Lesson 8

Lesson Eight: School Technology
                        Planning and Grantwriting

              National Center for School Technology Planning

              Key Internet resources for educational technology grantwriters

              Key tips for winning grants.

Lesson 8 Required Assignments:

Send a half-page abstract for a viable grant via private email to your instructor which includes scope, scale, timeframe, budget and impact/dissemination plan.
(Use suggestions at http://lone-eagles.com/mira2.htm.)

Include three URLs for educational technology Internet resources not included in the handbook or lessons. (Search for "Educational Technology Grants") (one hour)

Share with your instructor which of the resources for this lesson you found most applicable to your situation and your thoughts on at least one of the provided grant templates.

For the remaining 10 points for this lesson engage in resource sharing with the other participants via the class listserv as described in the class welcome bulletin at http://lone-eagles.com/spu1wel.htm .

Lesson Goals

To identify the best grantwriting support resources and funding sources for technology in schools.

To identify the basic structure of a grant proposal and quality tutorials on proposal writing.

To recognize that more and more grantwriting resources are appearing on the Internet, making the whole grant-getting process easier than its ever been!

A. Visit the National Center for School Technology Planning at http://www.nctp.com. Review the other technology planning resources
listed at http://lone-eagles.com/k12.htm
(One hour)

B. Explore the grantwriting tips and resources at
        http://lone-eagles.com/granthelp.htm Be sure to carefully review the first
        two links listed, the Grantgetter's Guide and the short course on proposal
        writing.

        Try some samples searches for funders in topic areas you're interested in
        using the foundation.org database. (The third link listed)

        For federal educational funding review
        http://www.ed.gov/Technology and
        http://www.ed.gov/pubs/TeachersGuide
        (Two hours)

C. Explore the Community Bootstrap Initiative grant and the Seventh Generation Community Initiative concept paper at http://lone-eagles.com/articles/articles.htm You're welcome to use any text you like from these documents, or the others listed, for your own grants.
Existing Grant Proposals you can draw from:

Three recent listings of my best grant templates are, for Alaskan Native villages, http://lone-eagles.com/amep1.htm and for rural communities http://lone-eagles.com/rural-grant-templates.htm and for youth projects http://lone-eagles.com/youth.htm

Seventh Generation Community Initiative: A Model for Native American Sovereignty http://lone-eagles.com/7gc.htm

The Community Bootstrap Initiative "Doing for Ourselves- Together"
http://lone-eagles.com/articles/boot2.htm

Culture Club – Community content and self-publishing to address the global need for culturally appropriate Internet training visions and resources. Includes a Lone Eagles Apprenticeship Ecommerce program. http://lone-eagles.com/cultureclub.htm
For similar themes to seed your brainstorming - See also http://lone-eagles.com/capacity.htm and http://lone-eagles.com/trainers.htm

Youth-Driven Community Internet Awareness initiatives are described in Chapter Seven of the "Good Neighbor’s Guide to Community Networking" http://lone-eagles.com/cnguide.htm http://lone-eagles.com/chap7.htm

Creating a Community Self-help Internet Empowerment Model
http://lone-eagles.com/taosvisions.htm A concept paper with many fundable ideas written
for the Taos, NM Kellogg MIRA project participants, complete with grant template URLS.
For more on the MIRA project see http://lone-eagles.com/miramodel.htm
And here's a very recent grant draft for Youth-driven Cultural Community Building: http://lone-eagles.com/bartsgrant.htm

The following very recent concept papers are recommended reading: "The New Gold Rush: Mining Raw Human Potential with Free Web Tools." http://lone-eagles.com/goldrush.htm http://lone-eagles.com/mining.htm

(One hour)

Requests for proposals are being listed online more and more commonly, and grant proposals are being accepted online. Listservs are frequently used to disseminate requests for proposals (RFP's.) Using your browser and email program, you have the potential for bringing large amounts of funding to your school and your own special projects of your own invention. Grant-writing is a skill to be developed and it gets dramatically easier with practice. Each grant you write serves as a resource for boilerplate text and ideas for the next grant.

D. You might find the proposal-writing handouts at http://lone-eagles.com/mira2.htm useful with your students as a writing/planning/thinking project.

E. Since you'll soon be finished with the course, as soon as you submit your final project, as discussed in the Welcome to the Course bulletin at http://lone-eagles.com/spu1wel.htm you'll need to know how to unsubscribe yourself from the class listserv:

Simply put, all you have to do is send an email to listserver@spu.edu and put in the subject field type
<unsubscribe edte5174> (do not type the brackets). Do not put anything in the
message field. You will receive a message within 5 minutes confirming
their action.

Lastly, my recommendation for your next course is "Designing K12 Internet Instruction"
offered by Alaska Pacific University. All lesson are previewable at http://lone-eagles.com/currmain1.htm

Lesson Feedback: Optional, but much appreciated.

You're invited to privately email your instructor:

       1. What areas, if any, did you have trouble with during this lesson?

       2. What questions remain now that you've finished this lesson?

       3. Approximately how much time did you devote to this lesson?

       4. What improvements would you like to suggest?

PS: I wrote many grants to sustain Big Sky Telegraph from 1988-1998, $1.4 million in total. US West was the main funder, and in 1993 US West and Annenberg's Math and Science project co-funded $880,000 for a "Reach for the Sky" project where 20 rural teachers received laptops and 3 online courses which enabled them to mentor teachers in a five state area using the courses I'd developed and which they were required to complete before they mentored others in taking the same courses. I found grantwriting got easier and easier! with practice!