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:

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!

Developing a Maker Mindset | Creativity Lab – Making in School Fun fact: here at the Creativity Lab, Making isn’t just about making things. Making is also about learning to see the world with new eyes, and developing deeper knowledge and understanding of the world around us. One of the ways we incorporate this idea is through using Agency by Design’s thinking routines. Educators can easily integrate these routines into any subject — even those not typically associated with making, like the Humanities. The first routine, called Parts, Purposes, and Complexities, (PPC) is a great one to start with, and is applicable to physical objects as well as abstract ideas and constructs. Last week, the 11th grade pre-Calculus class used this thinking routine to explore a retractable pen. As they familiarized themselves with the parts of the pen, they began to create theories about what each part does (the purposes), and recorded how these parts might interact with one another and questions they may have had about them (the complexities). About Cissy Monroe

We Are Makers: Documenting a Burgeoning Movement, by Nathan Driskell Posted by core jr | 23 Jul 2013 | Comments (0) Everything in the built world has been designed and crafted by someone. This is not news to most of us, but I'm amazed that even as engineering and design have taken more visible roles in shaping how we experience the world, there are still so many who see themselves as consumers, not makers. We Are Makers is a new short film that explores the workshops and institutions shaping a new generation of makers and designers. I work with a team of media producers and storytellers at Abilene Christian University, and when we were approached to produce a film on making in education, the goal was purely local, something focused on our immediate community. It's clear today there's a growing emphasis on craftsmanship and a return to making with the hand, that we can and should reclaim this somehow-forgotten part of our human identity. And that's it. About We Are Makers

The Maker Mindset » Stir-fried Science Written by Dr Kiruthika Ramanathan, Senior Manager, Education Services & Outreach at Science Centre Singapore. A key event of the Singapore Science Festival, Maker Faire Singapore, aims to inculcate the Maker mindset – a growth mindset that encourages people to believe that they can learn to do anything. As the founder of Maker Faire, Dale Dougherty, puts it, Makers reject the idea that you are defined by what you buy. Makers focus instead on what they can make and what they can learn to do. Makers are thus motivated by internal goals, and not external rewards. This is a very empowering thought, especially in today’s world where consumerism is rampant. The Maker mindset has a very important role to play in the transformation of education. This process of setting personalized authentic learning environments becomes almost effortless with the Maker movement.

The 'Maker Movement' Inspires Shift in STEM Curriculum We live in a world of mass-produced products and modern technology -- technology that has made it easy for an individual to create and distribute customized and unique items sans manufacturers. And this ability has created the maker movement -- "an evolution of millions of people who are taking big risks to start their own small businesses dedicated to creating and selling self-made products," according to the Huffington Post. And this movement is starting to make headway in some science, technology, engineering and math curriculum. A shift in education from passive to active learning is occuring, as shown by curriculum from the Digital Harbor Foundation, BatelleEd and Arizona State. "We're more interested in saying, 'We want producers, we want makers, we want somebody who isn't just using a website to learn, but is making a website to learn," said Andrew Coy, executive director of the Digital Harbor Foundation. That hasn't always been the mindset, though.

Educators as Lead Learners I have discussed educators as model learners before: The educator’s role has or should change in this age of information abundance or Education 2.0-3.0. The educator’s role has always been to model and demonstrate effective learning, but somewhere along the line, the major role of the educator became that of content and knowledge disseminator. Now that in this information age content is freely and abundantly available, it is more important than ever to assist learners in the process of how to learn. (Educator as Model Learner) The goal of this post is to encourage educators not only to adopt the mindset of the educator as a lead learner but also to model, demonstrate, and teach his/her learners the process of learning how to learn new “things”. To effectively do so, though, the educator needs to understand and be able to articulate and demonstrate the process of learning, him or herself. How do I gather information about what it is that I want to learn? Like this: Like Loading...

Maker Culture as a Learning Model | TeachingHumans Dale Dougherty, founder of Make magazine, believes that “all of us are makers“. In and of itself, this is a powerful statement about belief in life-long learning. It is also, when applied to the goals of education, a reminder that learning is a mindset and not a list of content and skills to be learned. Makers ask questions of the world, they explore and dare, they theorize, prototype, and refine. They set out, unasked, to identify holes in possibility and fill them with the products of their hands and mind. They are intrinsic learners, but to say they don’t need to do anything they do doesn’t give due respect to the passion that compels them to make their own work and learn from it. Part of the problem has to have something to do with money. Or maybe, and most probably, our schools are not filled with makers because we don’t seem to want makers these days, we want test takers.