With classroom SEL practices come key opportunities for students to learn some of the most significant social-emotional skills for the future, including self-awareness, goal setting, and social awareness. And, if more educators learn to seamlessly integrate EdTech tools in SEL instruction, they can help to unlock new benefits and expand how SEL impacts kids’ development.
Perhaps for the best, there’s no blueprint for creating a school makerspace but there are some strategies teachers could employ that might help to set theirs apart. Whether your makerspaces are big, tiny, stationary, mobile, or full of high- or low-tech tools, here are some of the coolest characteristics that the best makerspaces share—both physical features and attitudes.
Discovering connections through active experiences is a chief cornerstone of PBL and helps students establish authentic feelings for their causes. As such, knowing the impacts these connections can have among children is key for the educators who are leading them. And, this is especially true as they leverage them across the curriculum to connect different subjects.
Despite this prominent presence in the real world and elements of STEM in so many of today’s most lucrative careers, not every K–12 student pursues it. More importantly, many students lose almost all interest in STEM before they even reach middle school. So, in a lot of cases, educators have to be proactive to reach kids while they’re in the K–5 grades. So, how can they?
Edpuzzle is a versatile tool that educators can leverage to engage students with videos that resonate with them and enhance their learning. Essentially, with Edpuzzle, teachers could add video into their instruction and integrate it in a unique way—by directly adding their own points, insights, questions, or relevant bits of information for students to interact with as they watch.
STEM education is obviously a major piece of 21st century instruction and we know how important these experiences are for students. Many of those hard and soft skills they learn throughout elementary, middle, and into high school often help them better transition into a future career. Plus, for more and more of them, that career might be very closely related to STEM.
Although it’s a more advanced robotics tool, the Create 3 is certainly viable for any classroom. The biggest differentiator between the Create 3 and the Root Robots comes with its programming functionalities, which are almost entirely centered on text-based programming in Python but teachers could also, however, use it to introduce students to the world of ROS 2.
Besides creating their own virtual reality content, students can also use the CoSpaces Edu app to explore coding. Within this online platform, they can access this Blockly editor for drag-and-drop programming practice. Called CoBlocks, this visual language is simple for beginners and, as children get better at creating programs, they can move on to script-based languages.
Project-based learning, as you might know, is a quite effective approach to instruction that’s often tied to increased community involvement and active collaboration among students. So, we’re exploring what may help teachers get PBL right, tips for implementing successful projects, and ideas for how to best leverage EdTech tools to generate ideal results.
When teaching STEAM and coding skills with the Edison Robot, its unique features make it super popular among today’s teachers. This starts with its compact size, which helps to make the Edison a true 1:1 STEM solution in many cases. Some say it’s shaped like a brick but it’s also very dense and tough, which makes it a strong option for graphical or text coding lessons.
