Thing 30 Maker Spaces

The middle school librarian has a very successful makerspace program that has been going on for at least five years.  We have collaborated and for a couple of years once a month we would have a program in the elementary school and she and some of her students would come over and help facilitate them.  This collaboration was successful but it wasn't part of my schedule and I didn't like how I had to change people around to make it happen.  It also was purely by project and there was not a designated area or materials for a makerspace. 

We have something at our school called an IDEA grant.  The art teacher and I put in for money for a makerspace.  We received $8000.00 and a commitment from the PTO to donate $500.00 a year towards the program.   Unfortunately, the art teacher's schedule did not allow for her to participate.  I forged ahead mainly because I finally figured out a way that I could do a makerspace with  my schedule of 34 classes per week and no aid.  I participated in our summer PD on Schoology and designed a class in Schoology that is, for the most part, student managed.  Frankly, what I wanted to avoid the most was managing more STUFF.  So, with that priority in mind, I designed the class by belts and each belt is a kind of activity and is organized with the belt on it for a student to clearly see.  

Each belt represents a different activity that students do.  For example, the white belt represents a desire to begin the study of STEM.  Students must familiarize themselves with the STEM process through a variety of activities and learn how to post a video of him/herself.  To earn each belt, students must submit a video that shows what they did and how they applied the STEM process. The video submission prompts the teacher/facilitator to review the video and award that belt color.  Other belts are: yellow belt = puzzles; orange belt = building fundamentals; green = sewing, origami and more; blue = circuits; purple = 3d pens; red = coding; and black is make your own project/activity to add to a belt OR go into a class and teach one of the STEM activities to younger children.

Linda and I have spent a great deal of time discussing how do you assess STEM? I feel that you have to have something and finally came up with the video where kids talk about what they did and how they applied the STEM process. I have a little guide to help them form their thoughts about it before they do the video.

I had all of the fourth grade students participate in the white belt during a library class and I have some core students who come weekly. I am still working on the best way for kids to access the materials and the class. Right now I have fourth grade teachers sending 5 kids per class once a week at a certain time. I usually only have two teachers participate, which is fine. I know that if I offered to take the whole class (without the teacher, of course) I would have more participation but I am not willing to do that. I want students who are interested in being there. I have one student who has progressed to the purple belt and will be done with all of them by the end of the year. I plan to have an award for this at the fourth grade awards ceremony in June.

The nice thing about Schoology is it is easy to revise and improve each year or time you use that activity. I have joined a couple of maker space facebook groups and they have been excellent in terms of suggestions of what to buy. I also submitted this program to ISTE and it was accepted as a poster project. I hope to have this makerspace in the shape I want it to be by the time I retire, which is not that far away!

Thing 26 Media Skills

I have been using video much more this year in my library classes.  My third and fourth graders have made use of the discussion feature of schoology where they can video tape themselves responding to prompts and comment on their classmates' entries.  I also use SEESAW with kindergarten and I used it for the Global Read Aloud with second graders.

I looked at the information in this entry and I have used CANVA before.  I know how to take screenshots.  I didn't really have any projects in mind for resources such as Pixlr.  It also wants you to sign up with a credit card that you cancel once the free time is up which I was not interested in doing that.

I have used word art before so I didn't really have an interest in that but I was intrigued with the Camscanner and after reading the tips from Joyce Valenza, I downloaded camscanner on my IPAD and my phone.   Last year my phone died so I ended up scanning things off of my phone that I didn't want to lose again and downloading them into my IPAD photos.  I could have done this with my camera but I was interested in seeing the quality of the scans.  They are quite good and I used the multiple scan feature too and was pleasantly surprised.  I will use this helpful too frequently in the future.  Thanks for the information.

Thing 24 Google Drawing

I would like to keep working with google drawing because I can see the potential, I just have trouble leashing it.  After trying different things with no results I decided to try all of the items listed in the article, "Eight Ways to Supercharge Your Documents with Google Draw.  Since I wanted to be able to use what I produced, I decided to do something with Valentine's Day.  I wound up using google draw to make a document that I posted in Schoology.  Students will watch a video about facts they learned about Valentine's Day and then post a video of themselves telling me which fact was the most interesting and why.  I didn't have any luck inserting a video in a google slide so I just inserted it as a link in the document.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MMTu165Kz6BfN1I-RaYds8XWLuEE5-5gSuUFeXWxVU8/edit?usp=sharing

I would like to submit another cool tools submission using google drawing if that is OK with you.

