teach the Teachers Collaborative offers educators the chance to facilitate sustained learning in a relaxing and beautiful environment. We arrive on Sunday at the gorgeous Thacher campus in Ojai, California and spend a week learning, networking, and working together.

Breakfast is served from 6:30 to 8:00 and includes eggs, quiches, every fruit and cereal you can think of, yogurt and oatmeal. Lunch and dinner come at regular times as well, with a buffet and salad bar that rivals the finest restaurants. There’s always desert, or you can just get a soft serve ice cream cone. Snacks are served at 10, 2, and after our last class ends at 9:00 p.m. Somehow, being away from the city and having delicious food just relaxes the soul and makes the learning environment so natural. Top that off with a swimming pool, table tennis, a weight room, track, tennis courts, foozball, pool, and a gym and you hardly have time to breathe! Small wonder that I’m happily exhausted.

I’ll reflect about my first week and save the second week for another post.

The first week at Teach the Teachers, two groups, the PE Educators and the online content developers, got together for a week of learning. We had our separate courses, but the underlying bond was technology. The PE educators learned about new fitness programs, but they also learned to use Fitness grams and tools like Google Spreadsheets, docs, and groups to collaborate on projects. The online content developers worked on their Moodle courses, but also attended specialty classes that helped make their online content more interactive and engaging. That was my team.

I taught about Web 2.0 tools like rss, blogs, wikis, podcasts, etc – but also how they could be embedded in the Moodle content. It was the finest experience I have ever had. Not only did I get to teach my passion, but I got 30 other people passionate about it too! My course is in a password protected Moodle right now, but I plan to post it to a public Moodle shell somewhere soon.

I am so honored to have worked with such an awesome team! John Lenhardt, a long time EdTech leader and advocate in LAUSD, worked with participants in embedding video. He used Voicethread, TeacherTube, and other tools. John Rivera, an amazing educator and CUELA President, worked with Google Earth and other Google tools to help teachers learn to make learning authentic and interactive. Bob Sachs, an outstanding photographer and educator was our other team member. He taught participants to see things differently, through the lens of a camera. Dan Pink would be proud to see how Bob made artists out of all who were fortunate to have taken his course. His gallary walk of participant masterpieces on the culminating day looked like professional work. He used his large, professional printer to make striking prints that participants could take home and frame.

John Lenhardt discovered CellBlock, a site that allows you to set up a space where others can contribute photos and videos via email, that produces a slideshow to document the event. We always end our Teach the Teacher week long events with a slideshow/video of the week’s events. In the past, one person, which happened to be John for a few of the years, stayed up late the night before the showing putting together the video. This year, the slideshow was made by all of us. Below you will find the embedded show. Not only will you be able to see some of the beautiful photography taken by participants, but you will see many activities from the PE educators. (You also get a glimpse of the mouth watering food we got to eat.) What a wonderful way to document our experience!

Also, I did get to go on one photo walk with Bob, and this is what he helped me to see:

and

Thanks, Dr. Kip Leland, for making the Online Learning Content Development Collaborative a reality. Thanks to all the educators in LAUSD who made it possible to attend the Teach the Teachers Collaborative. Even our own Dr. Themy Sparangis kicked off the event with an inspiring Keynote about the future of education and the role of technology. Add to that the keynote by 1972 Olympian Medalist,  Craig Lincoln for the PE educators, and the week was perfect!

]]> http://jstearns.edublogs.org/2008/07/26/awesome-professional-development-in-lausd/feed/ 1 http://jstearns.edublogs.org/2008/05/24/our-online-profile-is-showing/ http://jstearns.edublogs.org/2008/05/24/our-online-profile-is-showing/#comments Sat, 24 May 2008 21:57:16 +0000 jstearns http://jstearns.org/wp/?p=64 Jeff Utecht, in his post, Schools: Take control or forfeit your profile, points out that many schools carry an online profile, from entries in places like Wikipedia and FaceBook, that needs to be monitored and maintained. Many schools aren’t even aware of this online presence, or might dismiss an article in Wikipedia as not trusted, so not a priority.
It got me thinking about really reading some of the wikipedia articles about our schools.
These are the schools that I could find that have an entry on Wikipedia:

Bell High School
South Gate High School
Huntington Park High School
South East High School
Maywood Academy
South East Middle School

You can tell that some of the schools have student created entries. Some of the articles are really quite good, but need some editing. Others need quite a bit of work. All haven’t been updated in quite some time – probably since our external IP was banned from Wikipedia. There was abuse to Wikipedia articles from our domain, so Wikipedia has blocked the entire domain from editing. This was a few years ago. As far as I know, no one can update Wikipedia articles from within our district firewall since then.

This causes a problem. If no one is updating these articles, then they will never be of high quality.They will never reflect our schools for some of the great things that happen there. Just this morning, there was an article in the LA Times written about an outstanding new teacher at South East Middle School. (Thanks Paul B. for telling me about it.) That should be linked to the SouthEast Middle School entry.

Since students and teachers can’t access the editing features from within the firewall, maybe we need to find other means of updating and maintaining these entries. Maybe students should have this responsibility as part of their homework. For those with internet access, they could be writing about their schools. What could be more authentic? They could also monitor the pages. This could be a shared responsibility between students, teachers, all staff and parents. The community could join together for something positive. This could be a very positive step into beginning to “get” 21st century literacies.

Thanks, Jeff, for posting this article to spark my thinking. I will be calling together interested educators from all our schools to see if we can figure out how to make this work as an authentic learning experience for all of us. I think this is extremely important.

.. Now if I only knew how to find profiles on FaceBook. All I see are students from those schools, but not much about the schools. I’m sure I’m missing something…

Note: After looking at the history pages of all the entries, it is apparent that some editing and revising has taken place recently. However, there certainly isn’t enough there to represent the schools well. It was interesting to see the discussion on the Bell entry. An alumni from the graduating class of 1965 had entered that the school colors were purple and white, and it had been changed by a more recent graduate. It’s interesting to see how those that contribute collaborate on the writing.

I’m always in awe of those in my personal learning network. They work all day at their day jobs, and still somehow keep up with their personal learning. For instance, I think of those that make up the writing team at the TechLearning blog. Absolutely every one of them is outstanding in their depth and breadth. They do their day jobs, teach extra courses, and still find time to write quality articles and share their learning in so many ways. Congratulations to them for receiving the well deserved award as the best group blog at the Edublog awards.
It’s humbling to surround yourself with so many smart people who have the energy and passion to make a difference. The Tech Learning group of writers are just a few of the hundreds of very smart people I surround myself with by subscribing to their blogs, seeing their tweets in twitter, marveling at what they bookmark and podcast or webcast or ustream or voicethread or capture in images or video or …teach and share with the world. I’m so thankful that I have found this network of educators with whom I share a passion for learning. I look forward to the next few months.

Photo credit: flickr photo The Flag of Times Square by Stuck in Customs