Different Perspective

This week was totally consumed with grant writing. Salisbury is fortunate to be the hometown of a very famous stock broker/hedge fund manager, Julian Robertson. Several years ago he setup a grant fund for businesses and schools exclusive to Rowan County. So much of the technology and repairs that our schools have benefited from are directly linked to this Foundation. They award several grants a year ranging from a couple thousand dollars to a couple hundred thousand dollars.

I resolved early last year to write a major grant for North Rowan to double the number of iPad carts. We were fortunate to obtain funding 4 years ago for 1:1 student iPods, but now the trend in education is moving towards iPads. This puts us at a disadvantage amongst our school system. We are not the first on the list to receive new technology because on paper we already have plenty.

This means that the option to get new technology ASAP falls to the people at the schools who put in the work to advocate for themselves.

Okay, on to the reason why I titled this blog, "Different Perspective". Writing this grant I had to look at NRHS in facts and figures. Test scores, growth, graduation rate, discipline referrals, etc. It was the first time I had given the school an overall look instead of what I see here day to day. Since NRHS became a 1:1 iPod Touch school, test scores have risen by over 20%, graduation rates have risen 15%, and discipline referrals are down 60% per 100 students.

The point being, today showed me more reasons to praise our school, and maybe a different way of approaching the features and what things need to be said about this school. It was a neat perspective I did not expect to have!

Collecting Resources

Again, I realize it has been a long time since I have posted. It is not indicative of any lack of research and work on my part, but busyness at school and working to collect what resources I will need. Last week, I decided to use my professional development training day to have teachers provide lesson plans that are heavy in technology usage. The goal of this is to build up the database of resources on the webpage for teachers to use. I encouraged teachers from all subjects to contribute what they had so that the resources would appeal to a broader range of teachers. I think I came to the realization last week that this website will be in a "bare bones" kind of stage when the semester finishes, but I hoping to continue improving it and potentially encouraging other technology facilitators to take on creating a web page for their schools like what is being created for NRHS.

I tried to start working on making the changes and additions to the actual website several times, but find that I need more information on a section, or I think of a better way to present other info. I have been brainstorming to try and see what kind of sharing and interactivity features I could have on the website. I would love this place to be somewhere where teachers from other schools could post tech-heavy plans, but I do not think the Rowan System structured these pages to do that. I could also see them being pages for teachers to post from each specific school. This would still allow other teachers to view, and would give them an easy opportunity retrieve lessons by going to the individual schools lessons.

There has not been difficulty in meeting the class's requirement for the final project, but I do feel pressure to make this a sustainable webpage for the system. It's main purpose is to show off the accomplishments and successes that have occurred at NRHS since the implementation of the 1:1 iPod Touch program. The secondary goal, and the one that I believe will drive traffic on the site are the teacher resources like lesson plans, and favorite apps. I will continue to work on this stuff and hopefully become a better, more regular poster in the future!