Do you wish there was an app to collaborate with other teachers, communicate with parents, or engage your students?

In need of a new website for your school or class?

Have you identified a pressing need in your district that you think new software could address?

On the weekend of June 1 & 2, 100 top developers, brought together by Dwolla, will meet in Des Moines to help students, educators, and administrators build the software, app, or website that will address a challenge found in their school.

All you have to do is teach Dwolla about the challenge.

If selected, you’ll have 36-hours and a team of developers to create the kind of software, website, or app that will not only solve your challenge, but the challenge for potentially thousands of others.

Winning teams will split a minimum $4,000 prize!

This “hackathon” is free and requires no technical experience.

To learn more head to: http://hacktoschool.com/

More:

Lt. Governor video: http://youtu.be/QPHcZImuP7Q

Blog post: http://blog.dwolla.com/hack-to-school

Website: www.hacktoschool.com

Registration: http://hacktoschool.eventbrite.com

Call for Challenges form: https://dwolla.wufoo.com/forms/r7p5w3/

Our Quest to leave no genius behind is coming to fruition! We have had an extraordinary flow of good news this week and will be announced many terrific partnerships and ventures in the next few weeks.

On Friday, May 17, Choose2Matter was featured on a segment of “Tech Game Changers” on HuffPost Live. CLICK HERE for a link to the recorded session.

I was joined by our partners Saul Kaplan of Business Innovation Factory, several of the “troublemakers” who help form BIF, and Brian Cuban, also a noted troublemaker, First Amendment lawyer and TV talk show host.

Prior to the segment, Saul and I had a chance to sit down and discuss the game changing elements of our partnership. We also explained in a joint blog post today on Huffington Post about the incredible rewards to be gained from breaking down generational barriers when it comes to innovation.

Gimme Mo Team (with Twitter handles)

• Monique Coleman
• Cynthia Hass
• Brooke Sassman
• Opal Vadhan

At the Student Voice Summit in NYC on April 13, I had the pleasure of speaking with the Gimme Mo’ team, a community that encourages young people to talk about issues they face.

Youth of today are blessed to count Monique, Cynthia, Brooke and Opal as role models for, and leaders of, their generation. These young women live their genius each day. They are passionate, confident, and tremendously supportive of one another and other young people.

We discussed how to empower young students to believe in themselves and their dreams.

The Gimme Mo’ team believes you can do anything you set your mind to, because “ifs” and “buts” don’t exist. They encourage everyone to lead by example, by being the best “you” that you can be, each and every day.

Support the leaders of tomorrow by making a small donation to The Quest2Matter.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6XJ12EffdI

For more than a year now, we’ve been working to launch Choose2Matter, a global movement whose mission is to challenge people to solve problems that break their hearts.

Everything that we have accomplished to date has been done through perspiration and inspiration of a few committed volunteers. We’ve recently been blessed with offers of help from many people who want to become part of this mission, so we’ve put together this page on our website which describes ways in which you can become involved. We will be updating the page frequently so please check it several times over the next few weeks.

We have some urgent, short-term needs that require very little time, and some longer-term needs for which we need people who want to become passionately involved.

Below I listed some of our short-term needs; the longer-term opportunities can be found on our website.

Fundraising

• Everything we’ve accomplished thus far has been done with funds from our own pockets or through pro bono efforts of our marvelous partners.
• We have resisted offers from companies that want to become co-branded partners of Choose2Matter, as it must remain independent of undue corporate influence.
• We want the bulk of our funding to come from small donations from individuals.

Please help us create Choose2Matter by making a small donation to our fundraising page, and asking others to do so.

Ambassador Program

Nothing is more effective than in-person outreach. We invite educators to become Choose2Matter ambassadors who present our movement wherever they have the opportunity to do so – whether one-on-one with another educator, at a school assembly, at a local conference, or to local news media. If you would like to join our team, please email Mark Moran at MarkMoranMES@Gmail.com

Encourage Students in Your School to Enter the Quest2Matter

The Quest2Matter is the first embodiment of Choose2Matter. It is an initiative that invites students to submit completed Quests or well-developed ideas to solve a problem. We hope to encourage a large number of students to participate in the Quest to validate our belief that today’s youth form the most compassionate generation this world has ever known.

Please encourage your students to participate in the Quest2Matter by submitting a quest.

Social Media Outreach

Please LIKE our Facebook page and ask Facebook friends to do the same.

Please follow us on Twitter and encourage your Twitter followers to do the same.

On Saturday May 11 on Classroom 2.0, we discussed the Quest2Matter. Click here to access the archive of the recorded session or that chat archive.

Today’s young people form the most compassionate generation this world has known. They have a way of looking at the world that gives me hope and excitement.  It is a way of seeing the world that can make the pivotal difference in OUR future.

Ask your students:
What matters to you?
What about it breaks your heart?
Let’s act to change that.
Let’s change OUR world.

The Quest2Matter offers platforms for students to share, with the web and the world, the actions they have taken, or ideas they have, to change our world.

This is a way to take hallway displays, badges and ribbons and magnify them dramatically.

This is an unprecedented opportunity to unlock the potential of students to think entrepreneurially to solve problems that break their heart. 

Join me this coming Saturday May 11th and learn how we are challenging students to change our world!

