Capture the Learning: Crafting the Maker Mindset

Innovation Mindset = Growth + Maker + Team Experiences - Getting Smart by Tom Vander Ark - 21st century skills, academic mindest, deeper learning, education, Innovation, leadership What do young people need to know and be able to do be successful? Sure reading, writing, and problem solving are important to just about every family wage job. Content knowledge gives you something to work with, but what else is important for success in life? It turns out there are a bunch of factors that schools seldom talk about, teach, or provide feedback on that are at least as important as academic skills. What research says. Two traits predict success in life: grit and self-control; that was the conclusion Penn professor Angela Lee Duckworth reached eight years ago. A 2012 CCSR lit review said that grades do a better job than tests at measuring life success habits including study skills, attendance, work habits, time management, metacognitive strategies and social and academic problem solving that allow students to successfully mange new environments and meet new demands. Beyond growth. The KEEN frame is a great framework but it could use a dose of maker. Team. I statements.

The Maker Educator Workshop I am doing full day workshops on The Maker Educator both at ISTE 2016 and EduTECH in Australia. What follows is both the description-goals and an overview of the workshop’s learning activities. Workshop Description, Goals, and Outline Description Being a maker educator requires developing a new mindset; a new set of skills and roles. Discover, through this workshop, first, a process for reflecting on making through creating circuits and hacked toys, and second, through a self-assessment, the mindset characteristics of an educator who is embracing making education. Goals By the end of this workshop, participants will learn and be able to apply: Outline Workshop Activities Introducing Maker Education – Frontloading the Maker Activity Making Paper Circuits and LED Projects Resources Like this:

Creating an Authentic Maker Education Rubric While many teachers are excited about the maker movement and may even be creating projects for their classrooms, assessment can be puzzling even to veteran classroom teachers. How can teachers prove that deep, rich learning is occurring through making? How do we justify a grade to students and parents alike, especially to the student who "just isn’t good at art"? Part 1: Process The process of making in the classroom needs to be incorporated in the final grade. Photo credit: Lisa Yokana As part of a recent project in my school's senior-level public policy class, students crafted scale models of Lower Manhattan in preparation for a disaster simulation. Students created a scale model of Lower Manhattan in City 2.0 at Scarsdale High School. Part 2: Understanding Students must demonstrate an understanding of materials and tools. Habits of Mind As part of the process grade, you will need to assess your students' habits of mind. What was difficult? The Story of Understanding Part 3: Product

Outside the Skinner Box Gary S. Stager ​The phrase “technology and education” usually means inventing new gadgets to teach the same old stuff in a thinly disguised version of the same old way. Moreover, if the gadgets are computers, the same old teaching becomes incredibly more expensive and biased towards its dumbest parts, namely the kind of rote learning in which measurable results can be obtained by treating the children like pigeons in a Skinner box.1- Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon Sadly, this quote from a paper written more than 40 years ago by two educational technology pioneers still reflects the state of affairs in many schools. Despite ubiquitous access, too many students possess low-levels of technological fluency and too few teachers know how to perform simple tasks using computational technology.A quarter century after schools first embraced 1:1 computing (a laptop for every student), such efforts at student empowerment remain controversial. Making the Future Personal Fabrication Programming 1.

Top Ten Makerspace Favorites of 2017 - Worlds of Learning This year's New Media Consortium/COSN's 2017 K-12 Horizon Report deemed makerspaces the future of edtech and predicted full adoption in K-12 in one year or less! It is more important than ever that we plan and create GREAT makerspaces! Part of doing so is selecting the right materials, resources and supplies to support the experiences you want your students to have in your makerspace. I am proud to present to you, the Worlds of Making Top Ten Makerspace Favorites of 2017! POWERUP 3.0– Smartphone Controlled Paper Airplane Flight has long been a theme in our makerspace, and that is what led me to the POWERUP 3.0 Smartphone Controlled Paper Airplane. PodPi The foundation of my work lies in storytelling, therefore I was thrilled to discover PodPi, which does a brilliant job of using storytelling as a way to teach children about concepts that many makerspaces include. Buildr TAPE You can now turn almost anything into a surface that allows you to build with legos! Mockups The Empathy Toy

