Chances are, if you’re a teacher, you’ve heard the word ‘grant’ thrown around quite a bit by friends, peers, and administrators. Chances are, you may have even applied for a few of them, too. These days, it’s not uncommon for teachers to spend hours and hours of their free time perfecting grant applications and submitting them for anything and everything. The problem with that is everybody else is also doing that and there are only so many awards to go around. Back during the summer, we introduced our monthly EdTech grant program, which has allowed us to award $500 worth of STEM tools to a deserving educator every month since! We’re very excited to be able to provide this opportunity to teachers, but, more importantly, your chances of being selected are much more likely! Keep reading to learn more reasons why should be applying for our grant next month and every month until you’re selected!
What You Can Get
If you’ve never take a few minutes to browse through our online store, we highly suggest that you do. Not only will you find hundreds of useful EdTech items, but just about all of the STEM and STEAM tools can be purchased with grant money. Even if you have been awarded a grant other than ours, we’re more than happy to provide educators with educational technology to purchase with grant money! Anyways, our store features EdTech in six main categories: Robotics, Coding, 3D Printing, Virtual Reality, Drones, and Circuitry. You guessed it—any item that falls under one of these categories can be purchased with grant funds. Grant recipients can also pick and choose from the different categories, creating a cart of customized classroom technology that fits within the $500 range, which ensures you’re getting exactly what you need and what your students want!
Some of our awardees in the past have taken full advantage of the large variety of technology on our store and requested tech from all different categories. Another way we’ve seen it done is educators asking for a bunch of different inexpensive tech tools and creating a bundle with up to 20 different items also from a bunch of different categories. Some of the technology on our store is as low as $15 or $20, giving our grant recipients a lot of freedom if they happen to be looking for low-tech stuff to add to or start a makerspace or to just complement what they already have. Of course, if educators want to put it all towards one slightly more expensive item, we can certainly accommodate that as well. Many of our best robotics, coding, and MakerEd offerings fall within the $100-$200 range, meaning our grant awardees could request two or three of them and then sprinkle in a couple less expensive items as well if there is money left over. The possibilities are truly up to you!
We’re constantly adding new technology to our store, expanding the opportunities for our grant recipients. Within the larger categories, there is truly something for everybody, including robotics tools for Pre-K and kindergarten students, elementary kids, middle schoolers, and high school students, for example. The same goes for the circuitry, coding, and virtual reality categories as well. Many of the 3D printers and drones are designed for older students to use, but there are still one or two options in those categories for students of all ages. If you’re not sure exactly whether a particular technology will be a good fit for your students’ age and ability levels, let us know! We’d be happy to offer advice and guidance to help ensure your grant award empowers you with something that’s genuinely helpful! Ultimately, we recommend taking a look around our store before submitting your application—and maybe even checking back every couple of weeks because there’s always something new being added—to ensure you find something that you can use and something new that will excite you!
Our Selection Criteria
When we launched our EdTech grant program last summer, we did so with more in mind than giving away some lesser-known tech tools or hoping that the educators we selected would endlessly promote us among their school community. We wanted to make sure we were truly helping those educators who demonstrated both elements of passion and financial need. It’s unfortunate, but the truth is that many teachers are commonly unable to give their students the 21st century learning experiences they need a lot of the time and, more often than not, that comes down to money. Teachers usually know what tools to use to give students opportunities that will help them in the future, but are often handcuffed by administrative restraints set by their school or district. With that being said, we absolutely take into account the need for assistance that educators demonstrate and their commitment to using their potential award in the classroom to benefit their students.
