Believe in what you do---Write a Grant

You may recall that this year, I had the pleasure of supervising a wonderful CF, Ashley Robinson. She possesses the remarkable ability to take a suggestion or idea and literally run with it.  In this case, she had an idea for a grant proposal, wrote it up, submitted it, and got it!  Here's her post!   (She is my very first guest blogger!)

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My wonderful supervisor, Ruth, has been gracious enough to let me guest blog for her. I have appeared on Ruth's blog a few times – I am her clinical fellow (CF) and she has been monitoring and documenting all of the time she has spent directly supervising me – even devising a Google form to keep track of the seemingly countless observation hours. Back in the fall, I applied for a grant on behalf of the Assistive Technology team. This grant was awarded by the Public School Foundation of Chapel Hill Carrboro City Schools. (http://www.publicschoolfoundation.org/ 

    Ruth walked me through the grant process and got me through my first grant application. The grant was titled, “It's Never Too Late: Targeting Literacy in Middle and High School Students with Disabilities.”

Our aim in this grant is to provide middle and high school students with disabilities easy access to age appropriate material at their reading level. The Assistive Technology Team Lead, Jim Tignor (check out his cool tech blog here: http://shinobijimbo.blogspot.com/) found a free app called ScribblePress, which allows students to write and illustrate their own books. There are several ready-made templates, so students who have trouble generating novel text can have more structure. Authors have the opportunity to share their material for others to read.

     Today, I want to take the time to thank the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Public School Foundation for their generous funding towards this grant. With this funding, Jim and I hope to put one iPad loaded with the ScribblePress app, and other apps to support literacy development, in each middle and high school. Exceptional Education teachers will be able to make use of this technology in their classrooms and with many different students. We have so many great educators in this district, that it will be a real pleasure to provide them with technology to support what they are already doing in their classrooms to target literacy.

On behalf of the secondary Exceptional Education teachers and the Assistive Technology team, we would like to send a huge THANK YOU to the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Public School Foundation!  

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 Ruth's Final Note: I realize that most of you don't live in Chapel Hill or work in our school system.  This blog post by Ashley is a great example of seeing what grant opportunities exist, and then writing up a proposal to match what is available.  During our current limited funding times, Ashley and others are doing what they need to do to help their students.  Ashley will be completing her CF year in two days!  Congratulations, Ashley: Job well done!