Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

"You may have heard about all the cool things 3D printers can do. If you're a math teacher, maybe you've thought about letting your students make their own manipulatives or get hands-on in geometry with 3D solids. If you're an economics or business teacher, perhaps you've considered assigning students a project to design, market and sell their own 3D-printed products. Or maybe you're a science teacher interested in exploring 3D models of cells, atoms or DNA with your students. Wait! Slow down. Before you jump into purchasing and integrating this new gadget into your classroom, take a moment to consider the logistics and realities of becoming a 3D printer early adopter. Here's a basic FAQ I've developed based on my own experiences and extensive research into classroom 3D printing."

Making is as old as learning itself. While the maker movement may only be about a decade old, the human desire to create dates back to the earliest forms of human activity, from making stone tools to drawing on cave walls (Halverson & Sheridan, 2014; Martinez & Stager, 2014). Thinkers such as Pestalozzi, Montessori, and Papert helped paved the way for the maker movement by stressing the importance of hands-on, student-centered, meaningful learning. Instead of viewing learning as the transmission of knowledge from teacher to student, these thinkers embraced the idea that children learn best when encouraged to discover, play, and experiment. More recently, maker education is being used as a way to connect do-it-yourself informal learning to classrooms. Driven by new technologies such as 3D printing, robotics, and kid-friendly coding, making is emerging as an effective way to introduce students to STEM, particularly women and minorities. By incorporating elements of making into the classroom, educators can bridge the gap between what students are passionate about and what they're learning in school.

"Ten years ago, I walked past a newsstand and out of the myriad of multicolored covers, one jumped out at me: MAKE magazine. As someone who grew up making stuff, this magazine spoke directly to me. I bought copies and immediately brought them to the director of my school. I remember triumphantly exclaiming "We should show this to all of the teachers-think of the projects we can do!" A decade later, well-intentioned schools that create dedicated "maker spaces" worry me. For the uninitiated, a maker space often houses ultramodern tools like a laser cutter or 3D printers, mixed with drill presses, table saws, and soldering irons, or perhaps screen printing equipment or sewing machines. My fear is that stand-alone maker spaces will cause the powerful act of creation to be confined to only certain parts of the school building. I worry that yesterday's centralized computer lab-which we rightly democratized and decentralized by putting computers in every classroom-is today's maker space. When I walk past a new room being outfitted with a laser cutter or a drill press and hear, "This is our maker space!" I am tempted to ask: "What happens in all of the other spaces? What do people do there?" The act of creation is transformative. An individual's self-image is forever changed when he or she can hold up a real object-a real contribution to the world-and say, "I made this." In a time when students' lives are increasingly virtual, abstract and vicarious experiences, it is every teacher's job to make learning, and life, "hands-on." "

"Learning to type well on the touchscreen keyboards of an iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch can take some time. To speed that process up, here are a handful of great tips to make typing on iOS virtual keys much easier and faster. Some of these you'll probably know and some you probably won't, but all are very worthwhile to learn and master:"

"At GeekDad we are big fans of apps that actually use mobile devices in innovative ways to support children's learning. Motion Math Games are one of those developers who have led the way in thinking about how they can design digital learning environments that provide ways for children to learn math with their hands and minds. Their first fraction/decimals app called Motion Math has become one of the benchmarks against which others should be comparing themselves."

"Inspiration waits for nothing and no one. Once it strikes, you have to be ready to capture the ideas borne from it; otherwise, all you will be left with are vague impressions of the brilliant images and animation ideasthat, if transformed into the screen, would have been your best creations yet. Are you ready to grasp and hold in your hand each and every dazzling idea that comes when inspiration strikes? Then use the following iPhone and iPad apps designed for animators on the go"

"This school year I joined the staff of a 1:1 high school here in Philadelphia. Students at the school have access to their own devices, which they take home with them. Although I've taught for many years in classrooms where each student had a school-issued device, the experience of my new students taking their devices home has forced me to reflect on the issue of distraction. How do we teach students to integrate technology into their schoolwork and their learning while also making sure that they're staying focused on the task at hand? "

"iTunes and App Store users have long been able to gift apps, movies, and music, and thanks to a recent iBooks Store change, we can all give the gift of literature too, and complete the whole transaction right in our hand from iOS. Perhaps best of all, you can schedule the gift arrival to be on a specific date, and the gifted book arrives neatly in their email inbox right on time, which means that even total slacker holiday shoppers like me will be able to get something for everyone in time for Christmas. "

"Many artists like pallets, holding pencils and brushes in their hands, and working with the textured surface of a canvas or paper. But many of the same artists also like digital portfolio, easy publishing, one-button sharing, working with layers, mashing images, video, and music, and other potential that comes with working with digital tools. And this is especially true for those working in art education-teachers that have to handle the workflow of dozens of students working on dozens more projects as a time. In this way, tablets like the iPad, Nexus 7, and Windows Surface can make a lot of sense-and programs like the collection-by listly user Teaching Pallet-of the following 30 iPad apps for drawing, painting, and art education a great place to start your iPad art collection"

"On a fairly regular basis I'm asked for suggestions on places to find public domain images. I have a handful of go-to sites that I usually recommend."

"Wonderville is a great website for kids developed by the Science Alberta Foundation. On Wonderville students can find games, videos, comics, and hands-on activities for learning about science and technology. The gallery of activities, games, videos, and comics is divided into three categories; fun science, awesome tech, and cool jobs."

