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What I am trying to get across, is that there are people out on the internet who want to help education, and CS education in particular.
I am inviting other educators, especially CS educators, in learning how to expand our fund raising capabilities. I have a Moodle set up where I have links, tips and tricks out there, and I am inviting teachers to join me in and hope to share my ideas and techniques.
Can’t promise you any computers, but can help you get peripherals and curriculum materials.
If you are interested in HOW I raise money, email me, and I’ll add you to the Moodle where I have all my resources.
For those who don’t know, I am wildly successful at raising money for both my robotics team and my classroom. I did a presentation on this at CS&IT but unfortunately I was up against two other popular presentations and buried in a back corner.
I have been able to get at least one paying staff development a summer for the past summer. For example, last year Texas Instruments paid me to learn more about PBL, something I am implementing for my district.
This summer I am getting paid to go to another one.
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I have gotten local mini-grants to support my robotics team, and have one a very large award from district. As a result, I obtained $5000 for my classroom and $5000 for my classroom. I am now on the selection committee and have helped others gets that award.
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Finally I have had over 20 projects funded on Donor’s Choose.
Now, I can’t guarantee that you will equally successful, but I think by working together we can increase the odd.
Email is at kweaver at dallasisd dot org
I woke up this morning and checked my email…..
Had a Donor’s Choose email, on a Sunday morning. Was still checking email and got another one, and another one and another one….
Seems that my current project was featured on a little website called “Daily Kos”, http://www.dailykos.com. Here’s the article:
And the project got fully funded in less than an hour.
How cool is that?
I mentioned to the Super Shuttle driver that I taught high school ….
Come to find out, he taught history in Kuwait!
I’ve posted about my surveillance cameras before, but Nightline is talking about them: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/burglary-victims-catch-thieves-home-surveillance-cameras/story?id=16016822
My husband wanted them after the drunk driver hit the house, I got a few cheap wireless ones that didn’t work well at all. We ended up buying high end cameras on Ebay, and a high end DVR, and had a former student install everything.
It’s great, because while I’m traveling to teaching workshops, I can check on the dogs and the husband. Especially the dogs. I have three cameras on them!
We haven’t caught anyone breaking in – between cameras, dogs, alarm system and the countries best cops, you’d be crazy to think about it – but we have watched a car spin out around the place.
If you have a digital camera, you SHOULD have an Eye-Fi Card. I have two, and have two cards. Took one of the cameras out to our walking parade yesterday, and it was awesome.
The photos are at http://flic.kr/s/aHsjAq2bmb
When I got home, I was just going to let the camera sit and upload but realized that was taking a bit longer than I wanted, so I pulled the card out and put it in a computer. That was literally all I had to do. Once the card was in my laptop, it took less than two minute for the pictures to get uploaded to my main desktop computer upstairs and uploaded to Flickr. A few minutes more to get the descriptions added to Flickr, and a bit longer to get them on Facebook.
Best part – I have a copy job that runs in the middle of the night that copies them over to my home server (an Iomega cloud server) so I have them backed up.
I’ll be taking everything with me to California to CS&IT as I will be doing a lot of sight seeing.
I’m going here –> http://csta.acm.org/ProfessionalDevelopment/sub/CSITConference.html
Flying into LAX, taking SuperShuttle to the hotel, and flying back. Leaving next Sunday and back on Wednesday.
On Monday, I’m doing the following Workshops:
Exploring Computer Science–Teaching with Inquiry and Stop Talking About HTML5 and Learn It!
I’m presenting from 2:45-3:45 on Tuesday, against my friend Alfred Thompson. Email me if you want access to the presentation ahead of time.
There are three people in our district who are considered Moodle Queens:
A CS teacher at SEM as she is the best at setting up tests.
The Moodle Administrator for the district.
And myself for setting up courses.
Well, I’ve gone a step further, I’ve figured out how to set up Moodle on a USB stick.
Why?
I’m about to go to California and present at a workshop and I never trust anyone else’s internet. For example, I’ve been at two places in the Dallas area where I can’t use my phone internet: UTD and Craig Culwell Center. Worse yet, it took a while for me to get internet at the Craig Culwell center and I was a presenter. I did have my USB Moodle site with me, so I wasn’t completely fubarred.
Went to an AP thing today by Region 10. A.C.T. Summit and it was all good, and had fun stuff. I presented AP Computer Science and Gridworld second session.
The Keynote speaker has written books on over achieving kids, and had a lot of good ideas on how to deal with them and their parents.
I asked a question as I had had something interesting come up lately. I invited a dog agility mom to come to a Teacup trial and she said they wouldn’t because they were competing to get an AKC scholarship. Oh, and the kid is in 7th grade. Looked it up today and the scholarship is for $1000 – $5000 so I don’t really blame them.
Probably looks a little different on the college application too.
Went to the AP Statistics session taught by a colleague and it was VERY good. It also gave me a chance to polish up my presentation.
The AP CS was mostly math teachers, but we had fun anyway. I think the biggest thing they got out of it was that they didn’t ever want to teach CS.
The last session I attended was a general session on why kids take CS, basically a summary of a paper the presenter did for his PhD. Had some very interesting ideas, basically that the more kids think they will do well, the more they enroll in AP Courses, the better they do, etc.
He suggested that we encourage kids to take AP tests a second time (which is a game we used to play when we had two AP CS courses – which I mentioned).
And at the end, we both acknowledged that kid that signs up for AP CS is not only going to get into college but they are going to be successful.
Went to a dying mall near my house, that they are trying to revive when I heard “Mrs. Weaver” – I turned and found one of my former students – and a very frustrating one at that.
I put on my biggest smile and asked how his summer was, and in a halting voice he told me, and his mother repeated clearer, so I told him some of what I was doing and shook his hand.
I am ALWAYS happy to run into students. With my more able students, I may act annoyed, but they know the truth. They see the twinkle in my eye.
Moral: If you see your former teacher, say something. We always like running into you.