Grant writing is an essential skill for a teacher, especially a librarian. In ETEC 579 we were asked to create a grant proposal to purchase technology for our campus. My focus here was to expand on our library Makerspace with the addition of robotics features. Grant writing is so much more than just writing. It is researching products, developing a budget, collaborating with teachers and technology specialists on campus, and finally creating a proposal (and in this case a video proposal!) This lesson really challenged my skills to think out of the box and make a solid plan for acquiring new STEM Makerspace tools. Grant writing is a skill that will translate to so many areas as a librarian. I can see writing grants for author visits, new books, and so much more!

Selecting technology is a key part of education. There is so much more that goes into "picking a program" to use! As a teacher, you must look at the capabilities of your available technology, the skill level of the users, and assessing the overall system available to you as a teacher. Evaluation of technology as a teaching tool is imperative and it is important to collaborate with your district technology team to make sure you are using a reliable and district-approved evaluation tool before jumping in! Another key point is to actually play with the technology and explore it just like your students will. That will help in your instruction and ability to troubleshoot problems that might arise. One requirement of these projects was to make a video. This was a little new to me because I had never used an app to record myself doing voice overs and production. Nerves aside, I feel like they came out pretty good!

In the past, I've done quite a bit of collaboration in groups, but this is the first time for me to participate in an online project with my peers. Outside of face-to-face collaboration or maybe via email or in a Facebook group, this was my maiden voyage into using Google to collaborate with my peers, edit, and explore the apps we were test-driving. I liked writing our Technology Evaluation paper for ETEC  "together" but still in our own space. It was neat to see how you could enter comments in different ways and even change font/color to reflect your personality. The online collaboration was easy and it was super helpful to be able to input comments any time of day but in real-time. It also made the paper easy to streamline for formatting before submitting because everything was in one place ready to go.