Ideal Classroom Grant

Last year I was selected, along with two other teachers in my school, to be a part of our county's team for the state STEM initiative. Over the past year and a half we've attended 12 days of training in Discovery Streaming, GPS, GIS, Google Earth and project-based learning, participated in 40 hours of online and face-to-face professional development and had the opportunity to attend state and national conferences. We designed and implemented lessons using the technology we'd be learning and shared them with teachers from other counties in our state.

As part of the STEM initiative, we had the opportunity to apply for an Ideal Classroom grant. This grant asked us to choose technology that we would like to have in our classroom and specifically describe how we would integrate this technology into our teaching. I was thrilled to find out last June that one of the other teachers in my building and I had our grant requests fully funded. Although our grants were individually done and we received items unique to our subject areas, she teaches science and I am a media specialist, each of us requested and received a class set of iPads (30) with a mobile charging cart, a wireless color printer and funding for apps. These arrived in our classrooms the day before the students did and it has been a time-consuming (in a good way) process to familiarize ourselves with the technology and find ways to integrate it into our respective curricula. I feel fortunate that there are two of us going through the process in our building as it gives us someone to bounce ideas off of, another mind to help with troubleshooting, and a second set of eyes to critique lessons when possible.

Dynamic? Yes! The iPads have been an incredible addition to the media center. They serve to motivate and engage my students and have caused some of the teachers with whom I work to start looking at their curricula differently. I will be sharing some of the lessons on which we have collaborated and how these collaborations have impacted student learning.