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By Jennifer Roland

Few schools and teachers have access to all the funds they need or want to outfit their classroom. According to a PBS survey last year, only one in five teachers say they have the updated technology they need. But with some creativity, educators can go beyond the typical PTA fundraiser and earn funding for specific classroom needs. Here are some ways teachers have filled their classroom coffers.

CORPORATE SPONSORS AND COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIPS

Tim Smith, a San Francisco parent and chair of technology at Alvarado Elementary School, who’s accustomed to schools asking parents for donations, decided to try something different three years ago.

He organized a Tech Search Party, now an annual event, which combines corporate sponsorship with a fun scavenger hunt using mobile devices. Corporations sponsor the event as part of their charitable give-back and provide participants with discount codes for purchases of their products and services. Participants sign up as teams and pay a small fee to be part of the scavenger hunt. Top teams win prizes.

The first year, all funds went to Alvarado Elementary School. The school purchased upgraded thin-client computer systems and software and upgraded many of the energy-hogging CRT monitors that were used at Alvarado. After the first event proved to be successful, they expanded to include two other local schools, splitting the proceeds from the event.

Other school systems can create similar events, looking at the needs and technology adoption rates to decide whether to use a smartphone scavenger hunt, as he does, or a traditional paper-based scavenger hunt.

ASK FOR WHAT YOU NEED

Educators have also been using donation sites like Kickstarter and Donorschoose to raise funds for their classrooms, though it can be hard to get traction for projects among all of the other worthy requests out there.

SA500 Kids is another donation site conceived by Next Jump, the company behind many employee and customer rewards programs from major businesses. Next Jump partnered with DonorsChoose to bring more visibility to technology projects and reach funding goals. When projects with a technology component are submitted to the DonorsChoose database, they’re automatically added to the SA500 Kids log at Oo.com. Next Jump says they average three hours to fund a project and that they have raised nearly $450,000 so far. See statistics on projects funded here.

One important tip to remember with online donations is to make sure that schools and teachers share the voting link with parents and through all their social media connections.

JOIN (OR START) A BRIGADE

TerraCycle, the company that got its start selling compost in recycled drink bottles, recently launched a Keyboard and Mouse Brigade that pays schools for things like old keyboards, mouse, and Web cams. As an additional incentive for participation, TerraCycle’s corporate partners have stepped up to offer grants and donations. Last year, Wal-Mart offered $125,000 in grants to the top-collecting schools in all of TerraCycle’s brigades, according to vice president of global communication Albe Zakes. One school used their grant funds specifically to purchase classroom technology.

This year, Logitech and TerraCycle have created the Erase Your E-Waste contest and set a goal of collecting 2,500 items in the Keyboard and Mouse Brigade by Earth Month. Until the end of April, the school that collects the highest number of qualifying products for the Keyboard and Mouse Brigade will be rewarded with up to 30 new keyboards and 30 new mice. If the goal is met, every school that sent in a shipment during the contest will receive a coupon for 35% off a school purchase of Logitech keyboards, mice, webcams, headsets and speakers. Every participating school is automatically entered into the contest.

To be successful with this type of fundraiser, set a specific goal for the recycling program and clearly communicate it to kids and parents, as Salem (Oregon) Child Development Center did. They used the funds they earned through TerraCycle and other programs to redo their garden area, and they are currently collecting to redo their play area.

TIPS FOR SUCCESSFUL FUNDRAISING

1. Be specific. Have a specific budget for your project and be clear about what exactly will be purchased.
2. Share your story. If you want parents to help, be specific about what you need them to do. Whether it is collecting recyclables or voting for your project, they will help as long as they know how.
3. Work with local and national companies. Many companies have charitable giving funds, whether they are housed in a special community give-back budget or in the marketing budget. Connect with them to request funds for your needs.

Flickr: Kenteegarden

In the past two days, I’ve received a few comments and emails from readers about different articles that all point to the same problem: frustration over lack of money to take advantage of all these transformational tech tools that we write about here.

In response to The Most Anticipated Tech Tools of Back to School, reader Noi Schoch writes:

“All this tech is great! IF you have the cash for it! Most schools can’t afford it, and most can’t afford the staff development to train everyone how to use it and keep up with the newest uses for it.”

In reference to the article Math and Science: Out of the Classroom, Into the World, which describes why new technology makes this an exciting time to be a student, reader “mjamerson” says:

“This really sounds like a wonderful expansion of educational possibilities. But there is a potential downside. This new technology will depend on two things: teacher ability and access. As we know, in poor communities there are less seasoned teachers and less access, both at school and at home. So as much as I love the idea of using technology to widen the educational experience, this seems to widen the technology/educational opportunity divide at the same time. It makes me wonder; How many people will be left behind?”

