Makerspace and Web Page Up & Running

Will Fastiggi — Wed, 25 Jul 2018 23:21:03 +0000

One of the key jobs of our digital leaders last term was to help design and create a makerspace room, which I’m pleased to say is finally available for students and staff to use this term. We have now got all the resources we need and the walls have been painted with unique designs to celebrate what this room stands for!

So, what is a makerspace? A makerspace room is a multipurpose learning environment that both encourages and enables children to make things. In the process of making things, they learn. It is very relevant to many of the activities that we currently do in school such as STEAM, the IPC and enquiry-based learning. You can find out some more information about how to plan and design a makerspace here.

As a well-resourced school, we can use the makerspace to both store and use these resources. Having now put the makerspace on our school booking system, this means that when teachers book the room, they also book all the resources available in that room.

Using our Samsung 360 Gear camera, I took a photo of the room earlier today. You can now take a 360° panoramic tour, to see what our makerspace looks like below:

Enlisting the help of an artist from São Paulo, Marina, we had designs painted on the wall to showcase our makerspace values and mission statement.

Our makerspace has several different stations, including the one pictured here with access to makey makeys, picoboards and digital Wacom drawing tablets.

To help students and teachers get the most out of our makerspace, our digital leaders have also helped to design a makerspace web page, which is accessible from our Classroom Flipped website.

One of the key features from our makerspace web page is the Tools option. From here, students and teachers can see all of the resources that they have access to inside the makerspace room. For many of these resources, I have attached self-directed activity sheets, which can be downloaded. The ‘Coding’ option, for example, provides information and prompts to help learners design and program their own computer game. All of these self-directed activities are designed to be adaptable to whatever theme or topic the students are learning about.

You can find the complete collection of these self-directed activities below:

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[item title=”Self-Directed Makerspace Activities”]

[embeddoc url=”https://technologyforlearners.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Activity_Coding-.docx”]

[embeddoc url=”https://technologyforlearners.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Activity_Digital_Art1.docx”]

[embeddoc url=”https://technologyforlearners.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Activity_Makey_Makey.docx”]

[embeddoc url=”https://technologyforlearners.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Activity_Minecraft1.docx”]

[embeddoc url=”https://technologyforlearners.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Activity_Movie_Making.docx”]

[embeddoc url=”https://technologyforlearners.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Activity_Photo_Editing1.docx”]

[embeddoc url=”https://technologyforlearners.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Activity_Picoboard.docx”]

[embeddoc url=”https://technologyforlearners.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Activity_Raspberry_Pi.docx”]

[/item]

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Having discussed with the digital leaders what we could use the room for, we decided to make an acronym out of the word! We then came up with the following statements to describe what can be achieved in our Makerspace:

M stands for Movie-Making. Making videos provides rich opportunities to create something original. Easy to use, iPads and smartphones, for example, allow learners to produce tutorial videos, presentations, stop-motion animations and short movies. Green screens, along with apps for special effects, make the whole process of movie-making much more collaborative and engaging.

A stands for Awesome Activities. Makerspaces are hubs for awesome activities, which allow tinkering, play and open-ended exploration. The only thing that is required is sufficient space and appropriate materials, to encourage learners to make.

K stands for Kinetic. Whether it is a making an animation, designing a computer game, programming a robot, building a balloon rocket, controlling a mini-drone, and much more besides, makerspace activities have one thing in common – they get things moving!

E stands for Enquiry-Based Learning. As making itself is part of the learning journey, the makerspace naturally facilitates enquiry-based learning, placing students’ questions, ideas and observations at the centre of their learning experience. Educators simply ask essential questions in order to frame this learning journey. Learners are then more likely to make enquiry-driven discoveries during their making process.

R stands for Relevant. As making itself is part of the learning journey, the makerspace naturally facilitates enquiry-based learning, placing students’ questions, ideas and observations at the centre of their learning experience. Educators simply ask essential questions in order to frame this learning journey. Learners are then more likely to make enquiry-driven discoveries during their making process.

