Mission Topic, Purpose, and Hypothesis:

In my community, I don’t think that students are thought off in a very good way by adults (except for their own children). Disruptive, always running around, immature, that sort of thing. That’s why our mission is to create a twitter for school recognition. The purpose of this is to acknowledge students who do an exceptionally good job in work, or helping out the school community. There is already something similar to this, Prexie Pride, at our school, but we felt like that wasn’t doing enough. With the shout outs on twitter, we will be able to reach a wider audience and let others know about the good deeds our students do. Our hypothesis is that if we put our shout outs on twitter and reach a wider audience, then our school (and students) with be thought of in a more positive light.

Real World Skills I’ve Learned:

Through this process I have learned (at least) three skills that will help me in the “real world”. I have learned to research topics online, and find information about companies and programs to contact them. This can help me outside of school when I find that I need to learn more about a certain topic (perhaps in college), for example, or to write a paper. Another skill I learned is work cooperatively in a group, and to listen to everybody’s ideas . I can use this later on in life when I get a job and have to work with my colleagues. The third skill that I have learned is to find another solution when the current situation is not working out. I could use this another time when I need to get through a challenge, it be in college, at work, or just in life.

Challenges Our Group Encountered:

There were many challenges that my group encountered while going through this project. One big challenge that we faced was switching our whole mission topic. When we started out, we wanted to create a better salad bar at our school, but when we started to research and move forward, we decided that our school didn’t really need a better salad bar. After all, there were still many schools that didn’t even have a salad bar at all! So, we decided to go with a twitter for school recognition. But, there were still other challenges that we faced, that ultimately made us switch from the salad bar. One was that we had trouble finding grants to support our needs. There were some that we found for the USDA Farm to School program, but by the time that we were ready to do anything the grant submission date had already passed. Also, it was challenging to work together and balance the workload.

Solutions We Tried Out:

One solution that we tried was to just keep working and looking for grants, but as was said before that didn’t really work out. The solution that ended up working for us was switching up our whole idea and rethinking the process. Once we did that, it was easier to make progress. Before we knew it, we had set up a plan for the twitter, and were ready to put it into action. With this new topic, we are already being successful in changing our community.

Next Steps:

Now that we have our plan for the twitter ready, we need to put it into action. Our next steps will be to get the teachers we selected to start contributing student names for recognition in our twitter. We plan to collect the names each week, and email them to another teacher for posting on the twitter. Once we get this set up, we are going to spread the word around the school, so that more people can hear about our project and see for themselves what we are posting. This way, we hope for the general community to see what we are posting and think about our students in a more positive way.

Favorite Part of the Process:

My favorite part of this process was being able to move to a solution and change our topic. When we were working on the salad bar, I felt stuck and never knew what to do, or if our idea would even work. With the twitter, there was a clear path of what to do and I didn’t feel pressured to get something accomplished. Now that we have a plan, I can just sit back and watch it all fall into place. Sure, it will need a little work from us, but I feel that now we can actually make a change. When we show the community all of the good things that students have done, instead of the bad, then I feel like our schools reputation may change for the better.