Mr. Williams' Classroom Edit display name

Past projects 2

• Knowledge Warriors 2021 Essay Tournament

  Funded May 27, 2021

  Thank you so much for supporting our Knowledge Warriors Essay Tournament project. Because of your generous donation, I have been able to give journals to students who embraced the daily journaling challenge I instituted at the height of pandemic instruction and who saw all that writing pay off in the form of higher quality end-of-term essays.

  I'm a firm believer that every time an American teenager writes an authentic sentence, an angel, somewhere, gets its wings. Thank you for being on the side of the angels and and for thinking of our students!”

  With gratitude,

  Mr. Williams

  This classroom project was brought to life by News Corp and 7 other donors.

• The Map is Not the Territory (Navigation and Map-Making Skills)

  Funded Apr 6, 2018

  Last year you helped me purchase four additional Chromebooks for my classroom at Curtis High School. I sincerely apologize for the delayed feedback as I forgot to secure permission for student images and have been spending a while tracking down signatures. Here's an update on what how donation helped contribute to the development of a more agile classroom culture over last year.

  First and foremost, your donation helped me guarantee a 1-to-1 student Chromebook access during a groupwork titled "The Map is Not the Territory" and in the months that followed. Our school makes Chromebooks available but insists that students pay a $25 security fee which mainly goes to cover the cost of insurance and replacement in the event a device gets broken. This can be a significant barrier for students who either don't have the money or who simply know from personal experience that even when things are free, life often gets in the way and items borrowed in 9th grade tend to show up as $300 charges on the student account when it's time to get a 12th grade diploma.

  Having a ready stack of Chromebooks for students to borrow (and return at the end of the period) sends a powerful signal. It conveys both a message of trust and urgency. It essentially tells students: "Get over yourself. You need to learn make use of the cornucopia of tools (Desmos, Geogebra, DeltaMath and Google Drive) freely available over the Internet NOW. Not tomorrow. Not next week. Now." This urgency is important, I think, because students tend to be more conservative than adults when it comes to trying new things in the classroom.

  Anyway, we're pushing through that barrier at Curtis. This year's big breakthrough was an automated online tournament used to assess and critique peer work. Look for another DonorsChoose appeal in the fall as I look to build on that success. In the meantime, I can't thank you enough for making the funds available for this mission.

  We live in a device-mediated era, and there are definitely times when you'd like to shut off digital

  downsides to putting technology at the center of classroom instruction. At the same time, however, I find the Chromebook to be a powerful (and relatively cheap) tool to help students build their digital literacy schools. I teach both honors level and quote unquote "mainstream" level classes and find the ability to experiment with .

  My Geometry students, honors level sophomores mainly, struggled with the challenge of researching and documenting their classwork digitally but grew more confident with time at publishing their work online and critiquing the work of others via surveys. Watching them struggle, I came up with new ways to simplify the instructional process so that, a year, later I have been able to push this instructional approach down into a non-honors Algebra class and ride out the inevitable first time friction you encounter when asking students to try something totally out of their mathematics comfort zone.

  My junior TOK students, meanwhile, had the more ambitious task of taking the title theme as an open-ended research prompt. Groups delivered impressive slideshows juxtaposing Aboriginal songlines and Polynesian navigational methods with the mathematically-derived maps used by European and Arab mariners to facilitate global exploration. I found this side of the project to be quite fascinating and an extremely valuable investment of classroom time. Not only did it familiarized students with the IB presentation process (a major internal assessment), it exposed them to multi-disciplinary demands of the course far better than a mere set of lectures.

  In short, I am quite thankful for your support. Not only did your donation upgrade the technology of my classroom, but the implicit endorsement helped me push both of my classes course in an adventurous new direction.”

  With gratitude,

  Mr. Williams

  This classroom project was brought to life by Verizon and 8 other donors.