Huge News!

As always, we've been keeping very busy in Room 209. So busy, in fact, that this poor little blog has been rather neglected as of late. Not for long, however. This blog is about to get a whole lot more contributors, maybe before next month!

As you know, we applied for a grant from EdTechTeam after I attended the Google Apps for Education Summit in Montreal. Students worked incredibly hard, even with me out of the school, to complete an excellent application. We've been waiting, crossing fingers, toes and eyes, hoping to get news. Every day, several sentences begin with, "If we get ChromeBooks, we can...".

This evening I got wonderful news. Room 209's grant was accepted and ChromeBooks will be on their way shortly! Students and parents got the news minutes after I did and my inbox promptly filled with enthusiastic replies:
Aaron is "over the moon", as his mom says;
many students, like Millie and Mel wrote obviously enthusiastic replies in all caps;
Hannah was concerned with details and made sure that EdTechTeam knew about our new student, Philip, she also thinks we should have more cake (after two days in a row already!);
Skye's mom filled an email with more than 10 exclamation marks for only two sentences of text;
Vickie used her mom's email to say that she was speechless (for once!);
Fiona is floored that out of potentially hundreds of applications, we won;
Erika wrote a 5-line exclamation to show her excitement;
Hunter's email was completely incoherent, from excitement, I hope;
I don't think Miguel could believe the news, as he confirmed with a quick, "So, we got ChomeBooks?"reply;
Apparently both Molly and Clara nearly made their mothers deaf with their happy screams;
Gabby told her mom she couldn't believe it.
I can't really believe it either. We thought we'd be getting the news on Thursday, and after not hearing for so long after when we thought the "official" announcement was, we figured we hadn't gotten the grant.

I've never seen so many "OMG"s in one night. I feel the same way, Rainbow Eggheads. I feel the same way.

We have SO much to talk about and so many lists of Success Criteria to come up with! We have lots of work to do together before we even get the ChromeBooks (which I think will be very soon!).

Something else that I've been thinking about tonight is how we can share with others. I know that we'll be blogging and tweeting about our adventures with the ChromeBooks, but we also need to think about how to share our learning with other students in our school and be role models for the use of technology. After all, this grant is designed for for classes doing "pilot projects". How can we share our learning with our Buddies and our friends who help make up "Room 208", the other grade 5/6s in Room 207? I look forward to coming up with all kinds of generous, creative, thoughtful ideas with you!

I can't wait to see your smiling faces tomorrow!