A site to explore and work on accelerating Innovation in Milwaukee Area Schools
A big thanks to Brian King for opening up the MJDS Innovation Hub for our visit and willingness to entertain all questions that could fit on the wall.
Thanks also to Quentin Allums from Mad Genie who came out before the tour with his 360° camera. Quentin showed a group of MJDS students how to capture still and video images for video and VR and with some occasional advise, turned them loose to capture the Innovation Hub. A first look at what they produced is here:
Collab Lab 9 focused on evaluating success of makerspaces and FabLabs. We used three questions to guide the discussion:
Our discussion groups came up with these three big ideas to take home:
And as a bonus: If students aren’t having fun, you aren’t there yet.
Links to things people heard about at Collab Lab 9:
April 20th: Tour of Milwaukee Jewish Day School’s Innovation Hub
April 27th: Betty Brinn’s Making in Education Community of Practice
May 11th: Collab Lab 10: Building Resilience
NEXT.cc: NEXT.cc supports making across the curriculum with STEAM based project learning set to NEXT Generation Science, Art & Design, and North American Association for Environmental Education Standards. Scaffolding cognitive learning with discovery, NEXT.cc’s eLearning DESIGNopiedia introduces skills and integrates K12 classrooms with apps, virtual field trips, TEDed courses, free data sets, mapping, and science interactives bringing our youth into the future of lifelong learning.
21st Century Classrooms
Outdoor Classrooms
Makerspaces
Mark Keane’s architecture classes for high school students:
Draw to Build I & II
UWM SARUP now offers two dual enrollment Architecture courses for juniors and seniors in high school. They can be accessed via Youth Options or PLA. Contact Prof. Keane for more information: keane@uwm.edu. Here’s a brief piece on the course featuring Collab Lab attendee Cindy McClinn and her students: http://uwm.edu/news/area-students-explore-architecture-100-and-perhaps-a-career/
Notes from breakout groups:
Dewy — Congnition — Metacognition
Mistakes & Failure
Outputs: What does it look like? What does it sound like?
Growth Mindset
Common Process
Audience?
Economic?
Engagement
Teacher/Educator thinking
Tasks — What is authenticity?
Standardization
Questions are unwelcome
Grade based system
Lack of experience with failure/open tasks
Kids are trained to think about school in “school” ways
Behaviorist vs Constructivist
Common processes
Digital modeling
Community involvement
What is making?
Hope
Culture
Expertise
Passion for a career path
Meaningful collaboration
Focused engagement on task
Problem solving
Equality of ideas/contributions
Success is nurtured and progressive
Teachers as facilitators & learners
Learning through experimentation
High level of resilience to change
Authentic experiences
Makerspaces is a process/culture
Fun
Futuring
Traditional buildings
Lack of exposure/access to tech
“Accounting mindset” of leadership
How do I manage the learning process?
How do I track learning that takes place 24 x 7?
Gather the info that leadership needs
Kids don’t know how to self-assess/be accountable for their learning
There is not time to teach anything that doesn’t lead to a 22 on the ACT
Don’t know how to reach outside businesses for real higher level learning
Parents
Teacher education is not continuous and focused on designing engaging project opportunities
Tine to do something other than standardized tests
Start with purpose– of the space; of the school
For who? Student, teacher, school, community
Attendance up
Increased engagement– students and teachers
Growth
Leadership
Curiosity is sparked
Students (and teachers) are not afraid to fail
Becomes part of the culture of the the school/community
It is demonstrated
Craftsmanship
Ability to transfer and apply the skills learned
Hit high standards
Process
Finding one’s self
Be able to adapt/be responsible
Kids set their own expectations
Compliance does not equal success
Integrated with curriculum
Other teachers are comfortable using the space
Students understand how to be life long learners
Teachers have an individual connection with students
Fun
Who is asking– district, school, parent, student
Subjective
Individualized
Long time frame required to see the results
Figuring out what is important
Pressure for standardized testing
Students are handed off to someone else (for the makerspace work)
Changing expectations
Getting teachers to adopt a new role– mentor/guide
Agreement on what you want to see happen
Ask how the community can help
Ask students for self evaluations
Classroom teachers should work with students within a makerspace (rather than handing them off)
Show off the results of student efforts
Great progress over the past week as our team has honed in on a pretty interesting up-cycling model. Last night work began to lay out their pitch in preparation for demo day, Tuesday April 25th.
