Donors Choose is Such a Gift

Do you use DonorsChoose.org? I have had a few things funded in the past, mostly thanks to chairs as well some large floor pillows.) I was so bummed! I wrote to them and they reissued the gift cards and surprised me with an additional $15 since the original gift cards had (no joke) expired on my birthday.
my family - hey I will take it any way I can get it. Wouldn't you? I had a number of gift cards from my family from last fall when there was a matching drive. (I am not above asking for things when I think that they may give to my class - each gift card at the time up to $40 was being matched by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.) I didn't realize that these expire in 6 months so when I

went to use them when we found some really cool flexible seating. (Wait until you see it! I found it via Twitter as someone in my district was buying samples for teachers to try out and since 1. I didn't know about this and 2. once I saw it I was so upset as we had just posted a DonorsChoose.org request for these chairs so you can imagine how excited I was when I was able to pay for the donorsschoose.org request with the gift cards and still had a few dollars left. (These photos are from my shared blog for our class.)

I created a second project for seat disks (can't wait for them to arrive!), a changing pod which we are going to use as a recording booth for flipgrid and other video projects. We got this idea from another teacher in our district (thanks Shawn!). We found out that this was funded just before the #bestschoolday that DonorsChoose.org announced that a company had paid off all of the projects on the site. Were you one of the lucky teachers who got their projects funded by this surprise?

So after that day, since DonorsChoose.org was on the news I figured it would be a great idea to create another project as we may have a better chance of getting it funded. So I requested a new iPad after Apple announced the new cheaper iPads for schools and an Apple pencil. Even though we are a 1:1 class with iPads our devices are older an do not have all of the functionality of iOS 11 so I am very excited to be able to show students how to conduct research by dragging and dropping information from one app to another. This was a rather expensive project so I was so happy to learn that Verizon was matching funds and we would only need half of the overall amount to get our project funded. I jumpstarted the giving with a small donation (I always like to make a small donation to motivate others) and kept tweeting and adding Facebook posts asking for money. I didn't really feel comfortable doing that as much as I did it but I was so worried I would lose the matching donations if I didn't really push it. So you can imagine my surprise when I received this email a few minutes ago:

So here I am awestruck and gobsmacked that we were able to get so much for our class in the last few weeks. I can't wait for the items to arrive and to share them with you when they come. 

Do you use DonorsChoose.org? What is the last project you had funded? I can't wait to hear what you have been gifted with.