Help Wanted!

So, I have spent most of my week chatting with my students and my Voxer buddies about how to best find outside experts for our Genius Hour projects.  As an elementary teacher, it is very time consuming to search for an outside expert for every single project.   Outside of school, it is next to impossible for me to spend my time calling, emailing, and tweeting people that may or may not respond to our requests.

As I have talked with others and played around with different ideas, I think I finally stumbled across what will work for me and my students.  Today I created a Padlet board titled Help Wanted.  We made it look like a bulletin board and posted our requests.  I did not include student names, just project titles and descriptions of what they needed in an outside expert.

After we wrote the posting, I created a Google Form for our experts to fill out.  They simply click the project that they are interested in and fill out the form.  I used notification rules in Google Forms to set it up to email me each time the form is completed.  This way, I don't have to remember to always go check for responses (because I won't).  As experts make a connection and submit the form, I will just receive a notification in my email inbox.  How awesome is that?!

I then clicked Modify This Padlet and Address.  I changed the address to one that would be easy to remember and share out on social media.  After doing so, I shared on Twitter, Remind, Google +, and even emailed the link to our entire district.

I immediately began to hear back from people in our district that knew someone that could fill some of these roles.  As the board continues to be shared on Twitter and Google +, I expect to hear back from several experts that are willing to help.

As a community, we have several parents and community members that are always willing to help.  I plan to create QR codes that link to our Padlet board and place them around the school and maybe even local businesses.  This way, community members will have easy access to the projects and may be inspired to serve as an outside expert for my students.

I am so excited about our Help Wanted board and hope it helps us find the experts we need to make meaningful connections to our learning.  I know it will save me so much time to have a central location and single response form for the experts that are interested in helping us out.