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So, you'd like to coach students to remarkable achievement in hands-on learning? Dreaming of making technology accessible to our urban students by giving them an exciting project to produce?
We can help.
What do I need to know before I begin?
You can best help yourself and your students by reviewing the Rules and Rubric for our contest. Then, visit successful TQNYC entries in our Library. A great introduction to the project would be to have your students judge entries from their age group using the Rubric.
I'm not a technology wiz, can I still be a coach?
Of course you can! Your role as the coach is to guide your students' learning. Take advantage of their natural aptitude for technology and put them in charge of "figuring stuff out". Other options for successful technology integration are to Co-Coach with the computer teacher; take classes or read books and tutorials on how to practice the relevant technology skills; attend a TQNYC Boot Camp for a basic understanding of how web sites work.
Where can I learn more?
Once you've surveyed your computer's software packages, you can choose many ways to learn more about the technology used in website production. The TQNYC staff has assembled many tutorials specific to your project. There are many software specific books that will help you learn more about your tools. The "Dummies" books are easy to use with great step-by-step tutorials, tech terms explained, and clear illustrations. UFT and many colleges offers many courses too. Why not hire your expert students to tutor you?
Do I have to be trained?
Training is not a necessary step for participating in the TQNYC project. Many teachers have taken on the project with their own understanding of website and content development. Training, on the other hand, gives teachers face time with TQNYC staff and hands-on practice with each step of the process.
What kind of time commitment is involved?
The answer we get from coaches, never enough! But, with the right amount of organization and preparation, you'll be successful in completing projects with your students. Research and content development should be the first area tackled. Creative topics and thorough information are what make winning projects. Once the information and images can be organized into categories, you're ready to start putting the web pages together. Leave a few weeks before the deadline to upload the project and test for bugs and spelling errors (give candy to the best proofreaders!) Some coaches have completed the above steps in anywhere from 4 months to 4 weeks. Use your time efficiently and get students involved and excited right from the beginning. The sooner they are invested in the work, the less you'll have to worry about deadlines.
What are the steps and timeline of the process?
There are many steps to creating a TQNYC website. Most of which will be completely familiar to your classroom: research, writing, editing, and organizing information for a presentation. In addition to this, you will need to form teams of 2-6 students, register each team by the March 30, 2007 deadline, and get completed websites successfully uploaded by May 1, 2007. View our calendar for important dates and suggested benchmarks to follow.
Where do I go if I need help along the way?
The TQNYC staff is here to help you during the whole process. If you're in need of a tutorial that isn't found on our site, have questions about a particular step, or are having problems uploading you can send a message to our Help Desk and you will get a response within 24 hours. Need an answer quicker than that? Take a look at our FAQs for answers to our common problems. Baking cookies for your school's technology coordinator is a nice way to get face-to-face assistance for the things that the TQNYC staff can't help with (like unblocking websites, network problems, saving back-ups of work, and chewing gum jammed into floppy drives). Either way, you're not alone.
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