Adopt-A-Classroom is a nonprofit organization that helps teachers get money directly into their classrooms without worrying about budgetary beaurocracy. Nobody tells the teacher how to spend the money; it’s donated to your classroom, so it’s your call. This year, I got money for:

1. ten headsets with microphones; now my students can record answers in Audacity, a program I’ll go over in a blog coming soon. They can also record narrations in PowerPoint presentations.
2. 512 mb USB drives for every student; now my students can keep all their work on their keychain rather than in a giant 3-ring notebook. It’s saved the school hundreds of dollars in copies already.
3. an extra printer with ink; now my student can print color copies or black and white for when they do need an occasional hard copy.
4. 10 USB optical mouses; now my students don’t take the balls out (why do kids do that?), the mouses actually work instead of getting filled with crud, and they have the little wheel on the top of the mouse that makes navigation easy.
5. flowers and a terrarium; now my classroom looks and smells nice. Of course, the terrarium has a big Venus Fly Trap and lots of baby crickets… kind of a guy’s version of a flower garden.
6. a scanner; now I can take old handouts, scan them to .pdf format, email them to the kids’ free google accounts, and the kids can keep them on their USB drives. Again, it’s paper-free. I can also scan in handouts and then project the .pdf version on the wall using my digital projector.
7. a digital projector, which is incredibly valuable in myriad ways. More on that in future blogs.

All you have to do is sign up for an account. After you sign in, you’ll follow the steps to ask for cash. It’s all self-explanatory, so I won’t redundantly list the instructions here.

There are a couple of little tidbits I will divulge though.

1. The staff at Adopt-A-Classroom will answer your emails personally and quickly.

2. When you get a cash donation, you do not have to spend it on the stores the website provides. If you email them and tell them that you can spend the money better locally, then they’ll just ask you for a receipt and then reimburse you.

They’re great, because they handle all the tax documentation that your donators might need. Most importantly, though, since ‘you’ solicited the money, you decide how it’s spent.

Now it’s time to think about all those contacts you have outside the world of education. All you need is email addresses. Who has money and might donate personally? What businesses might donate to your classroom for the tax break? What are you teaching that people in the community might be excited about? Who might be excited about it? What could you buy to make the lessons really cool for kids?
Now go get some cash!

-Shu

With this tool, teachers have very pretty data that tells them what kids do and don’t know. As the first part of the KWL, (what we do know, want to know, and what we learned) this has been proven valuable data. The kids love the remotes, the planning is easy, and the tool helps teachers focus their lesson plans on where the students need the most assistance.

I’m a wine salesman as well as a teacher, and I often find myself talking shop while ‘at work’ in the wine world. Recently, at a wine tasting, I was talking about the remotes, my new toys in my arcenal. The woman I was talking to asked me how much my new toy cost the school. When I told her, she snorted wine, shocked. She asked me why I haddn’t bought 25 small dry-erase boards, put them under my kids’ seats, and used the PowerPoint slides to the same ends. The data wouldn’t be as pretty, but it would be pretty clear when the kids wrote a letter and held up the boards simultaneously whether they knew their stuff or not. Seriously, I told her that she should quit what she was doing and become an educational consultant. It was brilliant, and it would save thousands. I asked, what did she do, anyway? She told me she was teaching in a school in Raleigh, where she had been teaching for fifteen years. And that’s the value of experience, I reckon.

-Shu