Sofa, Tables, and Books, Oh My!

The first two weeks have passed in the blink of an eye! The hustle and bustle of starting a new school year mixed with my children's Back to School nights and the start of fall sports have me running nonstop from morning to night. Surely you can relate!

I have so many wonderful updates to share about our Tiny Tech Cafe. This project, which began as a little dream of mine, has quickly taken shape and continues to evolve with great support from students, teachers, community members and even complete strangers! (For those of you wondering, "What's a Tiny Tech Cafe?" click here for our first round of updates.)

In my last post, I outlined the structure and purpose of the cafe and shared a few photos of our green screen area, our bar-height table and chairs, our logo and SAMR display. Now I am excited to share that our Tiny Tech Cafe includes a bookshelf, a sofa, an additional table, two bar stools, and a hanging curtain divider, all financed with the generous donations to our GoFundMe campaign!

 

WOW! Can you believe all that's happened in just TWO WEEKS?! It's incredible! 

The Tiny Tech Cafe was dedicated on September 6, 2016, the first day of school, in memory of my mother-in-law who would have celebrated her 69th birthday that day. She was a Mechanicsville Elementary School parent almost forty years ago and in my early days as a classroom teacher, she would lovingly make curtains and tablecloths for my room. Even though she passed away in March of this year, I wanted a little bit of her to shine through our cafe, so I created a small memorial in her honor:

We've been blessed by several random acts of kindness these past two weeks as well! One teacher made a lighted display and another custom-ordered a JOY pillow from two of our parents. We also had a visit from one of our retired teachers who donated additional pillows to our cafe so we can switch them out for the seasons!  

Oh, the indescribable JOY of so many people working together to make a vision come to life!

Our Tiny Tech Cafe campaign will remain active through the month of October with our focus now shifting to stocking our Lending Library with  awesome, new, relevant, inspiring books for teachers to borrow and read. (If you have a suggestion of a great book, leave a comment on this blog post! Better yet, if you are the author of a great book, we would love to have a signed copy of your book donated to our cafe as a wonderful random act of kindness!)

In addition to receiving support, we've also had the joy of blessing others with our campaign. Just this week we celebrated the accomplishments of two well-deserving teachers who attended eight (yes - EIGHT!) of my Tiny Tech professional development sessions last year. All of these sessions were optional, so their attendance and implementation of what they had learned was incredible! These ladies will enjoy a sweet treat at Starbucks thanks to the generous donors of the Tiny Tech Cafe!

Below are all the blog posts I've shared about our recent updates (believe it or not, this post is only a brief summary!) Click the links below to discover our latest news:

Post 1 - Tiny Tech Cafe

Post 2 - Coffee, Anyone?

Post 3 - When You Wish

Post 4 - Making Progress

Post 5 - Cardinal Love

Post 6 - A Little Surprise

Post 7 - We Have a Sofa!

Post 8 - Sit or Stand

To date, we've received funding from 17 donors - so amazing! I cannot begin to express how thankful I am for all your support! It's our goal to purchase the Green Screen app in the next week and start filling the bookshelf with more books. If you would like to join in as one of our donors (and earn rewards, too!) click here! When the campaign closes at the end of October, we will have a sign displayed in the Cafe listing all our donors and contributors, celebrating the joy that's created when we all work together to achieve a goal!

Please consider sharing this blog post with a friend or a member of your PLN. Perhaps they, too, would be inspired by designing a Tiny Tech Cafe in their building!

Thanks again for all your support - we couldn't have done this without YOU!

Celebrate Monday

Ahhhh... today is the official last day of Summer Break for those of us in Central Virginia. Tomorrow begins a brand-new school year with smiling faces, happy children, and joy, joy, JOY!

Have I mentioned lately how much I love my job as an educator? :)

This past week has been a flurry of activity as teachers have set-up classrooms, organized folders, and prepared to meet students and parents at Open House. I, too, have been busy, playing more of a behind-the-scenes role helping teachers with creating parent surveys, setting up computers, and planning for tech integration lessons and projects to come.

But right here in this moment, as I sit on my back deck snuggled under a lightweight fleece blanket listening to the early-morning sounds of summer chirping around me, I want to take a moment to #CelebrateMonday.

For those of you who are new to the Twitter scene, #CelebrateMonday and #FlyHighFri are two of my FAVORITE educationally positive hashtags to follow. They begin and end my work week with joy and help me find other positive thinkers in the sea of Twitter followers.

Today I am celebrating the progress on my Tiny Tech Cafe.

If you know anything at all about me, you know I am PASSIONATE about education, educators, and children. But I am also passionate about random acts of kindness. My vision for turning our sterile and stoic computer lab into an engaging Tiny Tech Cafe is starting to gain momentum as friends, family, and community members join together for a shared purpose.

It really is mind-blowing to see how it's all coming together!

I've written several updates throughout the week on the progress and wanted to share them with you as well:

Post 1 - Tiny Tech Cafe

Post 2 - Coffee, Anyone?