S stands for STEAM. The makerspace learning environment lends itself well to STEAM. As an acronym, STEAM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Maths. As an educational approach, STEAM is about facilitating learning experiences across these five subject areas, which promote collaboration, enquiry-based learning and fun! You can find some links to excellent STEAM activities, by the way, from our STEAM web page.

P stands for Problem Solving and Prototypes. Much of the work that goes on in the makerspace involves creating prototypes. These are tangible designs that demonstrate some elements of the function and appearance of the real thing. By building and tinkering with their prototypes, students learn to solve problems. They identify what works and what does not work, refining their prototypes again and again, until they come up with a feasible prototype. Solving problems by tinkering away on a prototype is the answer to “analysis paralysis”, where a designer gets stuck thinking about a problem, and does not actually design and build it.

A stands for Active & Autonomous Learning. The makerspace supports both active and autonomous learning. Requiring learners to engage in meaningful activities, students learn actively because the act of making something requires them to be involved in their own learning process. As the focus of this learning environment is the student rather than the teacher, learners are also autonomous. They are completely responsible for their own learning decisions regarding what to design and what to make.

C stands for Collaborative. The makerspace facilitates collaborative learning. For many of the activities, groups of students work together to solve a problem, complete a task, or create a project. Based on the idea that two heads are better than one, students help one another during the making process, addressing their misunderstandings and clarifying misconceptions.

E stands for Everyone. We are all makers. A great makerspace therefore is an inclusive learning environment that encourages everyone to tinker, play and create! The makerspace democratises learning by enabling resources and ideas to be accessible to all learners.

Using a 360-Degree Camera for VR Lesson Observations

Will Fastiggi — Mon, 04 Jun 2018 23:27:17 +0000

I have discussed previously about the advantages of using Swivl technology for teachers to film themselves teaching. Having now tried a 360-degree camera in the classroom, I would say this has even more advantages.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/samsungtomorrow/24859929243

I recently purchased the Samsung Gear 360 (shown above), a camera that serves to record a full 360-degree view as video or photo. Once recorded, this technology enables teachers to watch a video of themselves, as well as observe everything that happens in the classroom.

In several lesson observations, I have placed the Gear 360 on a tripod in the middle of the classroom during a lesson. The students then quickly forget that the camera is there, in the middle of the classroom.

As the camera records everything that is going on around the classroom, it can catch many things that can be missed by both the teacher and even observer such as low-level behaviour issues or students who just need extra support. In this way, the 360-degree video can be incredibly useful and informative as an extra tool for providing teachers with feedback after they have been observed.

After the video has been recorded, it needs to be converted into another format such that you can can move around the video (either by dragging the cursor on the screen or using a VR headset), thereby watching in 360-degrees. In other words, the video or photo needs to be stitched from the dual-sphere video into an “equirectangular” (flat mode) video first for it to be viewable in 360-degrees. To transfer into such a format, there is the software that comes with the camera, Gear 360 CyberLink ActionDirector. One thing to keep in mind, however, is that 360-degree videos take up a lot of memory. A 10-minute video clip for example, is about 1.6 gigabytes big! You therefore need to make sure that you have an SD card with sufficient memory and allow the necessary time for conversion (depending on your computer’s processing power, this will probably take about 30-minutes).

In addition, there are several online options for storing 360-degree images, including:

In the example above, I used 360player for the purpose of hosting 360-degree views of classrooms. This can also be informative, as we consider classroom displays and how best to organise our students’ learning spaces.

Concluding thoughts…

The Gear 360 is certainly a powerful, easy-to-use tool that is relatively cheap (less than $100). By providing teachers with the ability to both film themselves teaching, and at the same time, give teachers a view of themselves from the student’s perspective, lesson feedback can become much more thorough. This is a tool that I would recommend for any teacher to use, both for watching themselves teach and for watching everything else that has been going on in the classroom while they have been delivering their lesson.

Samsung Gear 360 – Technology for Learners

Makerspace and Web Page Up & Running

Using a 360-Degree Camera for VR Lesson Observations