Announcing College Credit for Teachers Executing an ODFL Fundraiser

ODFL has teamed up with the University of San Diego, the nation's leader in continuing education for teachers, to produce a course for those teachers executing an ODFL fundraiser. The course is titled, "Service Learning: Putting Theory into Practice," and enables the student to earn two units of graduate school credit applicable to any teacher's continuing education requirement.

The course exercises the Service Learning methodology. The power of Service Learning lies in the reciprocity that is its essence: students learn while others are served. The teacher taking the course will engage his or her students as active learners and doers in creating a better world by carrying out an ODFL fundraiser at their school and using those funds to help build a school in the developing world.

The course itself is divided into two parts. Part One is called "Planning and Learning" while Part Two is called "Project Execution." In Planning and Learning, the course participant reviews Service Learning concepts and learns about ODFL. They then decide what kinds of lessons they want their students to learn from the ODFL Service Learning Project. They measure and record the "Before" state for those intended learning elements.

The course then moves to the Execution phase where the course participant assists his or her students in carrying out the fundraiser. When it is complete, the course participant
measures the "After" state of the intended learning elements. These are then compared with the "Before" state.

It is the expectation of the course (and the experience of hundreds of prior fundraisers) that students will show broad, measurable improvements in most, if not all, of the target learning elements that the course participant has defined for their students.

This combination of Planning and Execution will engage almost every person in the school in one way or another. The result will be a sense of "ownership" of the final project by every person in the school community. As with all ODFL fundraisers, every dollar donated by students goes to fund a developing world project. The USD course number is EDU 523LA.

Registration is easy and the cost is very compelling. For course registration and other information, go to the course page on the University of San Diego web site by entering :

http://www.usd-online.org/course.aspx?id=2876

or by clicking here.