THING 9 DATABASES AND SEARCH TOOLS

I checked out most of the links in thing 9.  I plan to try out the saving feature that is now available in gale products to google drive.  I had forgotten about the way back machine.  I also appreciated the google tricks and the 6 Steps to Teaching Students to Search.  I plan on using and sharing the 15 must have google lesson plans to teach Students effective Search Skills with the other librarians in my district.  I did try out some of the google lessons and didn't do as well as I thought I should have!  For this assignment, I put the kid friendly search engines off of my page:

https://sites.google.com/a/schalmont.net/jefferson-library/home


I have enjoyed this class.  I have completed ten assignments and would like to continue but realistically I have a great deal going on right now and I don't think I will have the time.  I look forward to taking your class again next year.  I loved the organization and I loved learning new things that have helped me in my job.  It is really hard to get technical support at my school.  Most of the time I have to do a work around.  The information that is available in this class allowed me to succeed at working around the technology limitations of my school so that there are more tech opportunities for kids.  For example, I used to use the voice thread and didn't realize that you had to pay for it so it stopped working and I couldn't get anyone to help me with that.  I learned about movenote in your class and switched to that.  When I had trouble with that, I was able to switch to screencastify another tool that I learned about in your class.  Every day I have students who want to do the weekly library update and now they are able to.

THING 8 SCREENCASTING

I read all of the information posted in this assignment.  Since we use google chromebooks at school, I decided screen castify was the best choice.  I have used google hangouts in the past.  I decided that I wanted to do something that I could use so I made a slide show about how to use the on-line catalog to access EBOOKS that were currently available at the library with a specific reading level range.  I had fun doing this and I think the product I came up with will be useful to students and faculty at my school. I must confess it will help me as well as often I forget how I did something and don't feel like spending the time to reacquaint myself with the process.  The link to my product is here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxP7Yj1HGRPKOEdNWEZodmtPdTA/view

I also made this available off of my webpage:

https://sites.google.com/a/schalmont.net/jefferson-library/

THING 7 AUDIO TOOLS

I read all of the information posted in THING 07 Audio Tools.  I used movenote in an another assignment.  I use movenote to record student recordings of short booktalks and to update parents about what we are doing in the library this week.  I have had some trouble lately getting the video to come up. Unfortunately, I had the same problem when I went to use flipgrid.  It would not recognize my video camera as being there.  Right now I have I have a test run located at:

https://flipgrid.com/b6421b

But it does not have a video.  I had our tech person look at this as well because it is the same thing at school, the camera is not recognized.  My suspicion is that the Tech Director locked it down.  I plan to start another flipgrid account with my personal gmail account to see if I have the same problem.  In the end, I spent a great deal of time on this but much of it was with technical difficulties.

Thing 30 Games like Jeopardy

I went out of order for this assignment as I had been toying with doing something with Jeopardy.  I had recommended this site to a friend of mine who is  a high school special education teacher to do with her kids when she was being evaluated.  She had much success with the site, student engagement as well as a great evaluation.

I do a modified version of jeopardy.  At certain times throughout the year, I use student work and we either play bingo with it or we play a version of jeopardy where the student has to get the answer correct and a basket in the garbage can to get a point for his/her team.  If a student does not know the answer he/she can call on someone on his/her team to answer.  I have had great success with this game in particular as all students are engaged and it can get very exciting, especially if we have to have play sudden death.

This year with first and second grades we read two of the Caldecott runner ups, Duz It Tak and They All Saw  A Cat.  With second grade at the next lesson, I had the kids come up with their recommendation for a Caldecott winner.  This lesson coincides with opinion writing that is currently being studied in the classroom.  Below is a picture of one of the student's work

https://docs.google.com/document/d/171yWjpZo5wClB_YtgmONSBo4hOmEYQZXqFdi4sfGnYE/edit?usp=sharing

I then scanned in all of the student work for my five second grade classes and I made jeopardy boards for each class based on the work that the students' generated.  Below is a link to the addresses for the five classes.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1R68HOD7l9QsjzfEGijdQ2w5XiiAgU5NmSB7AjgA2fbM/edit?usp=sharing

I will then have an answer sheet that students can choose from.  I will probably use slides to make that.  Hopefully, the sites won't be blocked!  I am hopeful as they are not in the high school.  We'll see.