Review of Week 5
The work from week 5 was instructive and reviewing how things proceeded
is relevant education. I had seen a target, had already done my research
into the needs of an informed group of educators (you and our prior work
in the course) and begun my concept paper. In a rather short period of
time ( a few days) grant concepts were forming and I had reached step 8
of the grantsmanship process, the Search
for Stakeholders. The first team of stakeholders that I reached out
to was you, the course participants, asking for a reading of the RFP and
for written grant ideas at the concept paper level. You represent the kind
of group that you will need form and nuture in your 077 work when you see
a potential grant target. (That is, you need to pull together your own
group within your school district that is interested in helping you with
grant proposals in educational technology and bring them along. The more
you teach this group, the faster you will be able to move in handling ever
larger grants. Further, the activity of building such a group while you
are in the 077 program is that you have claim on leadership activities
that draw the attention of leadership within your district as well as providing
an important topic to talk about in a job interview. Choose this group
wisely. From time to time you will also need to draw on others in other
school districts, so you need to keep each other in mind in the years ahead
in tackling bigger grants.)
Next, I brought in another faculty member with needs and interests in this area. Further, I called our regional DPI Consultant and found out that DPI was already pulling together their own team. However, Dr. Mims and I were never able to get a response from the central DPI leadership in time for me to lay out related assignments. Therefore, as of this Wednesday morning this particular RFP chase is over. This course will not pursue it further with additional writing. Your concept papers related to the large scale collaborative grant are still due as concept paper 2. Please so name your files and the paper heading. However, your thinking and ideas in this paper still represent important work about state initiatives that need evaluation treatment in your school or district. That is useful thinking that may have many different applications. If you are creative, you will find other ways to apply that work for future grant proposals.
Part of the lesson here is that this is typical of the kind of leadership required in leading grant development. You have to know when to call it quits. Yes, we could have worked out our own proposal and submitted it, but it was my judgment call that without the immediate input of the next circle of stakeholders at the state level, we could not be competitive given the short timeline. Given the significant amount of time that grants can take, it is important to not chase after everything, ignoring all odds.
Remember that you also have a concept paper 3 due as well.
The NECC (the National Educational Computing Conference) is growing in importance, in large part because of its ability to attract players that invent policy and planning and effectively attract those with political interests on the national stage to contributing to such policy. Based on their work, I am moving it to my "must attend" list for next year and would hope that you can begin your planning for the funding to get there. This might be NECC's finest year to date which leads to the readings for this week. The "21st century" document includes an impressive array of corporations capable of contributing foundation money to the cause. It is time to get ideas in order.
1. This is an overview. Start here. Schools urged to teach ‘21st-century’ skills, eSchool News, By Cara Branigan, Associate Editor, eSchool News, July 7, 2003.
2. Read Partnership for 21st Century Skills, http://www.21stcenturyskills.org and the links on this page:
3. AOL Time Warner Foundation http://aoltimewarnerfoundation.org . Note that this is a private foundation which should reduce the complications of collaborative participation with the Cherokee and private schools.
4. Write your concept paper 4 with these readings as background and the Time Warner Foundation in the foreground as the funding source for a collaborative project that involves all of us. That is, each of you will need to develop a proposal relevant to where you now are employed, yet will fit can connect with each other in some over-arching way.
The goal then is to explore the concept of an educational technology grant that connects the Cherokee (Elizabeth Abbott), Debbie (Carolina Day School), Ezel (Georgia), Western Carolina University, and public schools in North Carolina (Kelby, Rae, Lori, and Angie). Given the slant of the writings that are assigned for this period, I want you to think along the lines of community based problem solving, in which part of the grant funding is used to build a central web-based database of real community questions. Each of your communities has its own database, yet each feeds a master database. That is, you can examine just the questions of your own community, or search the master database of questions to look for issues and problems in common across our shared region. This system will have its own director that maintains the database and recruits teachers and community participation across our region.
The other part of the grant funding is used to build whatever training, hardware and software resources are necessary to build problem solving capacity in some scaled way in your school or district. By scaled I mean that in year 1 only a few will be involved, and then expand the number of participants for year two and three. For example, in the first year, only the Gifted and Talented Program might be involved. The second year high school teachers might become involved. The third year, middle level and elementary students might be added. Each school or school district might choose their own way to scale across three years.
Different content areas will be able to pull out different kinds of authentic problems to use in their curriculum by use of appropriate field headings in the database. Teachers will also be able to propose question areas that they would like to have real problems generated by the community. A monthly and annual report of the number of questions acquired and the number responded too will be generated by the database director. Questions that prove more challenging in getting a useful response will be taken to a committee of Western Carolina's graduate school who will decide if they can find appropriate classes and courses in which further contributions to the question will come.
At this point, create a budget for what you think you really need without any knowledge of what the Foundation might really provide. From that I will build a collaborative budget out of your individual budgets. Leadership is being able to see what is not and invent a way to make it visible. Give it your best. Bounce your ideas off each other via email or IM if you need feedback.