Posts Tagged ‘21st century skills’
The Educator as a Maker Educator: the eBook
I compiled all of my blog posts about Maker Education into an ebook that I published via Amazon Kindle. The price is $3.99. It can be accessed at http://www.amazon.com/Educator-as-Maker-ebook/dp/B016Z5NZ6O/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
The pieces include theoretical ideas, informal research-observations, ideas related to the educator as a maker educator, the maker education process, suggestions for implementation, and reflecting on the making process. Graphics and infographics created to support the chapter content are included.
The Table of Contents:
- Introduction
- The Perfect Storm for Maker Education
- Is It Project-Based Learning, Maker Education or Just Projects?
- Maker Education and Experiential Education
- MAKE STEAM: Giving Maker Education Some Context
- The Intersection of Growth Mindsets and Maker Education
- Becoming a Lifelong Maker: Start Young
- Making and Innovation: Balancing Skills-Development, Scaffolding, and Free Play
- Let Children’s Play (with Technology) Be Their Work in Education
- Tinkering and Technological Imagination in Educational Technology
- Educator as a Maker Educator
- Educator as Lead Learner
- Promises to My Learners as a Maker Educator
- The Flipped Classroom: The Full Picture for Tinkering and Maker Education
- Maker Education: Inclusive, Engaging, Self-Differentiating
- Team Building Activities That Support Maker Education, STEM, and STEAM
- Stages of Being a Maker Learner
- Making MAKEing More Inclusive
- Example Lesson: Maker Education Meets the Writers’ Workshop
- Reflecting on the Making Process
Reflecting on the Making Process
My background is in experiential education. One of the strategies used in experiential education is debriefing or reflecting on the experience. In other words, learning from direct experience is not left to chance. The educator becomes proactive in debriefing or processing the experiences to increase the chances that learning occurs. This is in line with John Dewey’s ideas:
‘We do not learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on experience.’
A recent research study published via Harvard Business Review concluded that:
- Learning from direct experience can be more effective if coupled with reflection-that is, the intentional attempt to synthesize, abstract, and articulate the key lessons taught by experience.
- Reflecting on what has been learned makes experience more productive.
- Reflection builds one’s confidence in the ability to achieve a goal (i.e., self-efficacy), which in turn translates into higher rates of learning. (http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/7498.html)
In line with reflecting on experiences, I developed a list of questions and a board game (I love using board games in my classrooms of all ages from elementary to graduate level!) to help with reflecting on the maker process following the completion of maker projects. The purpose of these tools is to increase the possible learning and insights that learners extract from their maker projects.
A Maker Reflection: The Game
Questions to Ask Oneself While Designing Learning Activities
I absolutely love planning lessons from scratch. I just got a job teaching technology units for a summer camp for elementary age students. I can design and teach whatever I want – planning for a different theme each week. Some of the themes I am planning are: Expanding and Showing Your Personal Interests Through Blogging, Photos, and Videos; Coding and Creating Online Games; Tinkering and Making – Simple Robotics; Hacking Your Notebook; and Creating Online Comics, Newspapers, and Magazines. I have begun the process of planning these classes through reflecting on what the lessons will look like. Here are some questions I ask myself as I go through this process:
- Will the learning activities provide learners with opportunities to tap into their own personal interests and passions?
- Will the learning activities offer the learners the chance to put them “selves” into their work?
- Will the learning activities provide learners with opportunities to express themselves using their own authentic voices?
- Will the learners find the learning activities engaging? interesting? relevant? useful?
- What “cool” technologies can be used to help meet both the instructional and the learners’ goals?
- Will the learning activities provide learners with opportunities to have fun and to play?
- Will learners be able to do at least some of the work independently?
- Will the learning activities give all of the learners opportunities to shine?
- Will the learners get the chance to share their work with other learners, with a more global audience?
The Educator and the Growth Mindset
I am facilitating an in-service on Growth Mindsets for Educators. I created an infographic, Thinglink, and Slide Presentation of resources that I am sharing below:
Thinglink that contains links to Growth Mindset Resources http://www.thinglink.com/scene/549674394805338114
Google Presentation
MAKE STEAM: Giving Maker Education Some Context
As an experiential educator who has fully embraced technology as a means for allowing and facilitating learner voice, creativity, innovation, inventiveness, the Maker Education movement fits into my vision about what a good education entails. I have been blogging and presenting about Maker Education – see https://usergeneratededucation.wordpress.com/tag/maker-education/. But recent discussions with other educators and administrators made me realize that the idea of maker education is often vague and seems unrealistic in terms of regular classroom instruction. As such, in the future, I am going to associate and discuss Maker Education in the context S.T.E.A.M. – science, technology, engineering, arts (including language arts), math, hopefully, encouraging regular classroom teachers to integrate maker education projects into their classrooms.
What follows are some resources and articles I compiled to provide educators as part of this discussion.
