One of my librarian courses this semester was about instructional technology, and I loved getting to try new apps and tools. I have asked my students to use Book Creator before, but I had never made a complete project myself.
I'm sharing this short book, which can be read aloud to you if you use Chrome. I borrowed some vocal talent from a semi-reluctant teen for the complaining relatives in the story! I'm thinking of giving students the option to choose one of the four design challenges presented in this book for a maker exercise this week . . . and then extend it by having them design their own maker challenges in digital twisted fairy tales that they create. It might be a great exchange idea for our Canadian buddy class, too.
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This year, our school held our first-ever Maker Night, which was a fundraiser for our technology program. Here is some information about how we put it together, in case you're thinking of trying something like it at your school. Schedule We held our Maker Night at the end of March, on the evening we had already had Maker Day at our school. Maker Day was a free event that included 100% of our students during the regular school day, but that evening, we charged for tickets to attend Maker Night. Recently, my elementary school hosted its second-ever Maker Day. It was a huge success (again), and here is some information about how it worked, for those of you who are looking to try something like it. Please see my post about Maker Night, which was our technology fundraiser this year, and which was held the evening of Maker Day. Background:
Our school has a two-year-old maker committee, which started by touring makerspaces at different schools in our district before starting our own. We wrote a district grant for our makerspace, which included a part-time person to help manage it the first year. All classes were expected to attend every third week, so that all teachers could see some examples of "making" in action. These lessons began with fairly common challenges (marble roller coasters in tubes) run by the part time teacher, and expanded to coding experiments and eventually, teacher-led tasks that connected to curricular units. My school has a great tradition of maker-thinking when it comes to Valentine's Day. Our fantastic instructional technology specialist runs a contest for students who build Valentine boxes that use simple machines (she does this for pumpkins in the fall, too). However, students don't need to make their Valentine boxes move to be interesting:
Students created mazes in our makerspace this week, using broken crayons, pencils, and worn-out markers to create paths for hexbugs, which are small battery-powered robots. The goal was to create the maze that the hexbug would take the longest time to solve. Some students created little doors for the bugs to push through, while others had curved lines or complex traps.
5 hexbugs cost about $20.00, and it was a great way to work through problem-solving and revision, and collaboration. We might even say it was a-maze-ing! |
Jamie Wright
I've had the privilege of working with hundreds of students and families in IA, CT, NC, MO, TX, and Canada. I love being a teacher-librarian! Categories
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