At Maker Ed, we believe that in order to have an impact across the country it is important to also partner with educators locally. One of our local connections is with Achieve Academy, a TK-6 public charter school in Oakland, CA. At our second workshop, we engaged in a Tinkering to Discover lesson focused on imagining change we would like to see in the community in which the school is located, Oakland. This lesson integrated zine-making, social justice themes, and English Language Arts content based on expressed educator need and interest from feedback at our first workshop. Read more…
Earthquake Engineering and Cardboard Linkages at the CA STEAM Symposium
We had a blast at the recent 2019 CA STEAM Symposium held in Anaheim, CA! We loved meeting so many educators over the course of two days in this year’s Makerspace. We hosted a drop-in Earthquake Engineering activity, as well as a Cardboard Linkages workshop session. Read more…
Making to Learn About the Civil Rights Movement through Sewing and Textiles
Our approach to professional development is intentionally designed to be experiential, where educators actively participate from the perspectives of their learners as a way to reflect on their own practice, facilitation, and design of maker centered learning experiences. To support educators from a variety of environments, we also integrate making experiences that represent a diversity of subject areas and media of making—making sure to develop authentic tasks in meaningful contexts. During a recent Approaches to Maker Education workshop, we combined a history lesson plan with sewing and textiles. Read more…
Wheel of Documentation: Workshop Takeaways
How can documentation support assessment? How do you know when learners know? What types of learning do we value, but don’t normally assess? In our recent two-day, hands-on workshop, Documenting for Assessment, we explored these questions while developing a variety of tools and strategies to make learning visible and broaden our notion of what is assessable. One of the tools we have been integrating into our workshops is a Documentation Prompt Jar. Read more…
Computational Thinking with micro:bit at an East Bay Maker Educator Meetup
As an opportunity to explore programming and computational thinking with a community of educators, we recently prototyped a physical computing with micro:bit activity at our kickoff East Bay Maker Educator Meetup (EBMEM). Read more…
Examining Social Justice Themes through micro:bit and Scratch
Weaving together themes of social justice with ELA standards, block-based programming with Scratch, and physical computing with micro:bit, this series of linked activities from our Approaches to Maker Education workshop showcased a learning progression that integrated all three of our Approaches to Curriculum Integration: Tinkering to Discover, Making to Learn, and the Application Project. Read more…
Tinkering with Light and Shadow to Support Science Discovery
We recently hosted a Maker Educator Meetup for 30 K-8 science educators in collaboration with Community Resources for Science (CRS) as part of their Field Trip for Teachers program. Read on for an example of a learner-driven, inquiry-based activity that aligns with Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) practices, built on our Approaches to Maker Education workshop! Read more…
Institute Day Five: Equity Maps, Resources, and Final Reflections
After working all week on identifying resources around curriculum integration, program development, and assessment through the lens of equity and sustainability, we had the opportunity to share and present all of our work with each other. Read more…
Institute Day Four: Creating and Prototyping Resources
On Day Four of our summer Institute, we started the morning with an equity session centered on the Ready for Rigor framework provided in Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain by Zaretta Hammond. This framework outlines four areas of practice of culturally responsive teaching that enable us to support learners to become more independent: awareness, learning partnerships, information processing, and community of learners & learning environments. Read more…
Institute Day Three: Culture, Strands, and Ideation
In order to reflect on how culture impacts our learners, we started Day Three of our Summer Institute by asking participants to consider their own cultural roots through Zaretta Hammond’s representation of the culture tree. Based on this reading and our equity session on Day Two, participants created a physical representation of their own culture trees and reflected on the ways the three levels of culture showed up in their learning environment. Read more…
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