Cathy Nelson’s Professional Thoughts

Does anyone remember that annoying tune from Pink Floyd? Just in case you are not familiar with it, linking so you can refresh your memory. Enjoy, as it takes me alllll the way back to high school.

That video though is not why I write tonight. My head is spinning with ideas for grants. I have a long track record of getting grants funded, but most of them are small time. I have assisted in some larger grants that were $20K, and can proudly attest that one grant was funded three times in a row! W00T!

Grant writing has not always come easy to me. I have however, figured out some tricks to getting them funded.

1. Make sure the funding source knows just exactly how needy your kids are. Using your words to paint a bleak picture of pathetic poor students who are suffering without. Most grants require a needs statement, and this is your opportunity to whip out the metaphorical violin and draw the bow across the heartstrings with that sad and moving tale of just how much your students suffer because there is no funding to do creative and interesting projects.
2. Somewhere in the mix you will be asked to spell out goals, objectives, and maybe (more than likely) an evaluation of your project proposal. While the goal can be written with a relatively global flare–”My students will be better students after participating in this project.”–make sure you specifically state objectives in measurable terms–>Students will increase their scores on MAP testing math assessments by 20 points after the completion of the project. Give specifics here on how you will measure them . If called for, tell how you will evaluate–>When MAP scores are available after the April Assessments, scores in math will be compared to the January assessment.
3. Finally, the third most important part of the grant is the project description. Here is where you get to say what your kids will be able to do if you can implement this project. Describe it in terms of what students will do, and keep it grounded on students. Make sure it is creative, innovative, and engaging. Notice I did not say wow them with technology. Too often people writing grants think if it is liberally sprinkled with technology, it’s bound to get funded. After all, technology grants are typically creative, innovative, and engaging, right? Wrong. Yes they have the potential. But don’t forget to focus on the student learning because of those factors, and not just those factors.

Other tips? I would certainly focus on student engagement. And actually, the last seven or eight grants that I’ve had funded, I purposefully used the language of engagement in my project descriptions as I find those words tend to help the reader focus on the student learning, and not the budget that will follow. This link is a page I created for my old school’s website to inform parents about a school and district focus, and I personally referred to it frequently in trying to locate words I knew would flavor my grant with compelling evidence that it was a proposal focused on student learning. Of particular care I took to write my project description using as many relevant design qualities, and I must say it seemed to pay off. No these weren’t necessarily jargon words, but rather a way to stress that what I was proposing was good for the bottom line, student learning. I used them where relevant. No I did not use everything there 100%, but where it fit, yes, I used it. (I guess I’d better copy/paste and recreate that page since I’ve just confessed I use it frequently. I’m no longer there to maintain it, and in reality it could disappear any day…okay, it is done.)

Why am I writing this?

Well, just recently my principal has been sending out from the district grant opportunity after grant opportunity. I have let so many slip by. But suddenly today, I felt the grant bug bite. I actually whipped up 2 before I left school today. And my mind is churning away on another one, though it will need to be a group effort. Will they get funded? I don’t know. They are due in 12 days, so I have time to sit on them, let them get cold, and then reread, looking for typos I’m notorious for, and also to see if I can add to, rephrase, or improve in any other way. I’ll also get some others to read as well.

Where do the ideas come from?

I read journals, blogs, and partake of many professional development opportunities online (virtual PD) and in real life–attending conferences. One today came from a session I heard about (but did not attend) at SC EdTech and SCASL presented by MaryAnn Sansonetti! Even though I did not attend her session, I did pick her brain about it, and get her handouts as well as review her material made available online. W00T!! A virtual goldmine–thanks MaryAnn. Ipodabilities sounds like a fabulous grant. The second idea came straight from Twitter of all places, thanks to Karl Fisch. He tweeted about attending a neighboring school’s Techstravaganza. I dm-ed him, and asked for a few details. What he emailed me sent me into a tailspin, and I had to write it up! I even suggested it to my principal BEFORE writing the grant proposal, saying we should do this. A grant with a little funding will just make it a little easier! Advice to take away–when you attend conferences, don’t leave disheartened saying we’ll never be able to do that because we don’t have___. GO back and begin that grant. You never know when the right one will drop in your lap that it will fit into.

I hope they get funded, but even if they don’t, I can feel good about the effort. And confession–> I’ve had many more rejected than funded. I just don’t like to share that. But the ones that have been funded have motivated me far more than the rejections have deflated me. Sigh.

Attribution:

I am just a little disappointed. You see for the last eight school days (give or take) there has been a major focus on weeding, particularly the nonfiction section of our collection. We came back this summer to all the books from mid 550 through 818 boxed up due to the addition of our production studio, and these books needed to be reshelved. I made the decision to unmercifully weed since they each had an opportunity to be handled, smelled, and seen with a critical eye (and nose–yes some smelled OLD!) I was given the go ahead by my principal and district media coordinator, and tackled the project with zest. Me, my assistant, substitutes and a parent volunteer began. We only devoted half of the day to the task as other activities and needs arose daily–we’re there to serve our staff and students first and foremost, so they always come before most library management type activity. Since we were reshelving we decided to do all of the nonfiction (000=999). Now I printed and gave the folks helping a printout of the books I suspected needed to go (of course I physically checked every book before it was discarded) and today figured that we discarded a total of 1165 books. There were MANY on the list that were just NOT found. I will have to check in Destiny to see if these books are categorized as “lost” from inventories that have been done prior to my coming in. We may be able to delete a few more. I sort of hope so.

