Last weekend I visited the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh with my family. Four years ago when we visited, they had a makerspace in its infancy. To my excitement, the MAKESHOP (on Twitter: @makeshoppgh) is now a force to be reckoned with, and I had to share some of the pictures I took there. My 12-year-old daughter wanted to stay there all day!
Words and pictures don't do the MAKESHOP justice, but I was hoping the projects, storage ideas, supplies, and so forth would prove inspirational to librarians. Although the makerspace concept is different in a children's museum in terms of scale and budget (and the MAKESHOP is on an epic scale), many of the lessons are similar in terms of safety, supplies, supervision, and scope.
I was lucky enough to chat with the MAKESHOP's manager, Rebecca Grabman, who gave me permission to share her name on my blog along with the pictures I took. Her email is rgrabman[at]pittsburghkids.org. (Replace the at with @.) She is incredibly knowledgeable about makerspaces and making/learning research, some of which is supported by the Children's Museum. We had a fascinating conversation, and while we talked I was busy making a tiny house out of cardboard while my daughter sewed a bunch of grapes out of felt. This place will truly bring out the creativity in everyone. Go see it if you're ever in Pittsburgh!!
Here is part 1 of my MAKESHOP slideshow!
And because PhotoSnack limits the number of slides you can use, here is part 2:
Monday, July 27, 2015
A Blog to Watch
After viewing several blogs that were new to me, Will Richardson's really grabbed me: http://willrichardson.com
I took a class last semester about teaching social studies, and my professor spoke a lot about authentic intellectual work (AIW) and project-based learning. This seems to be what Richardson is interested in as well. His posts are extremely thought-provoking, and he challenges many of our base assertions about what school is and needs to be. He has his finger on the pulse of the need of education to evolve with the technological times. Very interesting stuff and one to learn more about.
I took a class last semester about teaching social studies, and my professor spoke a lot about authentic intellectual work (AIW) and project-based learning. This seems to be what Richardson is interested in as well. His posts are extremely thought-provoking, and he challenges many of our base assertions about what school is and needs to be. He has his finger on the pulse of the need of education to evolve with the technological times. Very interesting stuff and one to learn more about.
AASL Best Websites 2015
The American Association of School Librarians publishes an annual list of Best Websites for Teaching & Learning in several different categories. I perused many of the websites on the 2015 list and chose a few to highlight here. What I found somewhat universal is that, because these sites are meant to be crowd-sourced, a few are not yet as populated as they will be if they prove to be a hit. Therefore it can be a bit difficult to judge the potential of the online community when sites are in their infancy. These websites are all worth visiting and revisiting!
WhatWasThere: As a history buff and vintage photo lover, I appreciated the potential of WhatWasThere right away. Both an app and a site, WhatWasThere ties Google maps to historic photos, with the idea that visitors can see a historic street view along with a modern one. Once you click on a photo to select it, you can click to go to Google StreetView, where the photo you selected will be overlaid over the modern view. A slide bar allows you to fade the vintage photo in and out so you can simultaneously view both old and new.
What this could potentially mean in real time is that a visitor could stand on a city block (or search for it) and see photos of all the historic buildings that existed on that same spot. Alternatively, a class could research the history of a particular building as it was built and evolved over time. While it does take some age and experience to appreciate how cool this view of the past is, students might be excited to see what was there before their school building or the grocery store on the corner. It is a good way to get students interested in local history and to give them a sense of how time changes things.
The site currently has about 50,000 photos and is crowdsourced, meaning users are able to upload their own vintage photos with simple tags and labels. I tested the site by searching for Virginia Beach, VA (where I currently live), Ewing Township, NJ (where I grew up), and Chillicothe, OH (where my husband's father grew up). These are roughly in order of population, and I found photos for all three, with Chillicothe only having two photos thus far. Bigger cities obviously have more, but the site is growing all the time.
MyStorybook: This one is so fun and has instant appeal to children who want to create their own storybook. There are plenty of sites and software that do similar things, but MyStorybook is an excellent entry. It's free and quick to get started with no account needed unless you want to save your story. Accounts require an age range, email address, a username, and a password, but not a child's full name or any other details.
MyStorybook offers tutorials to help young students get started creating their storybook, but most will probably be able to dive right in. Teachers can easily provide structure to the creation process or let children's imaginations run wild. The characters and other pictures, backgrounds, etc. are numerous, flexible, bright, and colorful, and it is easy to add pages to your story. When you are done you can save it as an eBook and/or share it online.