Post 3 - When You Wish

Post 4 - Making Progress

I am humbled to see so many people supporting this project! It is incredible! Best of all, I can already see an increased engagement of conversation with teachers, students, and parents who want to know more about the Tiny Tech Cafe.

In a recent post by 4 O'Clock Faculty, we were asked to share our goals with the world. Here are my goals for the Tiny Tech Cafe this year:

Together we can achieve great things!

If you would like to join in and be a Tiny Tech Cafe Supporter, please click here! We would love to make our vision a reality through a fully-funded campaign!

I am excited to see what the first week of school holds for us at Mechanicsville Elementary and I hope your week shines with brightness, too! What are you doing today to #CelebrateMonday?

Tiny Tech Cafe - Rationale

Our official work week began last Thursday and I could not wait to get back in the groove! Don't get me wrong - I adore my three children and I can assure you that I have literally poured every ounce of stay-at-home-mom-mode into their summer experiences! But there is something about a new school year that brings joy to my soul like nothing else!

New beginnings. New classes. New joy!

As a technology integrator in an elementary school, my main purpose is to provide training and support for students, teachers, and administrators who want to use technology as a part of their learning process. This looks very different from person-to-person, class-to-class, so as you can imagine, I stay pretty busy during the school year! Last year I shifted my mindset to move away from the "one shot" professional development sessions to a more personalized PD approach where I tried to provide training on what teachers wanted to learn and provide quality support throughout the entire year.

With more than 40 educators on staff, this was challenging, but I knew it was the right thing to do. I began the year by asking teachers to complete an in-depth survey identifying areas of interest, then I offered numerous training sessions on those topics throughout the year. I also made a point to do "check-ins" where I asked teachers how it was going and provided additional support/resources if needed. For me, the exciting part of this process was getting to know my teachers on a deeper level, strengthening that relationship, and watching them succeed in learning something new. When they became confident enough to continue the learning without me, I knew this was the right way to provide professional developmnet.

It was like watching a caterpillar spin a cocoon and emerge as a beautiful butterfly. Fascinating!

This process of providing personalized PD made me realize that I need to offer more opportunities for teachers to build relationships - with their students, with each other, with me. I quickly discovered that having teachers collaborate with me in our laptop lab was less than ideal. I have a desk in the back corner, with no additional seating unless a teacher moved items off a table. Teachers would come and pull up a chair beside my desk, its sharp angles poking at them as they tried to look from their laptop to mine. If we were collaborating while another class was using the lab, it was difficult to hear and focus on our training.  

Even working one-on-one with students was frustrating. If I was helping a third grader with their digital writing, I would have to scrunch down beside them, trying to whisper so as not to distract the other children nearby. When students worked on collaborative projects, such as our fourth graders creating Google Slides presentations about Regions, there was no area of the room that invited them to sit and chat as they worked out details for final publication. 

In addition, several teachers showed an interest in learning more about using a green screen with their students (where we photograph or record students against a green background then use technology to insert images making it appear they were in that location, similar to what you see on a traditional weather report.) Unfortunately, there was no place in our lab to hang a green screen curtain with our furniture arrangement of long tables, laptop carts and overhead document camera stands. The computer lab was just that - a sterile lab that was functional, but not inviting at all.

This summer, following the ISTE Conference in Denver, CO, I noticed a trending hashtag on Twitter: #StarbucksMyRoom. It showcased classrooms stepping away from conventional desks and chairs to offer students a more flexible seating arrangement, much like what you might find in a Starbucks cafe.

The concept got me thinking. What if I could somehow transform my little workspace in the corner of the computer lab into a Tiny Tech Cafe? Immediately my creativity kicked in and I imagined a space that was warm and inviting, maybe even offering coffee or tea for the teachers who might want to collaborate or receive personalized training. I could even picture students using the Tiny Tech Cafe to work with their peers or conference with their teachers on their projects. I would love to have a collection of new-release books available for teacher checkout, written by some of my favorite educators and administrators whose innovative leadership makes learning fun, empowering, and impactful.

With that vision in mind, I decided to jump in and make it a reality!

I started with baby steps - designing a unique logo and scouring yard sales and online forums for low-cost furniture. I quickly discovered that my grand intentions didn't quite match my meager budget! Eek! We all know that teachers have to purchase things our of their own pockets to outfit their classrooms; however, I wanted to create something our school would be proud to use and showcase to other schools as an example of an innovative learning environment for teachers AND students.

This is when I realized I couldn't do it all on my own. I needed to reach out for help. 

My next few posts will showcase the things I have made and purchased to make this dream come true, but I could really use your generosity as well! Please visit the Tiny Tech Cafe GoFundMe page and consider donating or sharing with your friends. No amount is too small and every person or company who donates will receive recognition on social media (Twitter, Facebook, and my blog) as well as have their name displayed on a sign in the Tiny Tech Cafe. Together we can make an incredible impact on student and teacher learning, by providing a space that is open, engaging, and productive!

Check back soon or subscribe to this blog so you can be kept up-to-date and see how the Tiny Tech Cafe progresses. I can't wait to share it with you all!