South Carolina, so NOTORIOUS for poor test scores, has a reputation regarding our educational standards for teaching. When NCLB came about, SC had already set the bar high as far as student achievement. So our standards are rigorous, as is our state assessment program. I blogged about this before, and you can read the archived post from June 2007  for a more clear description.

Recently, our SC State Department of Education contact and liaison for library media programs released an assessment instrument to use on school library media programs. It is titled Achieving Exemplary School Libraries: School Library Program Recommendations and Evaluation Rubrics and it is located on the section for school library media programs, though I believe one has to be logged in to view it. It is 55 pages in length and is what I beleive a fair document. It is my goal to bring my collection up to what this document calls proficient, though I will long range goal work for what is known as exemplary. The “grades” a program can make even loosely match how are students are labeled based on their performance on our state assessment program of PACT (and scores classify one as Below Basic, Basic, Proficient, and Advanced). PACT, I should say, our assessment program, stands for Palmetto Achievement Challenge Test. Even the name suggests to the unschooled reader that the test is designed to “challenge” students. Go figure! Using this rubric, a school library media program might be labeled Below Standard, Emerging, Proficient, or Exemplary. It’s pretty rigorous too, but not unattainable.

Which brings me back to this post. A lot of time, hard work, sweat, and sore muscles went into the discarding of those 1165 books. I was SO hoping that I would lose five years off my average collection age of 1988. But this evening I ran another collection analysis (our district uses Follett’s Titlewise.) I have actually used the program in all my years as a school LMS–since it was started. I find it an invaluable tool for assessing your collection. So I uploaded my records tonight, and my collection only lost 2 years. Now instead of 1988 as an average copyright date, the collection is 1990. Here is the data from TW.

But there is more. In order to be “Exemplary” there are roughly fifteen or so indicators that refer to the collection. These indicators have to do with age sensitivity for the various areas (i.e. sciences are more age sensitive than folk tales or fiction…) Here is a view of the beginning of the “indicators.”

Did you notice the number of books per student?? 15 per student. With my school having according to the analysis 566 students (and I know that does not match enrollment right now since we are roughly 650 students as of Wednesday…) we are right now offering 17.63 books per student. I should have adjusted the enrollment number BEFORE running the analysis. But a quickie punch on the calculator shows that we currently offer an estimated 650 students 15.53 books per student. Proficient only calls for ten books per student….With a goal to be exemplary, I cannot afford to weed anymore, but my age absolutely DEMANDS it. Am I holding myself to too high a standard?? I will be acquiring more books to the collection, and usually its about 300 books a year. (Note I still do not know what my budget is yet, so I could be way off in either direction, to the good or bad. If I am off I do pray its in my favor.)

Again it is just a snapshot above, and then that section is JUST about books. The program is also evaluated on scheduling, collaboration, instructional practices, and other areas.

So where do I go from here? To be proficient, I can drop down to ten books per students, and that also keeps me within SACS requiremnts. So I am going to shift my weeding helpers to the fiction section and the story collection section. These two sections are very old too, and even though the SC section is small, the fiction represents 35% of our total collection. Maybe getting in there and ridding the shelves of old stories will help. So I’m going to allow for about another 1000 books to go.

Overall I’m not too sad. The change in copyright age from 88 to 90 does indicate the collection is being addressed. And we’ve only just begun, not to mention this should not happen over night. Maybe not even in one school year. Wish me luck.

Friday I got a comment on my post A little used tool of mine came in REALLY handy this summer!!
from Alan November himself. Imagine my ego to know that Alan November had read my blog and even taken the time to post! Here is his comment:

Alan November // Jul 27th 2007 at 7:19 am (edit)

Helllo Kathy,

I am thrilled that you were able to join our community in Boston from South Carolina. Now I have to rethink the BLC conference design to take advantage of how the new tools can connect to people around the world. It is a fun time.

It excited me to no end that I’d gotten this comment (so much so that I can forgive Alan for misspelling Cathy), as I had thoroughly enjoyed BLC this year through the kind efforts of the skypechatting going on during many sessions. David Jakes had sent out in his blog The Strength of Weak Ties and open invitation for anyone wanting to join in to skype him and he would add us. I took advantage of this opportunity since I could not go, and learned so much. I was not alone, as many (from within the conference and session to around the world) joined into this amazing new way to learn from the experts.