Link to Thinglink that contains links to the following resources – http://www.thinglink.com/scene/530497733706907648
Pivot Point: At the Crossroads of STEM, STEAM and Arts Integration from Edutopia,
retrieved from http://www.edutopia.org/blog/pivot-point-stem-steam-arts-integration-susan-riley.
STEAM is an approach which uses STEM and the arts to foster learning that is both skill- and process-based. STEAM brings together the critical components of how and what, and laces them together with why. Think of STEAM as teaching through integrated network hubs where information is curated, shared, explored and molded into new ways of seeing and being through collaborative risk taking and creativity. This means that students are using the skills and processes learned in science, technology, engineering, the arts and mathematics to think deeply, ask non-Googleable questions and solve problems.
STEAM Blends Science and the Arts in Public Education from The Wall Street Journal, retrieved from http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304747004579224003721262792.
The technology kids have now is the worst technology they’re ever going to have in their hands so we need to give them opportunities to take things apart and put them back together in connection to solving problems in the world.
STEAM Ahead: Merging Arts and Science Education from the PBS Newshour, retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/the-movement-to-put-arts-into-stem-education/.
If we think historically about how that has always been a part of learning, why would we stop it? Why would we deny our children that which will allow them to really contribute significantly in the future? It’s not only learning from root, it’s really understanding through their bodies, through their thinking, creativity and how they apply the knowledge.
Arts education helps Americans compete in the global economy. Part of what the arts certainly provides is the creativity and innovation, which is really fundamental in how many other countries are looking at success. Actually in the U.S., how we want to measure success is in terms of how to be creative, how to be innovative.
Gaining STEAM: Teaching Science Through Art from U.S. News, retrieved from http://www.usnews.com/news/stem-solutions/articles/2014/02/13/gaining-steam-teaching-science-though-art.
Across the country, teachers and administrators are coming to a similar conclusion: art informs science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) and vice versa. Consequently, they are pioneering new methods of teaching that combine disciplines which have been isolated from one another under traditional educational models. The way we get an innovative workforce is to make sure that we have creative and critical thinkers coming through our schools. Incorporating art into STEM disciplines is a way to cultivate the minds needed for the knowledge economy.
STEAM: Adding art to STEM education from The District Administrator, retrieved from http://www.districtadministration.com/article/steam-adding-art-stem-education.
STEAM enables schools to instill a collaborative culture, with lessons and courses that recognize individual course content often complements multiple areas of study. Students encounter this overlapping content often without recognizing the connections. Educators are realizing that STEAM learning—throughout K20—is increasingly important in educating the student population to be ready for whatever college or career might bring.
STEM to STEAM: Art in K-12 is Key to Building a Strong Economy from Edutopia, retrieved from http://www.edutopia.org/blog/stem-to-steam-strengthens-economy-john-maeda.
With global competition rising, America is at a critical juncture in defining its economic future. I believe that art and design are poised to transform our economy in the 21st century in the same way that science and technology did in the last century, and the STEAM movement is an opportunity for America to sustain its role as innovator of the world.
Kids Unite Art and Science and Create a World of Wonder from the Imagination Foundation, retrieved from http://imagination.is/storybook/kids-unite-art-and-science-and-create-a-world-of-wonder/.
STEAM connects the different subjects together in the way they would relate to the business world and to each other.
What is the Maker Movement and why all the recent buzz in Education? from Little Bits, retrieved from https://littlebits.cc/what-is-the-maker-movement-and-why-all-the-recent-buzz-in-education.
For many educators, Making locates its familiar counterpoint in the block area of the early childhood classroom, the hot pot on the classroom desk where Stone Soup is being heated and stirred, the woodworking bench with its array of familiar tools, art class, computer class, backstage where the high school crew is building the set for the school play—Making happens any time students use technology to make something. The Maker Movement of the 21st C is all about modern invention and innovation, and it combines new technologies into the mix to include open hardware (like littleBits,) computing platforms and programming tools (like Arduino,) and tools like laser cutters and 3D printers alongside say—a sewing machine.
Engaging Students in the STEM Classroom Through “Making” from Edutopia, retrieved from http://www.edutopia.org/blog/stem-engagement-maker-movement-annmarie-thomas.
At a time when many people are asking how we can get more students interested in STEM fields, we are hearing from teachers who have found making to be a great way to get students excited and engaged in their classrooms. We are seeing making occurring in subject classes such as math or science — in classes specifically listed as maker classes — and in a variety of less formal settings such as clubs and study halls. Many of these projects incorporate a variety of STEM topics. Students working on designing and building furniture for their classroom use algebra and geometry to figure out the dimensions. E-textiles and soft circuitry, in which circuits are sewn using conductive thread or fabric, have shown to be an engaging way to teach electronics and programming, especially for young women. The possibilities for ways to incorporate making into the school day are endless, and it is exciting to see what teachers have been developing and sharing.