If you teach and need money for a project or work outside of education and want to help fund a specific project, DonorsChoose may be the site you need to visit.

The site has two purposes:

1 – Give public school teachers a chance to get money for classroom projects that otherwise could not be funded.

2 – Give prospective donors a chance to learning about and fund specific classroom projects.

When you create an account on the site, you are asked to categorize yourself as a public school teacher or a prospective donor.  Teachers can propose projects that require funding and donors can select projects and donate money to them.

The site has also started what it calls a Blogger Challenge.  If you have a blog, you can challenge the readers of your blog to donate a certain amount money during a specific time period.  DonorsChoose keeps track of how much money that is donated through your blogger challenge.  Tomato Nation (at the top of the leader board) has raised $35,000 impacting over 3000 students.

In the end, everyone wins.

I’m starting something new with my students this semester. I’m calling it “POP” or Positive Online Profile.

Each student starts by making sure he/she does not have pictures or posts on the web that show conduct unbecoming of a teacher. If possible, those items are purged. With all the archiving out there, someone really looking for dirt may still find it, but it should be out of the popular search engines.

Then we build up all the things that are positive.

1 – Blog about educational topics
2 – Flickr photos of educational projects
3 – YouTube videos of lessons taught
4 – Online digital portfolio

All these things will have the students’ real names. The idea is to get positive educational information at the top of all the search engines. The only way to do this is to create a lot of positive information. To move this information to the top of the search engines, other people need to link to it. This is the hardest, most drawn out part of the project. It may take years to get close to the top of the search engines.

The students will participate in larger educational social networks. Any time they work on group projects, they will link to each other. They will also work with faculty members to establish those links. In four years, as the students graduate, we hope potential employers will not only find our students’ positive information online, but they will also see how the students fit into the educational community.

Alvin Trusty – The University of Findlay – Educational Technology