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RegisterOver 34,625 Wishes Granted!
End Date: 06/28/2013
Goal: $5000.00
Raised: $0.00
Sunderland Elementary is a small school loaded with hard workers and good hearts! We would love for our kids to enjoy the benefits found in many larger schools with big technology budgets and benefactors. Tablets and interactive projectors and or whiteboards would do just that!This will be my sixth year teaching at SES and I continue to be amazed at what our little red schoolhouse community can accomplish. Over the last four years, our principal has worked hard to bring technology to our school and more importantly, provide our students with 21st Century skills they would not otherwise develop. Many of our students and their families do not have computers or access to technology outside the walls of our building and depend on the teachers and the school to provide the necessary access and experience. Personally, I started small by creating a project for a document camera through Donors Choose. After receiving the camera, my principal saw how powerful a tool it was and scraped for funds to purchase cameras and projectors for all the classrooms. She has made sure every classroom has flip cameras and contracted for laptop computers for all students in grades 4-6. Younger classes received a lap top cart with machines to share. Laptops for my students were critical in allowing me to guarantee full participation in the Young Writer’s Project, a digital writing platform, as well as in fully utilizing the BRSU’s new learning management system. Individual laptops also facilitated more personalized learning and pacing in connection with the Haiku Learning Management System. Last year, I utilized the Digital Citizenship curriculum to help prepare my students as digital citizens, with a goal of bringing laptops home. Our principal recently retooled the school computer lab and this year, purchased a new server (multi-thousand dollar cost) that will better support what we are trying to do with our kids. One of my goals this year is to support students in creating electronic learning portfolios. My returning students are already discussing the wikis they want to create to demonstrate reading comprehension, videos of math concepts to post on our Haiku web pages to serve as homework and study guides, podcasts of “interviews” with scientists and historians they learn about. We have also purchased a new non-fiction digital reading program from Scholastic called TrueFlix. This will allow us to begin meeting the increased demands of the Common Core. Tablets will create a "portable classroom", allowing my students to explore and stretch themselves beyond the school day. Removing the obstacle of accessibility will facilitate and often expedite learning for my students. Tablets are also more portable and I believe will be “safer” to bring home in backpacks as a result. Interactive whiteboards will allow our teachers to tap into the countless resources that will engage our students in learning and to allow us to do so as a community. Sunderland, like all schools today, is operating on a limited budget. I have faith that my principal, school board, and community will do all they can to make sure our kids have what they need, and removing the burden of replacing laptops or being limited by a lack of technology will allow us to go even further in achieving our goal to make sure SES is preparing our students for the future.
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Beneficiary:Mary Ann CaracoSunderland Elementary SchoolClassroom Description: Great group of fifth and sixth graders with varied interests; writing, drama, dinosaurs, sports, super heroes, reading, etc. Looking forward to incorporating the use of flip cameras to capture and share the great thinking these kids engage in. Very excited about my first year teaching a multi-age class and am confident my students will rise to the challenge of becoming critical thinkers and communicators as they work together.
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