"As of late it seems that I have been blogging a great deal about our makerspace here at New Milford High School and with good reason. Not only is the space being overrun with students during their lunch periods, but teachers here have begun to explore how the process of making can enhance the learning experience for the students in their classes. Just last week I shared on my blog how physics classes were exploring concepts related to circuitry in a more hands-on, authentic fashion in our constantly evolving space through a collaboration between Mr. Fowler and Mrs. Fleming. It seems that this might have been a catalyst for even more collaborations in order to fully take advantage of what a well-designed makerspace can provide."

"Most people have heard of homeschooling - kids are educated by parents or caregivers at home, rather than at school, for a variety of reasons. But within the homeschooling community, the growing "unschooling" subset has a somewhat different, amorphous, definition. Depending on whom you ask, unschooling is centered around what the child wants to learn using any and all resources available, not just fixed, school-prescribed curriculum. The general idea behind unschooling is this: getting kids to develop a love of learning for its own sake rather than for grades, and giving kids the opportunity to experience "valuable hands-on, community-based, spontaneous, and real-world experiences.""

"Eleven-year-olds running a classroom? That could sound outlandish to some elementary school teachers, but not to Joe Jamison, or "Mr. J" as he is affectionately called by his fifth-grade students at Lawrence Intermediate School in central New Jersey. "I learn from my kids," says Mr. J, as he dips his hand into a Philadelphia Eagles football helmet - otherwise known as the "helmet of fate" - and pulls out the name of the next group of students to give a presentation on Mercy Otis Warren, an American playwright and poet, not to mention one of the few female propagandists of the American Revolution, which Mr. J's class is studying."

"A new wave of e-textbooks is giving students more than just words and a few hotlinks on a digital page. Publishers over the last few years have been adding video, interactive maps and gamified quizzes designed to engage students more deeply in their learning. "Think of it as making the textbook a hands-on activity," says Andrew Miller, an ASCD faculty member and technology expert. "It's making the content come to life in a way that meets the needs of different learners-auditory learners, visual leaders, text-based learners." The latest e-textbooks, developed by traditional publishers as well as new players like Discovery Education, are powered by a host of adaptive features, such as adjustable levels of difficulty and instant translation into other languages. And in some districts, teachers are using platforms like Apple's iBooks to create their own digital course materials."

"I used to believe that informational texts were boring. I avoided having students read articles in social studies, because I thought students would hate informational texts. I'm not sure why I believed this, because I loved reading non-fiction books and articles. Still, I thought I was an outlier and that my students would be better off with a combination of hands-on learning and fictional narratives. I don't believe this anymore. Now I believe that informational texts can be inherently engaging, because we are naturally inclined to seek out information. I guess, on some level, I believe every person is a geek about something. So, with that in mind, here are seven ways to keep informational texts engaging for students:"

"The learn-to-code movement is aiming younger. MIT and partners, for example, recently released a free iPad app with its visual programming language ScratchJr., so kindergartners could use it to code stories and games even before knowing how to read. Vikas Gupta, a former Google executive who founded the startup Wonder Workshop (formerly called Play-i), has taken a slightly different path. "We learned that in order to make programming of interest to young children, it has to be a tangible product. It can't be just software," he told Co.Exist last year. Enter Dot and Dash-Wonder Workshop's two new robots that teach coding skills to children as young as five that are now being field tested in a few dozen elementary school classrooms nationally. And they are definitely tangible: Dash hears and responds to sounds, navigates around a room and avoid obstacles, and comes to life with sound and lights. He can even play the xylophone. Dot, on the other hand, doesn't have wheels and is meant to interact with Dash via Bluetooth and act as a controller. Both have their own customizable "personalities." On the back end, through four apps that control both robots, they are secretly teaching coding skills such as "event-based programming, sequencing, conditionals, and loops.""

"Join young inventors and artists from around the world on Google+ to make awesome projects, go on epic virtual "field trips," and meet the world's coolest makers. Maker Camp inspires kids ages 13-18* to embrace their inner maker, get their hands dirty, fix some things, break some things, and have a lot of fun doing it. Week 1: Makers in Motion Week 2: Art and Design Week 3: Fun and Games Week 4: Science and Technology Week 5: DIY Music Week 6: Make: Believe"

"Project Ignite enables learners of all ages to gain practical hands-on experience with new software and hardware to build literacy in design, 3D, electronics, programming and more. Project Ignite integrates project content directly into Tinkercad and 123D Circuits, which are both free from Autodesk. Tinkercad is an easy to learn tool to create and print 3D models whilst 123D Circuits enables you to visualize and simulate circuits. These two apps provide a compelling combination to "make things real, and make them go!" Both of these tools are browser-based so there is no need to install anything. Children can carry on with their projects at home!"

"The 3D printing industry is expected to exceed $21 billion by 2020. Classrooms are joining in. Kelly Hines' fifth-grade classroom is redesigning a prosthetic hand. Can't buy a drone? Soon, you may be able to print one. You can print robots, math manipulatives, and even parts for a 3D printer. (In fact, Bryan Byer's science classroom in Michigan built their own 3D printer.) What will happen when we can 3D print things from door stoppers to wind turbines to (wait for it) wedding dresses? This past year, my students and I began our journey after I saw the FabLab at Kentucky Country Day School last summer."