With that being said, our grant recipients to date have been made up of different types of educators, those who are working to improve innovative educational programs for their students, those who demonstrate a financial need, and those who have a clear plan in place for leveraging technology to boost future readiness. Besides that, we also look for educators who are able to put their awarded technology into their programs in a swift manner—preferably within six months after receiving the award. This helps ensure that the technology does not become obsolete while it’s waiting to be used and helps guarantee kids get to use something that’s new and cutting-edge. Besides all that, we want to help teachers discover new EdTech since we know that they don’t always have unlimited time to do the research on their own. Once we’re able to establish a relationship with them through their application, we can work with them if we are encouraged by their plans to maybe recommend something slightly different or give them ideas for truly making the most of their precious grant dollars.
While this is not always something we take into consideration, we certainly will notice if we see an application that mentions something truly unique an applicant intends to do with grant money. In fact, we had one such application a few months back in which a teacher was looking for additional STEAM tools to help her students complete the construction of a district STEAM bus that they were planning to drive from school to school to give students the opportunity to take part in some very cool STEM learning. Anything that helps schools create a true 21st century environment is something that we want to play a part in developing. The ultimate goal of this program is to help provide some financial relief while also empowering teachers to give their students the chance to build 21st century skills. If you feel you are able to exemplify the qualifications we are looking for, we very much encourage you to apply for next month’s grant award and any others in the future that you would like!
Eligibility is Easy
There are some EdTech grant opportunities that only certain educators are eligible to apply for. And, there are others with a very specific set of criteria applicants need to possess in order to apply. Not for ours, though. Any educator at all can apply for our educational technology grant and they can do so as many times as they want until they are selected. We know that educational innovation is not limited to the classroom during the school day. Many school librarians and makerspace leaders are trying to find new ways to bring exciting technology into learning as well. That’s why we want to continue spreading the word about out grant program. It’s incredibly easy to qualify for eligibility because, well, everybody is eligible, including classroom teachers, administrators, librarians, makerspace leaders, and anybody else who works in the school community!
We’ve also really embraced the variety in the roles of the recipients we’ve selected so far as well. We’ve had elementary teachers, public librarians, STEM teachers, and makerspace leaders receive some of our grant awards over the last few months. If you haven’t heard all of their stories so far, we’d be happy to share some more! The first grant we awarded back in June went to adding some STEAM tools to a school makerspace in Lowell. They were in the process of converting an old school locker room into that makerspace, which we thought was a genius idea and we were happy to work with a local makerspace to enhance their transition. And, as we mentioned earlier, the recipient of our award in July was in the process of refurbishing an old school bus into a mobile STEAM machine. She wanted to help make STEAM experiences accessible to all students in the district, especially those with economic and intellectual disadvantages. They’ve since hosted various STEM nights in their community, giving kids the opportunity to try just that and we were thrilled to have played a small part in the process!
This just goes to show the scope of the applicants we’ve received so far—something that we’re proud of. Although we can’t award something to every applicant we receive, we definitely do look for those who are using their roles within their school community to bring technology to students in a creative way. That’s just what the recipient of October’s award did in her classroom. An employee at the American School for the Deaf, this grant recipient used the Root, BOLT, KEVA kits, and MakeDo kits with her students to expand her basement makerspace and provide her students with visual learning experiences. Her goal is to empower students to work more with their hands—something that pretty much all of the EdTech on our store would allow her to do. So, no matter what you teach or how unique your role in education is, anybody and everybody associated with a school can and should apply for our monthly grant. We love helping educators innovate through the gift of well-deserved technology!
So Many Options
Part of the appeal of being awarded our EdTech grant versus that of another company is all of the options for technology we provide. Our online store is filled with hundreds of various STEM, STEAM, and MakerEd learning tools from some of the world’s top providers. We search globally for the latest EdTech items from reputable manufacturers and work with them to get them on our store. Plus, the price our grant recipients “pay” is the Educator Discount price we offer—not the MSRP. The most extensive category on our store, with hundreds of options to choose from, is the robotics section. Here, educators (and grant recipients) can browse hundreds of robotics tools and classroom bundles from some of the top names in educational robotics, including Wonder Workshop, Sphero, Edison, and plenty of others. Whether it’s beginner level robotics, more advanced coding, or sets students can build themselves, there’s a good chance you’ll find something that fits within the $500 award amount in our robotics offerings!
