Thing 24 Makerspaces

I have been doing some of the things that are listed as makes for Maker spaces (duct tape creations, recycle inventions, coding to name a few) but our biggest problems are time and space. We have very little of each.
In an effort to justify expanding the idea in school, I read several of the articles about connecting Makerspaces to learning.  I have often had students create dioramas or displays out of materials such as cardboard and clay at the end of a research project to have  them show what they have learned.  I already know that hands on projects expand the students ability to learn but I was looking for some more concrete answers.
There was an article (How to Ensure Making Leads to Learning by Annie Murphy Paul) that interested me about how Makerspaces can include self-guided or minimally guided instruction and this reminded me that when I have to figure something out, even if it takes several tries, I understand whatever it is more completely. The article also mentioned something that I think is one of the most important philosophies of learning. In this article Murphy writes: Leslie Preddy, the school’s library media specialist, promotes learning there by encouraging kids to collaborate. “We had a student who became very knowledgeable about video production lead a workshop for his classmates in the subject,” says Preddy. “When you’re teaching other people, that’s learning at the highest level.”
When a student learns about something well enough to competently teach someone else how to do it, this is one of the best measures of learning and also gives the student a great deal of confidence.
As the article also states - some maker space projects require instruction before students proceed - such as how to operate a 3D printer or glue guns but others can be completely self directed with the idea that the less information or structure, the more the student can use their own knowledge and ideas to complete the project.
Making can be a great way to teach problem solving. For example, I am working on a Colonial Village with students in fourth grade library club and I want them to figure out what would be appropriate to the time and what material could be used to accomplish this.
I am considering having an after school program because there doesn't seem to be enough time in the day to devote to the project and then we could have several portable bags and boxes of equipment, materials and supplies that could be stored during the day and brought out after school.
I looked at a lot of apps and websites for different makes such as coding but we do not have multiple Ipads so this would be limited to using my one Ipad to access any apps to do such things as movie making.
I have a wish list of things I would like to have in the maker space arena:
3D printing, arduino, coding, sewing, movie making, minecraft.edu, tinker lab, littlebits to name just a few.
When I was looking for some other ideas, I came across this site which was more appropriate for an elementary school maker space: https://www.smore.com/utwjw and I got a lot of good ideas from this site.
As usual, I have to keep from going off on 10 different directions because Maker spaces are only limited by your imagination but it also a very fun way to learn.

Thing 7 - DIY

I decided to work on the DIY because I liked the lists of resources and I have been spending a lot of time looking through websites for certain topics such as digital storytelling to "dig deeper". It seems there are new websites and apps everyday and I came up with two programs that I really liked.
Powtoon and Thinglink. I especially liked Thinglink which had presentations that you could take and make your own. The ones that I found had beautiful background pictures and all sorts of interactive pieces already built in. There was one like this that included the lesson plan right on the interactive piece which could be easily modified. I guess the point is that when I had the time to go through the 4 or 5 resource lists (with 100s of sites and programs) provided in this tool, I was able to find some tools that were perfect for the lessons that I was working on without having to reinvent the wheel.
Another thing I found on the resource lists was School Tube. I knew about Teacher Tube but I found some great "student created" videos on this site.


After I did a pretty extensive search of all the resources on the lists provided, I decided to use the skills I had learned when I set up a lib guide for cool tool (thing 23) and create a general resource guide (http://libguides.rcsdk12.org/jdlibraryresources)


 I used another library's lib guide that I thought was pretty good to start and modified it quite a bit but it was a good experience with editing. I still have some issues with text editors and such but I did learn a lot.

Thing 23: Create a Resource Guide

I have wanted to try lib guides ever since I saw a demonstration of them last year.
This time I was determined to actually sit down and create one that I would used regularly.
I started looking at the different resources for websites on topics that I was planning to teach and several of them were very useful to help me plan some future lessons. One of them was PBS learning. I really liked their structure and the ability to search with parameters. Another one that I have used in the past is Read Write Think. I tried a couple others Great Lesson Ideas, Best Websites for Teaching and Share My Lesson. I had better luck with some then others. My biggest problem is that I go off on tangents and get carried away with ideas.


Back to Create a Resource Guide.
After saving many of the websites for future use, I decided to create a lib guide for my Reading Group (adult) Each month, In the past, I would send an email with the information for the next meeting and resources about the book.


I decided to set up the lib guide for this month (and hopefully on a continuing basis) and send them the link. This is it if you would like to view it: http://libguides.rcsdk12.org/bookgroup 


This is an easy way for me to update information each month and I have also included a list of the books we have read in the past. This is helpful because we often mention past readings.


I am really happy with it and I think they will be too.


Now that I have worked with it for this guide, it will be easier to create another one for school resources. I just realized that I could set up the next lib guide with the lesson resources I mentioned above and more!

Thing 3: Online Communities & Personal Learning Networks

I decided to revisit accounts that I set up years ago for Good Reads, Face Book and Twitter.
I haven't really used any of them because I didn't have time and didn't see the relevance to school.
I like the separate group for Good Reads to make it specific and the potential of setting up a future group for older students to interact about their reading interests.
I had twitter and face book accounts but I didn't like constantly getting bombarded with notifications (even after I had changed the settings) They seemed to have fixed that but I have to wait and see.
My daughter is on both constantly - of course that is her generation and she sends me tweets all the time about things that she thinks are interesting to me.
When I went on face book to look at it again, I saw a post she had on it and commented. She came right back with "what are you doing on face book?" I got a kick out of that.
I am seeing the use of twitter and face book between teachers for sharing information and ideas but as far as I know, we cannot use either one in school so I don't see how I could use it with elementary students as yet.

Thing 1- Blogging

This is my second year using Cool Tools and I love it.

I decided besides learning new things, I would go back and learn more about some of the ones I just started to understand last year.

This is a good example.

I had the opportunity to try a different blogging site and add more features.

I used word press last year and I didn't have any bells and whistles on it, pretty vanilla.
I started to look at the blogs some of the others have displayed in this years cool tools group and I figured they were using a different program. I went on Google blogger and it was pretty easy to make it look much nicer.