The Maker Mindset: Albemarle County Public Schools & Maker Corps By Chad Ratliff and Pam Moran, District Administrators, Albemarle County Public Schools (Charlottesville, VA) A few weeks ago, some of our young people reminded us that “making” is a mindset that can occur any time, any place. During a snow day, a group of kids were co-opted by a local teenage video “maker” into creating and publishing a fabulous YouTube video, “Call Me Maybe, Josh Davis.” It represented the inherent passion and joy that surfaces when young makers get together and intersect talents, skills, and interests in a collaborative venture. We also see inventive potential when our elementary school students children construct their own cardboard arcade games for their school carnival, use chairs, tables, and unifix cube bridges to test bending movement and design engineering solutions to meet challenges pitched to them. Making is a natural learning state for humans. Making offers integrated learning opportunities–the best of learning in any century.

Maker Spaces Can Round Out STEM Lessons A MiddleWeb Blog You may be familiar with maker spaces. In one form or another, hands-on teaching has always involved kids in “making.” Today’s new focus on maker spaces is taking making to a whole new level. Visualize a space filled with an assortment of materials and tools where people explore ideas together, create, and invent. Now think of such a space existing in a school – a space where students can go to imagine, investigate, figure things out, and design prototypes. Personally, I like to think of maker spaces as spots that fuel curiosity-driven learning – engaging spaces that nurture your students’ curiosity and creativity. Before reading on, note that maker spaces are not intended to substitute for STEM projects. On the other hand, maker activities and STEM lessons do overlap in useful ways. Blend making activities with STEM lessons Next, set aside a day for kids to do nothing but tinker with materials and invent possible solutions. A maker space location. Idea!

Designing a School Makerspace Makerspaces, STEAM labs and fab labs are popping up in schools across the country. Makerspaces provide hands-on, creative ways to encourage students to design, experiment, build and invent as they deeply engage in science, engineering and tinkering. A makerspace is not solely a science lab, woodshop, computer lab or art room, but it may contain elements found in all of these familiar spaces. Therefore, it must be designed to accommodate a wide range of activities, tools and materials. Diversity and cross-pollination of activities are critical to the design, making and exploration process, and they are what set makerspaces and STEAM labs apart from single-use spaces. A possible range of activities might include: Cardboard construction Prototyping Woodworking Electronics Robotics Digital fabrication Building bicycles and kinetic machines Textiles and sewing Designing a space to accommodate such a wide range of activities is a challenging process. Ask the Right Questions Going Forward

Make the Most of the Maker Movement A surprise arrived in my mailbox last week. The mystery envelope contained two pieces of finished wood, cleverly designed to fit together -- no tools required -- into an X-shaped bookshelf. The X-Space design is the latest product of middle school students in the Studio H program at Realm Charter School in Berkeley, Calif. Emily Pilloton, the innovative educator behind Studio H, describes her approach as "a design/build public school curriculum that sparks community development through real-world, built projects." In other words, Studio H students learn by making. Make-to-Learn Momentum There's no doubt that make-to-learn is a hot trend, complete with its own hashtag (#makered), reading list (check out Invent to Learn by Sylvia Martinez and Gary Stager), allies and advocates (such as the Maker Corps. Yet as I watch makerspaces pop up in schools across the U.S. and internationally, I can't help but wonder how many are also making way for a different approach to instruction. Learn Together

What Colleges Can Gain by Adding Makerspaces to Their Libraries Libraries are one of the fastest-evolving learning spaces. As many resources move online, and teachers require students to collaborate more and demonstrate their learning, librarians are trying to keep up. Some are even spearheading the changes. North Carolina State University’s librarians have the reputation for being innovators and leaders of change. “Our library mission is to be a competitive advantage for our campus and for our students,” said Adam Rogers, the emerging technologies librarian at NCSU who pushed for the makerspace and now runs it. “Our culture really favors us doing things like this,” Rogers said. In his first foray into making, Rogers was able to provide only 3-D printing and a laser cutter. “We think of a 3-D printer, a laser printer, as actually being an information tool or resource because it’s all about the data that goes into the tool,” Rogers said. He sometimes compares the process of designing and 3-D printing a project to research.