Gooru: This site, unlike something like MyStorybook, requires a bit of a deep dive in order to fully engage with the site. To take a snorkel, you can browse the "collections" uploaded by contributors--basically, annotated web links with suggested lesson ideas, all curriculum-mapped to Common Core and/or other standards.
If you want to take the plunge, you can "remix" them into collections of your own. You can also upload your own content and create a "class" within the site to share the resources you have remixed or uploaded with your students. Digital analytics help you monitor whether your students have visited and successfully completed the module you create.
A few districts have adopted Gooru, at least experimentally, and like other sites such as Edmodo, it does seem like a district or school-wide adoption of Gooru might be a more effective use than one teacher using it alone. Gooru has potential to be very useful and has the backing of some impressive corporate and non-profit partners.
Friday, July 17, 2015
Presentation Tools
This week's post is about presentation tools. As Dr. Kimmel stated, between apps and the Web there are about eleventy billion choices. I chose to explore three that I'd never tried before. The first one was Slidely, which I found to be easy and pretty intuitive. I could see using Slidely for those end-of-the-year slideshow presentations. You can create a separate account or login using Facebook, which is what I chose to do. I was able to access all of my FB photos and albums instantly, and I made a quick slideshow of my kids' school pictures through the year. I was able to add music from an infinite (seemingly) range of choices, so I chose "Time in a Bottle." You can also make a collage or movie. You can of course upload pictures or access them directly from several different sources, including Flickr. Despite poking around, I couldn't figure out how to share my slideshow any way except on Facebook, although it does seem like there are other options if you can figure out how to do it.
The next tool I tried was Haiku Deck, which is very simple to use though its options are limited. Taking my inspiration from the name, I chose to illustrate a poem that I like. One of the nicest things about Haiku Deck is that it contains a large array of tagged photos, making it super easy to find photos for your slides. (They are internally credited, too, which is helpful.) The templates are simple and you cannot control very much, but it is definitely quick. HaikuDeck, like Slidely, is integrated with social media and available as an app. I wish there was a way to add music, and at least when I was using it the autosave function crashed Safari several times, but otherwise this is a very painless way to make a quick presentation. I think students who do not have much patience with technology could find many ways to use it. Here's my creation:
Life has loveliness to sell - Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires
Finally, I tried Pixton, an online tool that allows you to create your own comic strips. The site offers a seven-day, limited function trial membership, after which you can pay for different installment plans that range up to $90 a year. The site offers a number of community features. The comic strips that others have created are way more impressive than this one (here's just one example), which I made in about 15 minutes using some Sondheim lyrics from the musical Company. While I am not inclined to pay to use a site like this, I could see students really enjoying it and using it for literature projects. How fun to illustrate a scene from a novel the class is reading, for example!
The next tool I tried was Haiku Deck, which is very simple to use though its options are limited. Taking my inspiration from the name, I chose to illustrate a poem that I like. One of the nicest things about Haiku Deck is that it contains a large array of tagged photos, making it super easy to find photos for your slides. (They are internally credited, too, which is helpful.) The templates are simple and you cannot control very much, but it is definitely quick. HaikuDeck, like Slidely, is integrated with social media and available as an app. I wish there was a way to add music, and at least when I was using it the autosave function crashed Safari several times, but otherwise this is a very painless way to make a quick presentation. I think students who do not have much patience with technology could find many ways to use it. Here's my creation:
Life has loveliness to sell - Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires
Finally, I tried Pixton, an online tool that allows you to create your own comic strips. The site offers a seven-day, limited function trial membership, after which you can pay for different installment plans that range up to $90 a year. The site offers a number of community features. The comic strips that others have created are way more impressive than this one (here's just one example), which I made in about 15 minutes using some Sondheim lyrics from the musical Company. While I am not inclined to pay to use a site like this, I could see students really enjoying it and using it for literature projects. How fun to illustrate a scene from a novel the class is reading, for example!
Thursday, July 9, 2015
You Can Learn a Lot from Lydia...the 3-D Printed Lady
The subject this week is 3-D printing, coding, and creativity...but first I'd like you to meet someone: The little doll on the left is Lydia. She belongs to my daughter.
Lydia also has a friend named Vivian...you can see them below left. (Lydia is wearing a yarn wig my daughter made for her.) My kid and her friends are 12 years old and obsessed with these dolls, which they design themselves online.
