(Don’t forget to use the code “INSPIRE” at checkout!)
Here are the details of where this project is coming from:
Our library has always been a space where we value creating and sharing just as much as consuming information. Last year because of a Donors Choose project, our library received a 3D printer and it allowed our students to create things that they had never even thought of. The makerspace culture is alive and well in our library, but we have a long way to go to exploring makerspaces and how the culture of a makerspace supports students, teachers, and families.
Over the summer, I had an article published in Teacher Librarian about the culture of creation that we are developing in our library and school. In that article, I talk about the culture, but at some point you have to get some “stuff” to create with.
“Building a Culture of Creation” in the June 2014 issue of Teacher Librarian
This year, one of our library goals is to give students, teachers, and families opportunities to dream, tinker, create, and share. A part of this is developing the tools that are available for creating in our library. Our space which we thought was going to be a studio is now going to be a makerspace within our library. A portion of our library funding this year will be dedicated to developing our makerspace. After attending an Invent to Learn workshop and focusing on makerspaces at ISTE this summer, I have chosen some next steps for our makerspace.
This Donors Choose project will extend our budget and give students even more access to maker materials by adding.
littleBits Cloud:
4 additional MaKey MaKey kits:
Sphero:
I hope that you will consider supporting our project. It will impact numerous students, teachers, and families within our school through projects, alternative recess activities, enrichment clusters, and afterschool workshops. Even if you can’t contribute financially, please consider sharing this project within your own networks. I will be sure to blog about our explorations throughout the year. Thank you in advance!
On June 25 and 26, 2014 I had the honor of attending the Google Teacher Academy in Atlanta. It was a long road to get to GTA. The application process is a test in how well you can boil down your practice into the most concise wording and video that represents your innovation and reach. The application is short with only a handful of questions that limit your response to 800 characters. One of the most challenging parts of the application process is the video. In one minute, you have to introduce yourself and show how you foster innovation in education as well as how you have a global impact. I don’t even know how many hours it took me to craft a one-minute video, but I do know that the process forced me to really think about my practice. I made multiple versions of the video and got feedback from multiple including Cat Flippen, #GTACHI. Here’s how it turned out:
The wait to find out if I got into GTA was agonizing. I won’t lie about that. Even though I had IFTTT recipes setup to notify when the email came, I still stayed glued to my phone and computer because I was in a professional learning session on announcement day. Once the email came, things started happening fast. The 35 were invited to a Google Plus community where we could begin connecting. It didn’t take long for the collaboration to begin. Here are just a few things that happened:
Jennifer Armstrong began making a Youtube playlist of our GTA videos
I created a Google doc where we could begin crafting a shared blog post that we each could share in our own networks to introduce the 35 #GTAATL participants
Linda Humes and Corey Holmer started designing a t-shirt for us. Corey’s design was ultimately chosen, but many people in the group contributed ideas. Frank LaBanca ordered our shirts and had them all shipped to me in GA so that I could easily drive them to GTA rather than someone having to bring them on the plane
Renee Nolan organized a meetup for most of us on the night before GTA began to get to hangout together before GTA consumed our brains
Janna Gibson made a guide to Atlanta to introduce everyone to the food and sights to check out in Atlanta
And the list goes on
I loved this because it brought out one of the things that inspires me about collaborating. We all have talents and expertise, and so many people stepped up to share their talents and passions with the group.
Finally meeting everyone face to face was so much fun. We only knew one another from our profile pics, social media posts, and blog stories. We all met at Marlow’s for dinner the night before GTA and spent time just having conversation and sharing the anticipation of what the next two days would bring.
We arrived at the Google office and waited until the exact time to enter. After checking in, we were immediately launched into the Google culture, which of course started with food. We had a great breakfast before moving into our agenda.
I won’t detail the entire agenda, but share some of the things that stood out to me along the way.
First, the planning team revamped the entire agenda, and we were the first GTA cohort to try out this new agenda. This was exciting but also a little risky since it meant that we might not experience what we thought we were going to experience. What I saw was that the agenda focused a lot more on philosophy than on specific tools. The idea behind this is that tools come and go and tools change, but if you have an innovative, risk-taking philosophy of teaching, then you adapt to new tools and environments as well as create entirely new environments for you and your students.
We watched the Moonshot Thinking video, which I had seen at a GAFE Summit. It is always powerful no matter how many times I watch it.
