Month: April 2020

Looking for ways to keep your students engaged from a distance?  We’re happy to help. 

Connect to outside expertise:  We can tap our network to connect you/your students to outside expertise to provide input and guidance on student projects.

Project ideas: Over the past four years, our Collab Lab participants have generated a number of project ideas.  While there isn’t a lot of time to ramp up a new project before the end of the school year, we can help you craft experiments or exercises for students that can give you a better sense of what you might want to do on a larger scale next year.

Materials: Over the course of our experiments in up-cycling, we’ve assembled a small inventory of materials students might use to develop physical prototypes. If we don’t have what you need, we can help find it and pull together kits for you to get to your students.

If you’d like help with any of these, or would like to tap us for something else, just let us know what you need here.

On Wednesday we kicked off our Learn Deep Lunch series with a discussion about the challenges educators face with coronavirus driven distance learning.  Participants shared their experiences and ideas on a Zoom session and captured their thoughts on a shared Google Jam Board.

The common struggles were keeping kids both connected and engaged. It’s not enough for students to simply to have access to technology.  If they have not used the tools deployed for distance learning, have adults or siblings at home that can help troubleshoot, or simply compete for time on the device with another sibling, they are much less likely to participate.  For educators that had not used distance learning tools in the past, or where district or building standards or expectations about how distance learning ought to run, the need to figure all this out creates an additional burden.

In spite of these challenges, participants had developed a number of strategies to adjust to the current situation. A number of educators recognized that their students are looking for ways to feel connected to their classmates, and had found lightweight ways to do so– from Instagram challenges to virtual lunch tables. The recognition that students need intrinsic motivation to stay engaged has a number of educators using the last weeks of the school year to help students identify and pursue passion projects.

Learn Deep Lunches run from 11:45 to 12:30 on Wednesdays. Our next session is April 29th.  Details and registration info are here.