Why is this relevant? These MyMakie dolls are 3-D printed in England from the designs their owners create. (Go try designing one, it's fun and there's no obligation.) They are fully articulated, balanced perfectly so they can stand without falling over, and have detachable replaceable parts. (Lydia and Vivian switch eyes fairly often.) Viewed close up, their skin, which comes in one of many colors you choose from, is just a bit rough, like expensive parchment stationery, and you can see the slightest bit of layering. But they are sturdy and playable just like any other doll.Cheap? Ha. No. They cost over $100 each, and my daughter spent all her Christmas and birthday money on these girls. But they have given her hundreds of hours of creative crafting enjoyment. She made the house you see in the top picture and the "secret garden" in the bottom picture as well as many clothes. In fact, she has learned to use a sewing machine, all because of these dolls. And because she loves photographing them, they have their own Instagram.
3-D printing is an amazing technology that we only dreamed of just a few years ago. Before 3-D printing, kids could imagine, dream, create, sculpt, anything they cared to invent. But they had no way of duplicating their designs. 3-D printing allows you to design and create an item, test it, alter the design, and create it again, almost effortlessly.
What on earth does this have to do with libraries? That's a valid question. Traditional print formats (unless they are pop-up books) are two-dimensional. Presentations, research, even computer screens are all two-dimensional.
But the world of the imagination is in 3-D. To be able to create an exact replica of something you design is a perfect example of "authentic intellectual work," learning by doing. Increasingly, with information readily available in any room of the school via the Internet, and books ever so slowly moving to digital formats, the library is not a quiet place of silent reading but an active laboratory of learning. 3-D printing, though in its infancy, is a great addition to that laboratory.
Coding, too, is authentic intellectual work. My son spent thousands of hours on Scratch as a young boy, learning how to code because he wanted to create something. You want to make that picture of a cat dance and sing? You have to drag and drop the commands in exactly the right order. He would open up other people's projects, study the code, and edit them to make them his own. He readily embraced the learning curve because he was creative, not because he wanted to learn to code. This is an important distinction for me--you don't decide to learn to play the piano because the piano's mechanism is fascinating, but because if you do it right, you make music.
In the library, as technology leaders, we have to make the right tools available so that students can follow their creative urges to their conclusion. If we provide tools like 3-D printers and opportunities to learn to code or program robots, we can change those wistful "I wish I coulds..." to "Oh wow, I can actually do that!"
Wednesday, July 1, 2015
QR Codes, Augmented Reality, and You Kids Get off My Lawn!
My children tell me that I am behind the times, but here's my dirty confession: I don't get QR Codes. I am very tech-savvy in most ways, but QR Codes have always seemed like a cumbersome thing that often doesn't even work. I have failed to be wowed.
Recently, however, my son used a QR Code for a year-long middle-school project that resulted in a Youtube video. He worked with the organization Lynnhaven River Now to write and direct an entertaining video for kids about preserving the watershed. The video is called Pollution Pirate and my QR code below links to it. I'm very proud of his team's efforts.
The reason I thought to link to this is because when it came time for the exhibition of all the projects, I was more or less anticipating the old-fashioned TV on a cart, showing his team's video on a loop. Instead my son made a flyer with a QR code linking to Youtube so the parents and other visitors could watch the video on their smartphones or at home. So cool, and a way around the fact that Youtube is behind the firewall anyway. It's a reminder that while we librarians are supposed to be tech leaders in school, we should never forget that students will lead us to new ideas.
Without further ado, Pollution Pirate:
In the library, QR Codes have a million applications. I particularly like the idea of using them for book reviews. For example, in a marriage of the new with the old, you could make a color photocopy of a book dust jacket, print it out, add a QR Code, and display it on a "What to Read" bulletin board. The QR Code would link to student book reviews, blogs, and other resources. Sometimes books even have video book trailers you can link to. In fact, after writing this paragraph I decided to look for visual examples to point to for my blog. This library blogger essentially did exactly what I describe: https://freshlymintedlibrarian.wordpress.com/2011/05/10/my-very-own-qr-codes/ She also links to a book trailer.
