My students need 5 Chromebooks to perform research in my after-school Engineering Design Program, to code in Scratch, to practice creating their own websites and Google Slide presentations, and to program their LEGO Robotics.
My students are fun-loving, enthusiastic scientists ready to take their learning to new levels! Our population is made up of a diverse group of learners from Brooklyn, NY, including ENL students and special education students.
My goal is to continue multi-modal, project-based learning in my classroom, where my students perform their own scientific research, build models, innovate solutions to the world's most pressing problems, and use their knowledge of coding to enhance their presentations.
My students are some of the most creative young minds I have ever met, and are always ecstatic at the start of any new project I introduce to them. It is most important that my students understand how to apply what they are learning in the classroom to the real world, and so we analyze case studies after each unit (for example, analyzing Hurricane Sandy during our Weather and Atmosphere unit, or the Fukashima meltdown during our Nuclear Power unit) and then conduct research on their own in order to evaluate where our curriculum fits into the real world.
My Project
My students desperately need Chromebooks so I can practice what I preach and shift our green-minded classroom into a paperless one. Our school goes through hundreds of thousands of sheets of paper every year making worksheets, exams, homework assignments, vacation packets, readings, graphic organizers, legal documents, and more. I feel as a science teacher that advocates sustainability and resource conservation, it's my responsibility to make a change in my own practice if I want to see the world make a change by way of our future workforce. This future workforce happens to be sitting in my classroom right now, watching me, absorbing and analyzing my actions. If I can make a change in my practice, maybe they will, too.
STEM is an acronym I hear thrown around a lot by the Department of Education, but they forget that for a teacher to effectively implement STEM practices, those teachers need the T: Technology.
In my classroom, my students rely on technology to carry out most of their assignments and research projects. I actively try to teach my students how to research responsibly, that is, how to evaluate source bias and data bias, analyze author credibility, and interpret data objectively. However, it's difficult to rely on students bringing in research from home when many of my students do not have access to computers or internet at their house.
The Chromebooks I am requesting will allow students to perform their research during class time, incorporate coding into their project presentations using Scratch software, learn to create their own websites and Google slides for presentations, and submit work for grading through online accounts. These computers will revolutionize my classroom while promoting true STEM learning, all while better preparing our future workforce for the technology-centered world we live in.
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As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Ms. Carcione and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
