Shirley has an extra area within her library designated as a Transformation Space that changes every few weeks. For their next project, Shirley will be challenging her students to build a 9-12 foot wall keyboard using some of the materials she’ll receive from our grant, which include a liter of the Bare Conductive Electric Paint and a Bare Conductive Touch Board Kit!
We love being able to share their stories and their work with you and hope this series continues to give all educators encouragement to try new things in the classroom! This month, we’re featuring Elissa Schaeffer, who has been using EdTech she received through one of our event raffles to run coding programs for elementary school students!
This month, we’re featuring Victoria Blackmer, who’s a public librarian from Illinois, who’s been using some EdTech solutions that she received through our grant program to host open tinker labs to inspire all the students in her community to experiment and be creative. Read more to learn about these open tinker labs she’s helped create and what makes them great!
While library makerspaces are a great way to advance and promote 21st century learning, we’re not exactly advocating for overthrowing the library in your school completely. Just want to make that perfectly clear. In fact, school libraries and library makerspaces have been known to complement each other, making one reason they’re so popular.
The awardee for the month of February is Laura Luker, who is a librarian at the Pioneer Valley Chinese Immersion Charter School in Hadley, MA! Laura works with students of different ages starting out in elementary school and all the way up through high school, and some of the students are definitely challenged with some pretty cool projects each year.
We are unable to award something to everybody who applies for our EdTech grant, so, this Holiday season, we selected a few of the applicants who weren’t chosen and sent them what they asked for. Alyssa Newton was one of the educators we sent something to and her students really seemed to love what they received.
Did you catch us in Boston this past Friday? Or were you lucky enough to be at AASL 2017 in Arizona last weekend? If you were there, hopefully you stopped by to visit us. If not, don’t worry. There will also be plenty more opportunities to see our booth in person the rest of the year. More on that later, but first let’s tell you about our latest events.
The way we look at it is that we can’t help educators increase innovation with technology if we don’t build partnerships with a variety of educational organizations. The obvious approach would be to go out and sell ourselves to as many schools as possible. We’ve realized, however, that there are many, many more ways to help children build the skills they need.
These days, teachers and school leaders are doing a lot of repurposing of old tools and one of the biggest makeovers is occurring in school libraries. That’s not to say that school libraries have lost significance in 21st century education. They’re just starting to provide additional opportunities in STEM learning, specifically as makerspaces in schools.
You have your teachers. You have your administrators. And, you have your aides. Now, there’s yet another profession that’s come to life in lots of 21st century schools and it’s becoming one that seems to soon be fully present across the board. We’re talking about EdTech specialists and instructional technologists, who help educators integrate tech tools more effectively.
