December Makerspace stations
At the end of November my principal, Gary Gylander, came to me with a challenge. He knows how hard we have been working to have our students and teachers use the Learning Commons as more than a repository. We have come a long way but what we find is that the same teachers are using the space over and over again. What that means is that some students are not able to use the space very much and certainly are not getting access to all of the cool technology that we have purchased. His challenge was for us to organize an event that would allow all of the students in the school to be able to try things out. So we did it! My partner Jaiden and I created 13 stations for the kids to try out and they ranged in complexity, technology and time needed. It took us a lot of hours to get everything set up because we wanted to make the students as self-sufficient as possible. We created trifolds for each station that would give all of the directions that they would need to complete the activity.
At the beginning of each class, I gave the students a speech about my expectations for them in the space. This included how many students could be at each station. I had placed a flag at each station that indicated the maximum capacity at that station. I also let them know that I had very high expectations for them in the space and if they chose to use the materials inappropriately or were disrespectful then they would be asked to leave the space. I did end up having to ask on average one person per class to leave for various reasons. I also asked them all to ensure that when they left the station that they cleaned it up as they moved to a new station. This really helped with clean up at the end of the class! This speech evolved over time as we learned what caused problems for us or for the students.
What a great experience. The kids loved it and so did we! It was a lot of work to make each of those stations for the first time but now we have them ready to use any time. We have tweaked many of the stations as we found the glitches in our instructions or problems with the length of the activity. It did mean that we were closed for students before school, lunch time and after school for about 3 weeks to make sure that we did not have to set our stations down to then set them back up again. This felt like a long time for many of our students!
We learned a lot throughout this process and it has given me a new spark to investigate new technology and try out new things!
The next slides will be an outline of each station and will contain links to videos and content that we used. Please feel free to use and make your own anything that you find here.
Chandra
At the beginning of each class, I gave the students a speech about my expectations for them in the space. This included how many students could be at each station. I had placed a flag at each station that indicated the maximum capacity at that station. I also let them know that I had very high expectations for them in the space and if they chose to use the materials inappropriately or were disrespectful then they would be asked to leave the space. I did end up having to ask on average one person per class to leave for various reasons. I also asked them all to ensure that when they left the station that they cleaned it up as they moved to a new station. This really helped with clean up at the end of the class! This speech evolved over time as we learned what caused problems for us or for the students.
What a great experience. The kids loved it and so did we! It was a lot of work to make each of those stations for the first time but now we have them ready to use any time. We have tweaked many of the stations as we found the glitches in our instructions or problems with the length of the activity. It did mean that we were closed for students before school, lunch time and after school for about 3 weeks to make sure that we did not have to set our stations down to then set them back up again. This felt like a long time for many of our students!
We learned a lot throughout this process and it has given me a new spark to investigate new technology and try out new things!
The next slides will be an outline of each station and will contain links to videos and content that we used. Please feel free to use and make your own anything that you find here.
Chandra
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