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Take a peek our current draft of the Makerspace Playbook, intended to offer some guidance to those who are hoping to start a Makerspace at their school or in their community. Besides this draft of the Makerspace Playbook, we've also made some progress on the companion document: High School Makerspace Tools & Materials,

Laura Fleming is using Makerspace in her classroom. She's at New Milford HIgh School -- a place led by one of the best principals in the business, Eric Sheninger (his new book is awesome - out in January). Laura is using Mozilla's Web Literacy Standard and her Makerspace which includes robotics, stop motion animation and "Molecular gastronomy" and more. Wow. I'm fascinated. Take a look. "Setting up a Makerspace has been a priority of mine from the moment I started here at New Milford High School, and it's already well on its way to being achieved. Having a school principal who provides the perfect mix of encouragement and autonomy has, of course, been a great help, but it has also been very much a team effort: the school's tech team and custodians have been very supportive and cooperative, along with a diverse variety of students interested in 'making' experiences. At the heart of the vision for my Makerspace is to develop the space and to provide resources and opportunities that will aid in promoting web literacy.  These components encompass Mozilla's Web Literacy Standard.  The standard is make up of three key elements:  exploring, building and connecting and focuses on reading, writing and participating on the web.   "

This Educause white paper is a useful write up that you can circulate among your staff. Every school should have a makerspace. Classrooms can each have them. Some are even designating parts of the library as a Makerspace. Great resource to share.

Dartmouth College has some videos and resources relating to makerspaces and libraries.

John J. Burke has assembled a tremendous list of Makerspace resources. If you're getting into the Maker movement, there are great things here.

Excellent article overviewing why makerspaces are popular with quotes from Sylvia Martinez and Pam Moran.

Adobe adds 3D printing to photoshop. Yes! 3D is going mainstream.

Tinkering works. Read Sylvia Martinez and Gary Stager's book "Invent to Learn" which talks about tinkering and how to use Maker Spaces to promote it to learn more. Great points from Lifehacker: "Research in the science of learning shows that hands-on building projects help young people conceptualize ideas and understand issues in greater depth. In an experiment described in the International Journal of Engineering Education in 2009, for example, one group of eighth-graders was taught about water resources in the traditional way: classroom lectures, handouts and worksheets. Meanwhile, a group of their classmates explored the same subject by designing and constructing a water purification device. The students in the second group learned the material better: they knew more about the importance of clean drinking water and how it is produced, and they engaged in deeper and more complex thinking in response to open-ended questions on water resources and water quality... it involves a loose process of trying things out, seeing what happens, reflecting and evaluating, and trying again."