And yesterday, I received an email from Shelley Tingle, with the subject head “Where do I start?”:

“I’m a parent of an 8th grader, 4th grader and 2nd grader.  I’m also a research civil engineer at the Engineer Research and Development Center in Vicksburg, Mississippi.  My junior high student goes to a school with virtually no technology!  Vicksburg is an odd society since it is home to many engineers and scientists but also has an extremely high level of poverty with the majority of the students on reduced or free lunches. See our district’s report card.

My passion is for these children to get connected to math and science which will help in educating our low-income children out of poverty with many job opportunities in their hometown. Where do I begin to get technology into the hands of these students?  We do not even have Smartboards in the classrooms.  What would be your priority list?  How do we go about getting the funds for pay for the technology?”

And this is just from the past couple of days. Since the launch of MindShift almost a year ago, I’ve received more notes and comments than I can count asking this pressing question. And I’m not sure how to answer it.

As I wrote in a recent article “For At-Risk Youth, is Learning Digital Media a Luxury?” the issue is one of priority for school administrators, those in positions of power. If educators can reach out to disenfranchised kids by engaging them with tactics like using their mobiles phones and Facebook for learning in class, and by learning about topics that interest them and have direct relevance in their lives, dropout rates and truancies might actually drop. We might see kids more interested in school, regardless of their economic standing. What makes this a more urgent issue is that the “digital divide” or “participation gap”—whatever term you like—will grow even more if low-income students aren’t taught how to use important tech tools they’ll need to survive outside school.

But is there a way to circumvent the system with sites like Donors Choose? Can teachers find sources to fund their own, individual classroom projects, and if so, is that the right way? Can parents help lead the movement in their individual communities? I’d love to hear from those who’ve been successful.

Flickr:Amagill

Continuing my conversation with the Department of Education’s Director of Education Technology Karen Cator, we talk about how schools can find inventive ways of allotting money for tech tools.

What’s your position on creative reallocation of funds in order to pull schools and districts into the 21st century?

We’re going to have to figure out how to reallocate funds. It’s not like we’ll have more money to add on the side. We have to think of our core mission: What are the required elements of building a high-quality, productive education environment? I think that’s the only way to be successful. We have to think of the ways we’re spending money now, and ways we can be more productive.

The productivity section of the National Education Technology Plan gets at the essence of how we can do more, better, even faster with the same amount of resources.

There are some great examples of reallocation of funds. Morrisville School District in North Carolina went through their entire budget and found where they can save money, if in fact, every student had a digital device. Think about what’s on a digital device – you can have a calculator, research materials, maps, writing tools, school binder, calendar, books and content, you can have your assessment.

We can’t think of it as whether we can we buy a device with content instead of a single textbook. It’s more like whether we can we provide a device with all of the tools and resources that students need every single day. And there is a creative way to reallocate funds. For example, we should be able to save on paper doing that, the paper budgets in schools could be used.

One of our problems right now is that we’re funding two systems: a paper-based system and we’re beginning to fund a technology-based system. That’s not sustainable. We have to make the leap to a digital learning environment from predominantly print-based classroom to see both increased improvements in productivity and learning, and to see cost savings that would fund the digital environment.

And to do this, we have to think of it as a system. There are a variety of funding pots that can fund different parts of the infrastructure. There are community-based grants, Department of Commerce grants and agriculture programs that fund broadband build-out. And we have to think of it as a system, with the focus of improving productivity and opportunity for everyone to learn.

How can decision-makers figure out when to invest in a new technology, knowing that it’ll change again quickly, whether it’s an iPod Touch, or an iPad, or another e-reader? How can they know it’s worth the investment?

I totally understand that. It’s a risk whenever you move into new environment, and in education we’re pretty risk averse. But I do understand the sentiment.

Karen Cator

But we can’t focus on devices, then we get attached to something that’s fleeting. Whether it’s going to last for four or five years, or whether there will be something better, it’s just the way technology evolves. We need to focus and clearly articulate on what we want students to be able to do.

We want them to write and to write better, and be able to edit, and have the tools of writing. We want them to read, to leverage tools of the text that the screen can provide, which is much more enabled than text on a page. We want students to do research, to find data sets online, the tools, the stimulation, the assessments. If we focus on those things, the actual device becomes less daunting. Because today, it’s one device, and it might be another one tomorrow. But whatever devices we have are going to enable students and teachers to do those things that we clearly say we want them to be able to do. And that’s when we’ll feel better about our decisions.

And if we focus on what we want them to be able to do, that actually doesn’t change as frequently, and that isn’t like technology. It just becomes a more enabled environment.

I think we’ll see some people experimenting with a variety of other strategies as well, potentially welcoming devices that students can bring from home. If we can begin to have that kind of mine/theirs/ours types of devices, then a couple things might happen. One, the support is more distributed, because students are empowered and responsible to support their devices, and second, the funds that school districts have can go further. And bottom line, you can get closer to having a more productive environment and increase opportunity for all students.

[Here's the first part of our interview.]