Education Foundation Grant

I just applied for the Education Foundation Grant my credit union, Schools First, offers to educators in Southern California. I asked for productivity and creativity apps to install on the iPads we have at school. The problem with our iPads at school is that we have none of the wonderful productivity and creativity apps that are available through iTunes because they are not free. We have no budget to purchase these apps. So the apps I requested are Explain Everything ($2.99), Keynote (9.99), and iMovie (4.99). I asked for 45 licenses. I also asked for the cable and adapter to connect the iPad to my LCD projector, and I asked for Apple TV. I think that will cover everything I will need to help my students and myself.

I had to create a unit/lesson as part of my curriculum and explain how new program will integrate with the current lesson. I needed an Implementation Plan and an Evaluation Plan. It all reminded me of my Literature Review and my Final Project. I wish I could have explained what I have been studying, but there was a word limit. To describe my Evaluation Plan, I wanted to show them how important I feel it is to do a pre-assessment to gather data and then a post-assessment to analyze achievement. I also mentioned taking formative assessment measures to gauge whether my students were understanding the content.

I wanted to emphasize the importance of information literacy and using the new technology of the iPads in the classroom. I think my focusing on students and technology in this class inspired me to apply for this grant. It’s just a small grant ($1000), but every little bit helps. Since we received these iPads, they’ve just been sitting there. We don’t really know how to use them. That is part of what my Final Project is about. One of the reasons they’re not being used is those great productivity and creativity apps are not installed on our iPads, and we don’t know when or if they ever will be because of the cost.

I hope they choose my project. I checked out past years, and they seem to choose quite a few every year. I’ll now sometime in January!