I’m continuing on with my work on my MakerCart proposal (see this blog post if you missed the first installment) and this time I worked on a presentation to the School District Board about the program.

Making this presentation for the Board was a bit difficult for me. I have not yet presented to the Board, so I had to imagine what things they would want to hear from me. That said, it was good practice should I ever get the opportunity to make a presentation for the Board.

In the presentation, one of my top priorities was providing simple goals for the project people could remember that also incorporate the SMART methodology. I made those goals, and also gave a short three-point overview of how the project would progress that I think would make it easy for the community to get a sense of how things would run.

I resisted the urge to go too in-depth on how the podcast focuses could link to subject-area curriculum, because I think that would have made the presentation too long and I imagined that might be too in-the-weeds for the school district. I also wanted to leave things more open-ended for students to develop their own interests, rather than me overly prescribing topics. (Do you agree or disagree? Let me know in the comments.)

My goal as a whole for the project is to give students an opportunity to learn about their community’s history in a fun way, and share that with others. Our area is rich with history. The Champaign County African American Heritage Trail has done a lot of work in our area to make sure African American history is known by our community, for example. It’s important my students are aware of the Trail and have experience learning about local figures. When writing about the history of queer spaces in Champaign-Urbana, for example, I saw first-hand that local history often goes undocumented, and can be lost to time.

If I were to implement this (sadly fictional) project, my students could learn about where they live, develop their research skills AND give that history back to their community using this MakerCart. Having the tools and training needed to make sure important moments (good or bad), are not lost to time, feels empowering. I want to give that to my students.

Check out the presentation below, and let me know what you think in the comments. What would you change?