Christopher High School English teacher Tai Bambusa needs a class set of tablets.
The man who used to be illiterate in English when he immigrated from Vietnam to the U.S. is now an honors sophomore English teacher using his tech-savvy skills to foster a love of reading and make his classroom paperless as early as 2015.
Using crowd-funded site DonorsChoose.org, Bambusa snapped up tablets for his classroom with a goal to have at least 34 by next school year.
He got one tablet, three cases and an adapter closer to his dream on March 26 when Google paid $666,895 to fund every DonorsChoose.org project in nine counties surrounding Google’s San Francisco headquarters including 29 projects with a collective cost of $12,700 in Gilroy.
“I really believe once kids learn to read—that’s all they need,” Bambusa said.
In Bambusa’s class, most students read novels on tablets and phablets (phone tablets), annotate text with a stylus instead of a pencil and submit essays using iCloud.
Bambusa discovered many of his students already had tablets and phablets and were voraciously reading away in their free time, so he gave a handful of the new donated tech devices to low-income students: a portal to limitless reading opportunities that put them on equal footing with peers.
“I’m not giving them a tablet. I’m giving them an access to the web,” Bambusa said.
While the Google donation was a one-day event, an additional ongoing Double Your Impact Grant will let Gilroy teachers get 50 percent of any project valued at $1,000 or less funded by an anonymous donor until funds run out, said Chris Pearson, spokesperson for DonorsChoose.org.
“We have a quite a lot of funds available,” Pearson said.
Since December, Bambusa received about 20 tablets, 12 of which were crowd-funded through the website.
Some of Bambusa’s students come from tech-savvy families, but they’re still learning new styles of modern communication.
“I need to teach the curriculum, but I also need to teach soft skills,” said Bambusa, who said technology skills will set his students apart from others as they head off to college and the workforce. “This will make them more competitive regardless of where they go.”
His sophomore honors student Savannah Snell may describe her family as “tech-savvy,” but she got her first tablet after she entered Bambusa’s class this year.
“When I got into the class, (Bambusa) actually introduced me to the tablet,” Snell said. “It’s way easier to do everything-to take notes, surf the web an even write a note for later.”
Snell said between two and five tablets in each of her seven classes—and even more in Bambusa’s class.
In a quick survey of hands, Bambusa found about one-third of the students in his honors English classes have tablets; and between 10 and 20 percent of his regular English class students have the same technology.
“I definitely saw the need for it,” he said.
Bambusa placed his first request for tablets in December. Since then, money has been flowing in from Facebook friends and student parents, allowing the teacher to buy more than $8,000 worth of technology for his classroom.
With Bambusa’s prompting, members of the CHS English Department have made accounts on DonorsChoose.org and raised about $20,000 in the last four months, most of which went toward buying tablets for teachers and students, according to Bambusa.
Bambusa wasn’t the only teacher who benefited from Google’s donation.
More Google donations
Second-grade teacher Kirsten Finucane at El Roble Elementary School’s request for a classroom library was one of more than two dozen local projects completed thanks to Google.
The day she learned her project was funded, Finucane logged into her DonorsChoose.org account to thank Google:
“Thank you for supporting my students!” Finucane wrote. “My goal each year is to get my second-graders to really love reading, and they love getting new books.”
While Bambusa is closer to his classroom goal than before, he’s still plowing ahead with crowd funding. Parental support has been instrumental in implementing the tech-friendly new media classroom of his dreams, he said.
“It’s a really simple concept: I just want kids to read,” Bambusa said.
Since December, Christopher High School English teacher Tai Bambusa has received about 20 tablets, 12 crowd-funded through DonorsChoose.org.
To take advantage of the Double Your Impact Grant in Gilroy, ask a teacher to list a project with a value of less than $1,000 on the DonorsChoose.org website. Teachers can set up an account at: https://secure.donorschoose.org/wizard/addressWizard.html?execution=e1s1