If you’ve navigated our website at all, you may have seen the eight store categories at the top. Any of the STEM tools in those sections can be purchased with winnings from our grant program. In addition to the robotics category, we also have the following sections for awardees to choose from: Coding, drones, virtual reality, 3D printing, circuitry, maker tools, and more. Even if the items a recipient wants exceed the amount of the $500 award, they could certainly put $500 towards them and pay for the balance with another method (like a purchase order). Once again, you’ll find some of EdTech’s most popular and well-trusted brands within these categories—whatever STEM focus you decide to take. The circuitry section is highlighted by littleBits and their magnetic LEGOs that help kids learn about circuitry, engineering, problem solving and now even coding! We also have things like the Makey Makey, Thames & Kosmos kits, Snap Circuits kits and plenty of others just in the circuitry section of our store alone!
Other technology items that are becoming more and more popular in education are programmable drones and virtual reality systems. We have sections for each of those as well and plenty of lower-end models that fit within the $500 award amount. Some of the VR options include the DJI goggles, Oculus Rift headset, Samsung Gear VR, View-Master, and VR One while the HTC Vive Pro VR Glasses are slightly over the threshold at $700.00. For drones, the DJI Spark, Micro Drone, and Airblock are all under $500 while the programmable RubIQ is slightly over at $695.00. The point is that there are so many new, cutting-edge technologies always appearing in the education world and we want to help educators acquire them at as low of a cost as possible. That’s why we’ve created yet another avenue for doing so with our grant program. Hopefully, if you ever decide to apply for our award, there is something from one of these categories on our store that can be put to good use in your classroom!
Improve Your STEM Library
Whether you’re just starting out with STEM teaching or already a seasoned veteran, there’s always something new that you can try. It’s also possible that there are other STEM tools out there that pair perfectly with the ones you already have. Electric Paint, for example, can be used with the Makey Makey and we know a lot of educators have used and loved this STEM tool for a while now! Adding the artistic element of the conductive Electric Paint helps turn STEM to STEAM and gives students a lot more opportunities to be creative! Or, maybe you’ve been focusing on robotics since you got started with STEM teaching and would like to try adding a new element to the equation. There are some robots that students can build themselves, giving them the chance to combine robotics and coding with engineering! Whatever it is that you want to accomplish, we can provide some form of technology to make that possible!
The beauty of our grant program is that it gives teachers the chance to try something new. We know that a lot of educators create year-long or semester-long projects and challenges for their students as well, so it could be nice to get away from that and be able to do some coding for a few hours a week. Or, hey, maybe your students are planting and taking care of plants in the classroom and you want to give them a more interactive experience that helps them learn a lot of the same things. The Experimental Greenhouse Kit from Thames & Kosmos might be a good way to keep them excited about their plants and help them learn different things about them. Basically, whatever you’re covering in the classroom can probably also be conveyed to students using a hands-on set of STEM tools. Having the willingness to give one of those tools a try is great and taking some time to apply for our grant can help you get some new ones!
In a lot of schools, teachers from different grades and subject areas share the STEM tools they acquire. This could be one way to approach applying for a grant—collaborating on an application and sharing the tech tools between classes. Or, teachers could combine their classrooms and create a highly collaborative environment with a bunch of different viewpoints. This works great with students a couple of grades apart (second and fifth, for example) because the older students tend to take the younger ones under their wing and show them a bunch of useful things! Plus, you’ll be filled with some satisfaction knowing that your hard work and dedication contributed to your students being able to use new technology in the classroom! If you’ve received one of the grants we’ve awarded so far, we congratulate you. If you’ve applied and have not been selected, we appreciate your application. If you haven’t applied (or would like to apply again), it’s a new year and a fresh chance to try something new! Find our grant application here and have a happy New Year!
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