I loved how this framed our entire GTA experience because it set the tone that we as innovators in education we need to be trying things that have never been tried and creating new tools and experiences for our students that stretch far beyond a “next step”. I loved how this moonshot thinking and “solving for x” brought us into our first experience at GTA.
This was probably my favorite “activity” that we did over the 2 days. Prior to GTA, each of us submitted what we felt were our biggest challenges in education. Those challenges were compiled into themes. At our tables, we were randomly assigned one of the challenges. Then, one of our team members had to spin a wheel filled with tech tools. Our goal was to use this tech tool to address the specified challenge, and to make things interesting, we only had 5 minutes to make a decision.
My group ended up with “lack of teacher training” paired with “Panoramio“. Most of us in the group had never used Panoramio, which was perfect! I felt like it put us in the shoes of our teachers who feel insecure when facing a new technology tool. I was reminded of teachers who feel frozen when they face the unknown and want someone to just tell them exactly how a tool works before they will try it. With the clock ticking, we didn’t have that luxury. Instead, those of us that had used the tool began brainstorming how Panoramio could address teacher training. Others, like me, frantically researched the tool to see what it was capable of. At a glance, Panoramio is a collection of photographs uploaded by the community of users and embedded onto Google Maps by location. You can browse the photographs by location or you can specifically search for topics of pictures. For me, I was trying to figure out if you could tag images and search by tag. From my own experience, I’ve seen the lightbulb go on so many times for a teacher when they see something put into practice in a classroom. Sometimes all it takes to help a teacher feel “trained” enough to try something is just seeing what it looks like in a classroom. I thought that if we could create a massive social media campaign for educators to upload images of their classrooms into Panormaio and tag those images by the topics that they showcased, then we could support teachers in “seeing” what that specific topic looked like in a classroom. If we needed specific kinds of pictures uploaded to Panoramio, then we could be specific like pictures of students using social media in the classroom. I added this thinking to my group, but I loved that others in my group had completely different ideas for how this tool could be used. This exercise also reminded me that our focus can’t be on the tools. Our focus should be on our students, teacher, families, and community along with the needs that they have. There’s a whole range of tools that can support those needs. If we push our thinking and try something radical, sometimes a tool that seemed like the most absurd idea for solving the challenge actually leads to something innovative.
Our day was of course surrounded by snacks. We had official breaks, but drinks and snacks were always within reach.
Even breaks to the bathroom kept you learning and surrounded by Google culture.
Throughout the 2 days of GTA, there was time for “inspiring ideas”. These were short presentations from various members of GTAATL. We submitted ideas before GTA and were selected by the planning committee to present. I was the very first one to share, which was a bit intimidating. I shared various ways that I empower student voice through Google forms as well as how Google forms can help you crowdsource information.
Other rockstars included Chris Aviles, who shared how he gamifies his classroom. He has created an entire story line that plays out with his students which even includes getting phone calls from game characters using Google Voice. Amy Burvall shared how she used Google Plus to give her students a space to contribute to the classroom and crowdsource information. She also uses this tool to connect people in her professional development sessions. By doing this, people aren’t sitting passively in her sessions, but are instead, actively contributing during her session and beyond. Genius! Hearing from all of these amazing educators during this session was an energy boost during an exhausting day. I was proud to be a part of this group.
One of the things that I hoped would happen was a preview of Google Classroom. We heard about the process it took to develop Google Classroom. I loved seeing a picture from an elementary teacher’s classroom where she had posted about 7 or 8 steps it took to turn in an assignment to the teacher. This was one of the inspirations for Google Classrooms. We had a chance to try out the interface and were all excited and blown away by the usefulness and simplicity. With 35 innovative educators in one room, it didn’t take long for a range of questions to surface. We definitely surfaced some barriers that people may face in using Classroom, but overall the buzz was one of excitement and eagerness to get this tool in our teachers’ hands.
Our lead learners
The rest of GTA involved 4 rounds of explorations of various Google tools and themes. We grouped ourselves into these rounds by common interests in the kinds of challenges we wanted to tackle in our action plans.
We saw a lot of tools, but didn’t have time to use them very much. Now that I’m away from GTA, I’m starting to look at what I saw and consider how these tools fit into what I may try in the library this year. I’m already thinking about how Google Draw can be used as we connect with other schools via Skype and Google Hangout. I wish that we had spent more time with the various map tools from Google because I think there is a lot of potential with those as well for global collaborations. I’ll have to take time to do this for myself.