Last night at The Commons, the Betty Brinn/Learn Deep team pinned down a persona for their beachhead customer– now known as “Steve” who manages the makerspace for an area school. The key problems faced by Steve:
The team was able to use that set of problems to filter the ideas generated last week to just those that addressed these key issues. It also led to the creation of a second persona — “Orlando”, who has excess material, but also,his own problems to solve:
This week’s work: Confirm the assumptions about the problems faced by Orlando, and clarify the vision for a potential solution– what’s the minimum viable product, and what might it look like when fully realized?
Following on the success of our monthly Collab Lab community discussion events, we’re introducing a hands-on opportunity to explore the ‘why?’ and ‘how?’ of maker spaces as they relate to the introduction of forms of authentic learning for K12 students. Our first tour will visit the Milwaukee Jewish Day School’s Innovation Hub on Thursday, April 20th from 4-6pm. We will explore how that vision guided various design decisions they’ve made along the way– in terms of how the space is configured as well as how it is used.
Details and registration information for our first visit are here. Stay tuned for what we have coming up next.
At Tuesday’s session at The Commons, the Betty Brinn/Learn Deep team brainstormed ideas for potential solutions to address problems for their beachhead customer– teachers who manage makerspaces/FabLabs in area schools. This week the team will narrow the focus to identify key features of a solution.
Collab Lab 8 focused on integrating the arts across disciplines. We used three questions to guide the discussion:
Thanks to Nancy Blair for a wrap up process that helped us get down to the one big idea coming out of the discussions of each question. Here’s what our discussion groups came up with:
Our makerspace challenge team got a chance to share what they’ve learned to date with their mentors and peers from NML’s team. The team is working to understand the types of materials used within school based makerspaces, how that varies by grade level and where schools run into issues. By Next Tuesday they need to have a firm grasp on their initial target customer and the problem(s) they hope to solve.
Last night at Ward 4 The Commons revealed the teams for each of this semester’s challenges. After a getting-to-know-each-other exercise that involved great lengths of yarn and a couple of well placed metaphors, the teams got to work. Joost, Mike Cook and I walked our team through the challenge to find a sustainable way excess materials from area firms could be made available for Betty Brinn’s maker initiatives and the makerspaces/FabLabs within area schools. The team’s work for this week is to look at how other organizations have solved the problem.
Back row:Ryan Dickson (Cardinal Stritch), Gabe Wichser (Carroll University),
Jason Hart (DevCodeCamp)
Front row: Taylor Waite (Cardinal Stritch), Jedidiah Hersey (UWM),
Holly Hamm (UW- Washington County), Isioma Okoro-Osademe (Marquette)
Photos: Robert Colletta Photography
One of the ideas that came out of our Makerspace/FabLab workgoup was to set up a series of tours to area Makerspaces/FabLabs. Tours would be structured to facilitate an exchange of ideas about effective use of a Makerspace/FabLab with the added context of the space within which those activities may occur. Below is a description of what we are thinking.
If you are interested, let us know, we’d like to get started this spring.
Tour participants have a chance to visit Milwaukee area Makerspaces/FabLabs at area schools and outside organizations. This provides a first hand look at how the space is organized and a chance to hear from the host about the types of projects they run, and challenges they face.
Tours would happen once per month during the week after school– 4:00 to 6:00 PM. Tours would run during the school year (Sept. through May).
Learn Deep will coordinate the tour schedule with schools and outside organizations interested in hosting, and handle registration for each tour. Participants will provide their own transportation to host sites.
Visits will follow a standard format so that participants have a sense of what to expect. The agenda will include:
The tour host will determine how many attendees they can reasonably accommodate. Learn Deep will work with those interested in hosting a tour to schedule tour dates.
