Jason and his son

About six months ago an idea started coming together inside of my head.  I wanted to “test” the power of my personal learning network. By April my PLN was firmly established and the value and power of Twitter was becoming more evident each day.  No matter how hard I tried to educate people about the benefits of Twitter the vast majority of people still turned their nose up at it. I set out on a mission to prove that Twitter was the most powerful tool that I had at my disposal.  I decided to see if my PLN could raise enough money to send a fellow teacher to NECC 2009 in Washington DC.  After looking over the people in my PLN I decided to ask Richard Byrne to be the guinea pig for the experiment. Since he didn’t have anything to lose, he happily  agreed.  Richard was already very popular on Twitter and also well known for his blog, FreeTech4Teachers. Since he had such a large support base, it only took two weeks to reach the $1500 goal.  I assumed the 2009 Newbie project would be the only one, but in the weeks leading up to the conference there was a lot of press surrounding the project. I felt like there was enough momentum and interest to do it again.

During NECC,  I introduced Jason Schrage as the Newbie for 2010.  I felt he deserved the chance to attend ISTE  which will be in Denver next summer. Is he more deserving than any of the other educators in my PLN? Of course not, but  I could only pick one person. I chose Jason because he stood out to me for a variety of reasons. First, he was not afraid to ask for help. My first encounter with Jason involved him asking for my help with a blog post.  It was evident that he was willing to investing his own time in learning as much as he could from his PLN. After a few months of working with him on a variety of projects I realized that he was an amazing teacher who had some fantastic ideas.  I already know our PLN can pull together to send a “rock star” to ISTE, but can we send someone who is not a well known edublogger?

This post is meant to rally the troops. In order to make the 2010 Newbie Project successful we  need your help. Please do not assume that a donation of just a few dollars will not make a difference. The idea behind this project is for hundreds of people in our PLN to make a very small donation. If everyone who has told me what a great idea this project is would donate just $5 we would easily meet the goal of $1600.  We are not only counting on your monetary donation, but we need you to help get the word out about this project.

Donations can be made on either my blog or on Jason’s blog using the PayPal button. Please add your name and contact information to the spreadsheet as well. There is NOT a column where you are able to list the amount you donated. After discussing this with Jason we both felt there was no need to put this on the spreadsheet.

Whether you are going to ISTE in Denver or not I hope you will consider supporting this project. Even if you are not an educator I hope you will consider making a contribution.  Jason teaches over 100 students face-to-face each year, but he indirectly affects hundreds (maybe thousands more) more by sharing his knowledge on Twitter and his blog. Please tell him thank you by helping send him to Denver this summer.