At the end of day one, we all became Google Certified Teachers. We had a pinning ceremony and a celebration dinner. It was a great sense of accomplishment, but it was only the beginning of the work and opportunities ahead.
Day two was time for us to explore our own interests through an unconference as well as work on our action plans. After GTA, it is an expectation that you create an action plan to facilitate change in education during the coming school year. My focus is on global collaboration. Seeing what students gain from connecting with authors, experts, libraries, and classrooms beyond our walls has convinced me that I need to develop even more opportunities for students to have these connections. This year, I want connecting to be more than a one time thing. I want to create content with students in other states and countries. I want students to offer one another feedback and ask one another questions. I want students to have an opportunity to create projects that matter to them and share those with a global audience.
Amy Burvall inspired many conversations about hashtags and “showing your work”.
I had many important conversations during GTA about this project. Amy Burvall and I talked a lot about hashtags and how tags are the “soul of the Internet”. She helped me to think about how we track our work so that it continues to inform our next work. We talked about the importance of sharing the whole process of a project and not just the final project. This is the kind of thing that GTA does. You may not get to know every single person at GTA, but you make connections with people that you know are going to continue to push your thinking well beyond the 2 days that you spend together.
Now my attention turns to GlobalTL, a Google Plus community that was started by Joyce Valenza. Now, I’m working along with Joyce and many other librarians to develop this community that will facilitate global connections. I know that by connecting and collaborating with librarians, I am connecting my students and teachers with students and teachers around the world. Librarians work with every student, teacher, and family member in the school. I think it makes sense to think about how to create a community that connects people. We don’t know exactly what will happen in the group, but we are going to shoot for the moon to foster global collaboration.
Google Teacher Academy has connected me with 34 other amazing educators, and I know I can call on them for any questions or roadblocks I face. I’m also now connected to a global community of Google Certified Teachers who are actively supporting one another in their educational spaces. I’m sure that GTA is only the beginning of a long collaborative relationship with some amazing global educators.
This has been a whirlwind summer. Across 9 days from June 22-July1, I visited Evanced in Indianapolis, became a Google Certified Teacher at the Google Teacher Academy in Atlanta, and experienced the awesomeness of ISTE in Atlanta. My brain was so exhausted that it has been hard to pull out the strands of what I actually learned. However, I’m going to slowly start letting the learning soak in and write about each of those experiences here beginning with the #Wandoo5
During the past school year, a small group of 5th graders began beta testing a tool called Wandoo Planet. Wandoo Planet is an interest genome project like Pandora or Netflix where students share their interests in a game-like environment. In return, Wandoo Planet offers book, movie, and game recommendations to them based on those interests. We loved this tool so much that we used it to kickoff our summer reading at the end of the year. Lindsey Hill at Evanced Skyped with every class in 2nd-5th grade and families, UGA students, and Barrow student ambassadors assisted me in getting every student signed up for an account.
Other schools were also exploring Wandoo Planet and hosting the Banishing Boredom Tour at their schools. Thanks to some informal conversation between Sherry Gick and Rob Cullin, President of Evanced, and making our work public, 5 library leaders were chosen to visit Evanced Solutions, a DEMCO company, in Indianapolis for a Think Tank. The details of the Think Tank were really not specific, but when you have an opportunity to get together with Matthew Winner from Maryland, Sherry Gick from Indiana, Shannon Miller from Iowa, and Shawna Ford from Texas, you don’t say no and you expect nothing less than awesome!
Before we even arrived, a name had been created, the Wandoo 5 (#Wandoo5). It felt like a giant signal had been activated in the sky and we were climbing aboard our planes to assemble at headquarters for a secret mission.
We all arrived in the afternoon on June 22 and had a chance to hangout, have informal conversations, and enjoy downtown Indianapolis. Lindsey Hill (@thelindseyhill), Reading Engagement Innovator at Evanced, made us feel right at home from the moment our planes landed and she didn’t stop even when our planes were returning us home. You can tell that the people at Evanced truly care about libraries, librarians, and especially readers.
On Monday June 23, the Think Tank began. I was amazed by how we started because we didn’t start with the products that Evanced offers. The very first question asked of us was to describe the landscape of school libraries and librarianship and to think about what some of our biggest challenges are. Where would we start? Our attention immediately turned to our students and access to information. This particular strand of the conversation went from access to quality devices to access to Internet outside of school. Our attention turned to the teachers within our buildings and the wide range of experiences and comfort levels with using and taking risks with technology. Finally our attention turned to our colleagues around the world and how we support one another.
