I've had a dream of starting a school library makerspace ever since I made the switch from classroom English teacher to school librarian two years ago. I had already heard of them and read about them and thought they sounded AMAZING. Creativity, technology, problem solving, collaboration, critical thinking, and trying new things! What's not to love? So last summer when I attended a summer PD in my district that had a session on grants, I jumped at the chance to learn about grants. I then applied for and got a small grant from my district's education foundation. Fast forward to this past winter, and we had some funds to spend on technology. Some of those funds got allotted for collaboration stations and some for a makerspace. I ordered the items in the spring for us to use this coming school year. In both of these cases I worked to make sure I got the most bang for my buck. When you have a chance to use funding for a makerspace, you want to put money in things that will benefit students and have impact, but you also want to do that as cost effectively as possible to get more. So how do you get the most bang for the buck with provided funds or prepare a grant proposal budget?1. Brainstorm. After scouring blog posts like this one www.thedaringlibrarian.com/2015/06/makerspace-starter-kit.html and Twitter with searches on #makerspace and #makered. 2. Prioritize. What items would most benefit people at this time? What items would help draw people to use the makerspace? What items could be used in a variety of subject areas? What items could kids use with classes? What items could they use independently? 3. Gather input. This one is a case by case basis. With my grant, I knew what I wanted to get and that it would be a smaller amount, so I didn't take input. With the technology monies this year, I invited input from all. I gathered my personal ideas into a Dotstorming board. I then duplicated my board to have one for each grade level except for the grade level moving onto the high school. (That just seemed mean to ask them since they wouldn't still be in the building for implementation.) In Dotstorming the students could see my ideas, add their own ideas, add comments, and vote on the ones they liked best. (You can decide how many votes each user gets.) Here's a locked copy of my board I sent to teachers with my ideas: https://dotstorming.com/b/5886133ff11e0a2276b2b27f. You can see in the image below how the top of one for students looked. I also had some in person meetings with my building's technology leaders and chatted with some colleagues as well. 4. Price around and budget. After using the input to narrow down your list even further, start getting prices. I can be frugal to a fault. I would check Barnes and Noble, Amazon, the company that makes the product, Demco, and any other company/distributor that I could think of that might have each product to see who had the best pricing on what. Also with pricing in mind - several companies offer tax exemptions for schools, some companies offer discounts to schools (i.e. I learned that Barnes and Noble discounts some, but not all, of their makerspace items for schools), and some offer bulk discounts (i.e. Best Buy does on some items if you order over a certain quantity). I worked on creating budget drafts in Excel while I went.
5. Make final decisions and order! I know that one robot may seem amazing, but is it really worth most of your budget for one set of them? Does that accomplish your main goal? Or would it be better to spread the wealth? It depends on the situation, but these are the types of final decisions you may have to make if you didn't make them earlier in the process. But once you make a few final last decisions, you're ready to click on those Order buttons! Relish in it, and go celebrate with some chocolate! Curious what I ordered? Check it out here!
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