Grade: 9 - 12 Science & Math Classes

Teacher Name: Haley Bilbray & Aviel Porzio

Description and purpose of grant:

We are asking for a total of 35 portable white-boards on wheels. These whiteboards will be used to create meaningful interactions between learners where they are collaborating and communicating to solve challenging problems. They will primarily be used in science & math because of how challenging it sometimes is to create meaningful scenarios in the content where learners can work together and discuss while problem-solving, but other courses also want to create these experiences within their classrooms. In alignment with CISD’s value of Great Teaching and our campus’s desire to increase collaborative and real-world learning, we will be using these whiteboards to increase the number of opportunities students have to collaborate meaningfully on course content.

These whiteboards are necessary due to how vital it is to have erasable vertical surfaces when creating safe and meaningful spaces for collaborative problem-solving, just like you see in collaborative office spaces such as Google. These whiteboards will remove physical space between learners, will encourage meaningful discussion by removing distraction, will allow for knowledge to easily transfer around the room by making the learning visible to all, and will facilitate teachers being able to see what groups need to keep moving ahead. Currently, some classrooms lack vertical space to work on, but these whiteboards will increase those vertical spaces by a large margin.

Implementation process: 

We plan on implementing these whiteboards primarily in science & math classrooms where rigorous problem-solving is vital to the content. Some of these whiteboards will also go to non-math classrooms to facilitate similar collaborative problem-solving for the needs of that content. These whiteboards will be distributed so that, combined with existing white boards, there are enough whiteboards for groups to work spread out around the room. Then, groups will regularly use these whiteboards in their lessons & explorations of content. The whiteboards will benefit all students on campus, because every science teacher, as well as some teachers in math and other content areas, will be implementing these whiteboards in their curriculum-planning and lesson design. All students will be using these whiteboards to collaborate and discuss while solving challenging problems.

Items you plan to purchase with grant money

Qty 11: Large Dry-Erase Rolling Magnetic Whiteboard - 48 x 32 inches

Qty 10: Rolling Magnetic Whiteboard - 24 x 48 inches

Qty 6: Adjustable Height Mobile Whiteboard - 16 x 31 inches

Qty 6: Adjustable Height Mobile Whiteboard - 16 x 24 inches

Qty 2: Mobile Whiteboard - 4 x 6 feet

In the event my grant is not fully funded, this is minimum amount I would need to get started on this project: $2,500