Three projects in grant-writing class get funded

Good news from EdTech students around the country.

Robin Watkins’ project last semester in Technical and Grant Writing was funded, and when I started asking a few questions, I learned more good news. Two students in the fall class wrote successful grants, as well.

This past semester, Watkins, an M.E.T. student who operates a small web design/multimedia company called Whatever Media in Hampton, Virginia, asked WomensNet.net to help her create a summer technology camp for at-risk girls.

WomensNet.net provides informational support and small quarterly grants for women in business. Watkins’ WomensNet.net granted $500 to help provide equipment and promotional printing so Watkins can teach at-risk pre-teen girls about web design, programming, multimedia production, and video game design using open-source software.  

Last fall, Michelle “Shelly” Jenkins, an elementary school technology teacher in Teton County, Wyoming, won a $5,000 grant from Lowe’s, the home improvement retailer, to build a pergola in her outdoor classroom and to install solar lights in the school’s garden shed.

A pergola is an open-sided structure with overhead rafters for shade and often has grapes or other vines growing up the legs and across the rafters. You can see a conceptual drawing of Jenkins’ pergola and pictures of the gardening work she’s doing with her students at the school’s web site— http://tetoncountysd.wy.schoolwebpages.com/education/components/layout/default.php?sectiondetailid=17752&linkid=nav-menu-container-4-34275  >.

Also last fall, Shane Wheeler, an M.E.T. student in Van Meter, Iowa, competed against 76 other grant writers to win part of $50,000 in grants offered by telecom giant Qwest Communications. Wheeler’s proposal was funded at $10,843 to develop an initiative in technology development and marketing for high school students. The grant will buy text books in C+ programming, game design, iPad and iPod programming, and marketing strategies. The grant will also buy apps needed by student developers.

Wheeler’s grant writing skills competed against 76 other educators to win 21 percent of Qwest’s grant pool. “I couldn't have done it without your class and help,” he wrote in an email to EDTECH 551 instructor Janet Worthington.

A fond farewell to the always affable Dr. J.

Dr. Janet Worthington is retiring. Again.

This time, she is going to devote her retirement to portraying historical women. She’ll also return to Thailand to teach English to teachers.

When she retired the first time, in 2004 as dean of Continuing Education at the State University of New York’s Plattsburgh campus, she and her husband moved to Boise to be closer to their children. She came by campus to introduce herself and went home that afternoon with a job, and she's been teaching Technical and Grant Writing for the EdTech program at Boise State ever since. 

But the spring section of EDTECH 551 was her last.  She said she has been continuously pleased with student performance and was happy to hear from three recent students whose class projects were funded. I'll write about them next week.

In her other public life, Worthington has portrayed in period costumes the wives of presidents and pioneers in one-woman shows for several years.  

She played Mary Todd Lincoln, Martha Washington, Abigail Adams, Louisa and Catherine Adams in a monthly series at the Bishops’ House sponsored by the Idaho Humanities Council. She has also portrayed writers Louisa May Alcott, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Mary Hallack Foote, a New Yorker who lived in Boise in the 1890s and hated it. 

She has also brought to the stage the ruminations of Amelia Stuart Knight, an Oregon Trail pioneer, and Amelia Bloomer, a suffragette from whom we get the word bloomer as a synonym for women’s underwear. One of her most challenging characters has been Queen Isabella of Spain, and her newest character is Edith Wilson, the second wife of Woodrow Wilson.

In the fall she and husband Gary plan to make their third trip to Thailand to again teach English to teachers. They’ll only be gone for a couple of months, but they feel this ongoing project is critical, as Thai teachers are required to teach English, but have little or no contact with native English speakers.

Worthington will be replaced as EDTECH 551 instructor by Dr. Cathy Coleman Morton, director of the Rolling Plains Education Consortium (a group of rural Texas school districts), for which she has generated more than $15 million in grant funding since 2003.

Check out this series of living history interviews with Worthington:  http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB94705E64378F0CC  >.