Existing Resources

There are many organizations and individuals willing to share their talents and time to help students and staff. Some are willing to come in when a teacher needs a little help setting up or prepping for an event, others are specific about the students and services they offer. Either way, they can be tremendous resources IF THEY ARE UTILIZED. This means both staff and administrators are aware of the resources available, what they offer and how to use them. A client of ours is working to pull together this exact information to help their staff and students better utilize existing community resources. The process has been fairly straight forward thus far. We collected existing contact information for the resources from both existing lists and teachers who currently coordinate with them, set up an electronic information form, and sent it to the contact person responsible for each resource. Our next step will be a small “summit” meeting where each organization will share a little about themselves and the school administrators and staff can share their needs. We’ll update you on the summit after it happens, but for now thought we would share a template of the information form. Discuss the idea with an administrator or take on the project yourself.

The only requirement for the form is Adobe Reader, a free download that most of us already have on our computer to view PDF’s. Occasionally MAC users use a different product that doesn’t always play well with PDF forms, so it may be useful to add a note about this to your contact e-mail. In any case, here’s the form for you to adapt to your needs. Another idea would be to set up the form using a free on-line survey host such as Survey Monkey or Zoomerang.

Professional Development Tip for February 12, 2009