Learn all about the Quest2Matter and ways you can get involved! 

To support the Quest2Matter, we’re seeking contributions from people who believe in our mission.  CLICK HERE TO DONATE

After 14 years in the classroom, I became a consultant, speaker and author. I gave up my own classroom to dedicate my life to making it easier for other teachers to work effectively in theirs.

At the root of everything I do is a profound respect and appreciation for teachers and the challenges they face.

In honor of Teacher Appreciation Week, here are my five favorite posts on why teachers matter:

Teachers Matter

12 Things Kids Want from Their Teachers

There is No Lesson Plan for Tragedy – Teachers, You KNOW What to Do

The Courage to Teach

Celebrating Teachers – A Collection of Online Resources

Mimi and Eunice, CC-BY-SA Nina Paley

Near the beginning of my “You Matter” presentation, I say, “This is not an ego thing – it’s a DNA thing. Human beings were created for significance, and the most dangerous feeling they can have is the feeling that they don’t matter.”

What did I mean?

Simply that the need to feel we matter is something we’re all born with, and that feeling as though we don’t matter is a dangerous condition.

How dangerous?

Numerous research studies show that the feeling that we matter is associated with academic success, healthy self-esteem and self-confidence, and many other factors that contribute to emotional and mental health.

The absence of a feeling that we matter is associated with a parade of horribles.

This is why I often say that your goal should not be to seek success; it should be to seek significance.

For more, reading “The Science of Mattering” on Choose2Matter.org.

Please consider making a small donation to support Choose2Matter on Indiegogo!

Most books have one shot at success. If they don’t have strong initial sales, typically they are relegated to obscurity forever. However, we published the Classroom Habitudes nearly five years ago, and it is getting more attention now than ever.

Years ago, I was thrilled whenever a teacher told me her or she was reading it. These days, I hear nearly every day of an entire school, district or even province full of teachers reading the book. Several schools told me they have modeled entire programs around the book.

For example, Melissa Storms and Dave Neese are leading a Habitudes book study with middle school teachers in the Lakota Middle School in Washington. I’ve also been thrilled to be invited to keynote many “tech” conferences by presenting the Habitudes.

This Thursday afternoon, I’ll be presenting, on behalf of edWeb.net,  a webinar titled, “Classroom Habitudes: Teaching 21st Century Skills to Brains Wired in the Digital Age.” The webinar is presented as part of a community devoted to the Brain and Learning, one of my favorite subjects.

Please join us!

Photo Credit:Jônatas Cunha  http://www.flickr.com/people/jonycunha/ 

“If we cannot see the possibility, we cannot achieve the outcome. Imagination is our mind’s eye and gives us the capacity to jump from present facts to future possibilities. Our capacity to dream, hope, and plan for the future is influenced and impacted by the control and understanding of imagination’s remarkable power.”

– Chapter Two, Imagination, from Classroom Habitudes: Teaching Habits and Attitudes for 21st Century Learning

At a time when what it means to be a teacher is being defined by everyone except teachers, we need to remind ourselves of these two undeniable words:

Teachers matter.

After the tragedy in Newtown, CT, I published what became my most-read blog post ever; it generated so much traffic that my blog server crashed several times. Teachers all over the world wanted to know how they were going to address their students on Monday morning; what would teachers say, how would they act, would they show their own fears?

My prescription was quite simple: you will teach. As I wrote, “Thank God for teachers. Thank God you know what to do. Thank God you do what you do.”

This week, teachers once again were called to help children cope with a tragedy in New England, as a bomb blast took the life of an 8 year-old boy and two young women at the Boston Marathon. I didn’t feel the need to republish my post, because I know that teachers would know what to do: they would teach.

Teachers don’t just do what they do in moments of global tragedy; they do it every day, helping students deal with whatever problems, big or small, are holding them back. Our partner, findingDulcinea, presents some real-life examples in this post on the importance of great educators, and some famous examples in this post on how teachers empower students by expecting more of them.

Last week I spoke at the iPad Summit in Atlanta, GA. I knew I would be facing 1,200 educators who were struggling with what it means to be a teacher at a time when our profession is under attack from all sides. My job was to inject them with a passion for teaching, and tips for re-creating passion in their students. Jen Carey did a terrific job live blogging my talk.

The night before, I put my head on the pillow and began to form my final thoughts about my presentation. A thought came to me; even though I am no longer in the classroom and don’t have to worry about politicians or standardized test scores or helicopter parents, my job is far from easy. I travel more than I should, I battle the same intransigence that teachers encounter, and there are times I wonder why I do what I do.

Laying in bed well past my bedtime, I decided to lay that on the line the next day: I, too, suffer from self-doubt about whether I am in the right profession and whether I can continue with it. I, too, deal with frustrating people, who fight for their own limitations, every single day.

But unlike the 1,200 educators who were looking only at me for insight and wisdom, I had a much better vantage point: I was looking out at 1,200 educators, and finding inspiration in every single one of them. I told them that, as difficult as things could be from one day to the next, I knew I had all of them walking alongside me, and with them I could not fail.

After my presentation, a young man approached me and said, “This is my first year of teaching. I had pretty much made up my mind that this would be also be my last year of teaching. I now realize that teachers matter, and there is no way I’m giving up a job that matters.”

Teachers matter.