Some Takeaways from Think Tank Part 1:
As we take risks as teacher librarians, it is more important than ever to show our work in a public way. It isn’t about always showing the polished product at the end. It’s about showing the process that it took to get there, even if it wasn’t successful. We never know who we are mentoring along the way by showing our work.
It is more important than ever to build your own Professional Learning Network (PLN). We all come from a range of support systems. Some of us are fortunate enough to work in districts that are supportive of our work and have administrators that respect and value what happens in the libraries. Others don’t have that support system. Regardless of where we are, there is a vast network of librarians ready to support us. From following #tlchat on Twitter to watching the TL Virtual Cafe webinars to tuning in to TL News Night to building your own network of librarian colleagues on Twitter or Google Plus Communities, it is more possible than ever to build your own support system that pushes your thinking and enriches your work rather than feeling like you are living on a deserted island in your school.
Evanced listens! To sit there and share the landscape of libraries and the challenges we face was overwhelming, but it was nice to know that there is a company that has the word “solutions” in their title on our side. They may not be able to solve all of the challenges we face, but we at least had a voice and impact into future solutions that they may explore in the landscape of libraries and librarianship.
The next part of our day was looking at the landscape of Evanced. Matt Sheley, Vice President of Evanced, shared the journey that the company took in arriving at Wandoo Planet and Wandoo Reader as solutions to a challenge. The company looked at reading data that showed a population of students who weren’t reading beyond elementary grades. They wanted to develop a tool that connected learners with materials that resonated with their interests in the hopes that it would grow them into lifelong learners and readers. It was truly amazing to see the process from notes in a journal to the tool that we are using today.
During lunch, we got to view Wandoo Reader, which is primarily focused on public libraries for now, but we had the opportunity to brainstorm what this tool might look like within a school.
To me, one of the most interesting conversations centered on collaboration between school and public libraries. While we acknowledged the importance of data confidentiality, we also considered how powerful it would be if school and public libraries could share data. Since students mostly read based on their interests during the summer, being able to see that data as a school librarians would help us improve our collections to match reader interests as well as advise our library members on next reads.
We also got a chance to walk around the Evanced office. Some parts were very quiet with coders at work. We also saw some of the displays that were taken to schools and conferences.
Some Takeaways from Think Tank Part 2:
In our libraries and in our schools, we should take time to identify the major challenges that we face. Rather than try to “fix” them all at once, we should select the one(s) we want to focus on and think beyond just the next steps or even the “research-based” strategies that we always turn to. While these are certainly things to consider, we should also give ourselves permission to dream and create something entirely new that we build together as we go. It should be a solution that truly matches the needs of the learners involved and pierces to the root of the challenge.
We should never feel done. I could tell that Evanced is the kind of company that doesn’t put out a product and say “This is it. Take it or leave it.” They constantly listen, fine tune, and add new features that respond to the needs of the users. Isn’t that what we should be doing in our libraries and schools? We are never done.
Our day ended with “Our Whys”. We each took time to reflect on why we do the work that we do in school libraries. It was a mixture of the #whylib conversations that took Twitter by storm in April and a series of short TED Talks. It was very intimidating to me to go last during this sharing because I was blown away by the whys that my colleagues shared. Our whys included keeping students at the heart of what we do, empowering student voices in the global community, creating a participatory culture that gives all students an opportunity to contribute, and listening to each student that enters our doors and allowing the library to be a home within our buildings. If these statements had been recorded, I think I would listen to them every day on the way to work to frame my day.
Some Takeaways from Think Tank Part 3:
We each need to be able to share our “why”. It reminds us why we come to work every day. It focuses the hundreds of decisions that we make on a daily basis.
Again, we need to share the work that we do within our libraries and within that sharing we need to embed our why. It needs to shine through in the successes and the failures that we share. When it does, it becomes one of our greatest advocacy tools.
I went to Indiana thinking that I was just going to give a company feedback to improve a tool that they had created and get to hangout with some of my closest professional learning network. However, I realized that this was much more. This was about thinking big, dreaming big, and (since I’m Googlified) solving for X through moonshot thinking.
The people at Evanced are listening. They are dreaming. They are searching for solutions to some of our biggest challenges. This was such a rewarding experience, and I’m thankful to all of the people at Evanced for this opportunity. I look forward to many more conversations in the future.
Expect the Miraculous 