Create

Donors Choose: Crowdsourcing Funding for a Creative Digital Media and Audio Engineering Station

/ gravescolleen / 1 Comment

My latest Donors Choose project just went live! This week only, any donation you make will be matched if you activate the SPARK promo code at checkout.

Anything counts! So even if you just want to donate 5 bucks, your donation will turn into 10 with the SPARK code.

We are hoping to turn our workroom into a digital media and audio engineering station.  Students will be able to play with sound, record their own sound effects, music, and even produce high quality videos all before graduating high school!

If you could give a little, it’d mean so much to my students. Go here to donate. (And don’t forget the SPARK promo code at checkout!

Thanks to Chicago Library’s Youmedia for Teens and Holly Arnason at Edmonton Public Library for the inspiration!

http://www.donorschoose.org/gravescolleen

Makerspace Workshop for Region One Librarians

/ gravescolleen / 1 Comment

Last week I had the privilege of being invited down to Region One Education Service Center to lead Region One librarians in a half day makerspace workshop.

We started out with a simple chat about owning failures so we can learn from them. I also pointed out that it’s very important when beginning your makerspace journey to immerse yourself in maker education and not to get caught up in following directions. Don’t be afraid to fail and fail often in front of students. Try not to get flustered instead show them how you can learn from these experiences.

Then we got straight to work! I was hoping to give them 4 short tasks with each maker resource and move quickly so they could visit each maker station, but librarians like to move at their own pace, so we ended up moving more freely than this slideshow would suggest. (Since some of my task cards will appear in a one of my book projects with the #superlibrarianhubs, I can’t post task cards here yet.)

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Librarians enjoyed rotating through stations and learning about Makey Makey, littleBits, paper circuits with Chibitronics tutorials, coding with Scratch, programming Sphero robots, and making simple robots with electric toothbrush motors.

Banana and Human Piano Keys!
Makey Makey
Off
On
littleBits Tasks
Can you make something that lights up and moves?
Art bots
Toothbrush motor robot
Pretty Scribbles

View more about our learning that day by clicking on the image below to go to my Tackk documenting the day.

https://tackk.com/makerworkshop

We ended our day discussing how to start a makerspace and get buy-in from administrators.

I got some great feedback on the day:

  • “I really enjoyed the coding game and the marker bots!”
  • “Loved the banana piano. Makey Makey”
  • “My favorite station was the makeymakey station.”
  • “Getting to try out and play with the different stations.”
  • “Trying out the littleBits kits:)”
  • “I loved that we got to play and experience things for ourselves before the actual presentation.”

Thanks again for having me, Dr. Sheneman!  It was a great day of learning for us all! Can’t wait to see where your librarians go with their makerspaces!