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Kickstarter for CTE projects?????

http://coolcatteacher.blogspot.com/2012/11/why-not-kickstart-school-and-nonprofit.html

Maybe we could use this concept for the Carpentry House at BTC and the Metal Container House at MTC.

Why not kickstart school and nonprofit building projects?

Posted by Vicki Davis 

Architizer has a fantastic article about how new facilities are raising funds on Kickstarter. (Kickstarter is a funding platform for 'creative projects.')

In "How Kickstarter is Changing Architecture," they profile several instances of kickstarter being used to fund and implement needed buildings and projects:

• A "Peace and Quite Booth" in Times square"
• The Lowline project - an underground park built in Manhattan's Lower East Side (they met their goal in 8 days!)
• A New York public pool gets a new Splash House when grad students from Parsons decided they wanted to build it.

OK, let's take your mind and blow it with this one here. Two people wanted to create a special feature in a park, so they didn't take the typical route and propose to city leaders, etc. They created a Kickstarter campaign. Of course, you still have to get approval for things, but often it comes down to money, doesn't it? No one wants to be on the hook to raise more money for a dog of a project that the public doesn't support.

James Ramsey used Kickstarter to raise money for the
Lowline Project underground park project in Manhattan.

Now, imagine this - what if you had several potential projects at your school. You really needed some classroom space as well as a sports facility. Which do you build?

Well, why not kickstarter them? Raise the money using kickstarter or some sort of kickstarter-type program to see where the most support is. The school can match the project to raise the first X amount and it is done!

So many great projects lie dormant because the powers that be are disconnected from the moneys that be. ;-) (forgive my grammar error, but you get my point)

I think this sort of thing can transform so many things we do and it is right here in front of us. We should start using kickstarter principles in our schools or to add the enhancements that so many people need. The nice thing about kickstarter, is that different levels of support include t-shirts and other goodies, so it helps you design the campaign as part of the process - these are things that we should do anyway, but often don't.

Social media has many ideas that we can use to help cash-strapped schools. We don't have to sit on our hands and do nothing, maybe some of our projects just need a kickstart! ;-)

Oh, and if any of you are already doing this, or know of schools who are, please leave a message in the comments, I'd like to know more about successful school fundraising projects using this model and I think others would too.

Why “Googling It” Is Not Enough

Talk about 21st Century Skills being applied to CTE projects!  This article will come in handy when we talk with the staff regarding the Research projects.  It was originally publisher on this blog:

http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2012/11/why-googling-it-is-not-enough/

November 9, 2012 | 10:58 AM | By Annie Murphy Paul

Has the Internet changed the way students conduct research? Yes, and not always for the better, reports to a study released last week by the Pew Research Center, “How Teens Do Research in the Digital World.” According to a survey of more than 2,000 middle and high school teachers, “research” for today’s students means “Googling,” and as a result, doing research “has shifted from a relatively slow process of intellectual curiosity and discovery to a fast-paced, short-term exercise aimed at locating just enough information to complete an assignment.” While teachers in the survey acknowledge the benefits of the web for students—great depth and breadth of information, material presented in engaging multimedia formats, and the opportunity to become self-directed and self-reliant researchers—many of them express concern that easily-distracted students with short attention spans are not developing the skills required to do deep, original research.

From the report: “Some 77% of advanced placement (AP) and National Writing Project (NWP) teachers surveyed say that the internet and digital search tools have had a ‘mostly positive’ impact on their students’ research work. At the same time, 76% of teachers surveyed ‘strongly agree’ with the assertion that internet search engines have conditioned students to expect to be able to find information quickly and easily.” Here are a few ways teachers, parents and others can help students go beyond Google.

PROMOTE DIGITAL LITERACY — AND TRADITIONAL LITERACY, TOO. 
In the Pew survey, a majority of teachers agreed that “today’s technologies make it harder for students to find credible sources of information.” Instruction in digital literacy techniquescan show students how to  determine whether an online reference is legitimate and how to check its claims against other sources. But what students really need to navigate the inaccuracies and flat-out falsehoods so common on the web is a store of knowledge saved on the original hard drive: their own minds. Students must possess abundant factual knowledge in order to evaluate what they encounter on the web, and the best way to acquire content knowledge is still reading nonfiction books. 

ENCOURAGE STUDENTS TO FACT-FIND FACE-TO-FACE.

Young people who’ve grown up in the digital age often have the impression that everything anyone needs to know is located somewhere on the web—so devise assignments that show them it isn’t so. Ask them to find a book in the library that hasn’t yet been scanned by Google Books; require them to consult with a research librarian, who will give them a sense of how many and varied non-digital resources are available; have them conduct an oral history project, collecting stories from living people that can’t be found on a website.

GUIDE THEM TO SEARCH DEEPER.

The Internet is not the enemy of careful research; after all, historians, scientists and other experts rely heavily on the web in their work. But they’re using their computers to access in-depth resources like online databases and academic journals—not only Yahoo and Wikipedia. Make sure students know that the results turned up by a search engine are only the topmost layer of information about their subject: from there, they’ve got to do a lot of digging. Google isn’t the end of their search, in other words—it’s just the beginning.