Well yesterday I find out something different, and it dismays me to no end. You see, I live in a state where funding for public education is TIGHT. Even though I have desired to go and asked each year (only to be told no), I do not think it is realistic to think that I’ll ever get to go. I only know of folks from the wealthier districts in South Carolina, like Lexington 5 and Greenville County who have sent folks. I read a lot of blogs through my reader, and frequently link out to those blogs to see if there are comments, especially I I feel it’s a popular topic (and the blog doesn’t seem to offer an rss for comments.) So yesterday, as I was reading up, I came to the folder in my Bloglines titled NECC Tags. I came across the post about Skyping called “Uber Blogging” which oddly enough mentioned me and my participation in BLC from my home here in South Carolina. Yes, I was flattered that I had gotten a mention in that blog, called Nexus. So tonight I pulled up that link again, but this time instead of linking to Nexus since I’d already read it, I went to the links that linked to it in Technorati. Here I found this blog named Educational Discourse, and the principal blogger (Kelly Christopherson) also talked about all the skypechatting and back channeling going on during BLC, and how it had forever changed the way folks want to enjoy presentations at conferences. Yes, I was in total agreement! And I was proud of the fact that I had already experienced this phenomenon and had already blogged about it in my own blog. I have now subscribed to Kelly’s feed (in a folder I’ve named school administrators who blog.)

But here is where the disappointment comes in. I linked to this blog simply because it had linked to Diane Hammond’s blog Nexus (the one that had mentioned me.) I wanted to check out the links as I was sure it had something to do with skypechatting or “uber-blogging” as Diane had aptly titled it. But what caught my eye was the lone comment by none other than Christian Long, a presenter from BLC, and an author of his own blog. He was also heavily involved in extending my learning at BLC through the skypechats. I’ll quote it here:

Christian Long
July 26th, 2007 at 4:06 pm

First, thank you for pushing on this idea. Echo your thoughts across the board.

Second, as a new papa who has video access to his kidddo in daycare each day, I am already preparing to be blacked-out once he arrives in a traditional school that considers ‘parent teacher nights’ to be the equal of ‘access’ that I have n0w. Whether regular or semi-regular podcasts (or something more or less dynamic), I’d like to think that by the time my kiddo goes to kindergarten it will be possible for me to regularly ‘attend’ his classes from a distance.

Third, and the same can be said of the classes ‘down the hall’ at the same school I’ll be teaching at this fall. So many wonderful conversations taking place in the same building, but I can’t be in all the classrooms at the same time. Mmm.

Fourth, Alan November’s BLC events will be available for a fee virtually starting next year. He announced that in Boston this summer. Plan on attending one way or another!

Cheers, Christian

Did anyone catch Christian’s fourth point?? Let me quote just that one again:

Fourth, Alan November’s BLC events will be available for a fee virtually starting next year. He announced that in Boston this summer. Plan on attending one way or another!

To say I am shocked and dismayed is an understatement. I even feel a little mad. You see, as I mentioned before, the rate (roughly $700) is high, and it does not include housing or travel. If I were to fund this my self, the trip would more than likely be well over $1000. It saddens me tremendously now to think that the opportunities I enjoyed this year at BLC (from right here in my own living room) will not be available next summer because for someone in charge, this will be transformed into a money making scheme. It really concerns me to know that this conference costs participants $700, and when you factor in that there were roughly 600-700 people there this year, well that’s a lot of money they made. In working with SCAET over the last 3 years, I realize it takes a lot of money to run a conference. And BLC brings in some really great presenters, like Mitch Resnick, Angela McFarlane, Tim Tyson, and Dr. Yong Zhao, which I’m sure come with a hefty price tag. Factor in some of the other amenities that have a cost, like free wireless, its location at the Boston Marriott Newton, breakfast and lunch daily, very nice evening events (this year’s conference included a trip to Boston Waterfront and a Harbor Dinner Cruise), and assorted activities daily for participants’ entire families. Yes, I’m sure this conference totals a whopper-sized bill.

But I don’t think BLC will lose participants just because of the skypechatters who enjoyed the conference (some like me free, but only in the virtual sense) this year. This conference is way popular enough that the planners SHOULD NOT charge for what we did this year. For some reason after reading Christian’s comment yesterday, and then rereading Alan’s comment on my blog, I felt like I had done something wrong…like I had stolen something. Something that had felt so wonderful two weeks ago, suddenly felt dirty. Gee thanks for making me feel that way.

Well, all I can say is I’m sorry if I did something wrong. I am changing school districts this year, and once again I will ask for funding to attend BLC in 2008. I really don’t think the request will be funded, and so once again next summer I’ll be sitting at home wishing I was there and clamoring for blog posts, podcasts, and any other tidbits that may come from this conference. Someone correct me if I’m wrong. I really hate to think this change is going to take place because it’s just another way to make money. Oh well. Hopefully it will be considerably cheaper than the $700 it’s costing participants now, and will include perhaps an opportunity to see and hear the presenters, and not just get bread crumbs from the skypechatters.

If the planners are going to find a way to charge for even the “breadcrumbs” that go from this conference, then PLEASE, develop some kind of scholarship system so those of us in rural districts with tight budgets can apply and perhaps win a conference registration.

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Olsen, Tracey. “Money!” Tracey O’s Photostream. 22 October 2005. 31 Jul 2007 <http://www.flickr.com/photos/tracy_olson/61056391/.>.