As for augmented reality, the students and staff at my son's middle school use Aurasma quite a lot. About a year ago the librarian at his school was raving about this app. She had seen some demos and was brimming with ideas for it. Smartphones and iPads are pretty common, so the librarian thought students might use Aurasma in the library for adding their own quick video book reviews. They could take a picture of the book cover and then film a quick video of themselves talking about the book. I don't know if this idea took off, but I know my son created an Aurasma in the cafeteria, something to do with the benefits of recycling.
Augmented reality is a fascinating idea. The number-one thing that makes it new and different from the "regular" Internet is the ability to access information from 2-D images on a mobile device. I love it for marketing. The demos I have seen of scanning movie posters or car ads to get more information are impressive. HOWEVER...I think one of the reasons it has been a hit is the novelty. Once that novelty wears off, then what? Only time will tell. I am old enough to remember when simply visiting a website was really cool! In fact, reviewing websites in actual paper books about the "Net" was one of my very first jobs in New York. No kidding, I wrote a good portion of this book and several others:
Seems comical now. But that book came out in 1996, which is "only" 19 years ago. I plan to be a school librarian 19 years from now...so who knows what will seem comical then?
People want the information they want when they want it, and I don't think text-based search is going anywhere, for the primary reason that you cannot type an image into a search bar. (Although on the other hand, I use Google Image Search all the time.)
Also, and this is my own curmudgeonly bias, while these types of apps are incredibly cool and have many interesting potential applications, "Ain't nobody got time for that." Right now, augmented reality is an extra--an add-on to the real, everyday stuff we have to do. The Internet (circa 1996) used to be an extra. Once upon a time, computers were an extra too. Once upon a million years ago, moveable type was the most advanced technology in the world. I do not think QR Codes and Aurasma are the be-all, end-all, but they are certainly part of the evolving journey.
Recently, however, my son used a QR Code for a year-long middle-school project that resulted in a Youtube video. He worked with the organization Lynnhaven River Now to write and direct an entertaining video for kids about preserving the watershed. The video is called Pollution Pirate and my QR code below links to it. I'm very proud of his team's efforts.
The reason I thought to link to this is because when it came time for the exhibition of all the projects, I was more or less anticipating the old-fashioned TV on a cart, showing his team's video on a loop. Instead my son made a flyer with a QR code linking to Youtube so the parents and other visitors could watch the video on their smartphones or at home. So cool, and a way around the fact that Youtube is behind the firewall anyway. It's a reminder that while we librarians are supposed to be tech leaders in school, we should never forget that students will lead us to new ideas.
Without further ado, Pollution Pirate:
In the library, QR Codes have a million applications. I particularly like the idea of using them for book reviews. For example, in a marriage of the new with the old, you could make a color photocopy of a book dust jacket, print it out, add a QR Code, and display it on a "What to Read" bulletin board. The QR Code would link to student book reviews, blogs, and other resources. Sometimes books even have video book trailers you can link to. In fact, after writing this paragraph I decided to look for visual examples to point to for my blog. This library blogger essentially did exactly what I describe: https://freshlymintedlibrarian.wordpress.com/2011/05/10/my-very-own-qr-codes/ She also links to a book trailer.
As for augmented reality, the students and staff at my son's middle school use Aurasma quite a lot. About a year ago the librarian at his school was raving about this app. She had seen some demos and was brimming with ideas for it. Smartphones and iPads are pretty common, so the librarian thought students might use Aurasma in the library for adding their own quick video book reviews. They could take a picture of the book cover and then film a quick video of themselves talking about the book. I don't know if this idea took off, but I know my son created an Aurasma in the cafeteria, something to do with the benefits of recycling.
Augmented reality is a fascinating idea. The number-one thing that makes it new and different from the "regular" Internet is the ability to access information from 2-D images on a mobile device. I love it for marketing. The demos I have seen of scanning movie posters or car ads to get more information are impressive. HOWEVER...I think one of the reasons it has been a hit is the novelty. Once that novelty wears off, then what? Only time will tell. I am old enough to remember when simply visiting a website was really cool! In fact, reviewing websites in actual paper books about the "Net" was one of my very first jobs in New York. No kidding, I wrote a good portion of this book and several others:
Seems comical now. But that book came out in 1996, which is "only" 19 years ago. I plan to be a school librarian 19 years from now...so who knows what will seem comical then?
People want the information they want when they want it, and I don't think text-based search is going anywhere, for the primary reason that you cannot type an image into a search bar. (Although on the other hand, I use Google Image Search all the time.)
Also, and this is my own curmudgeonly bias, while these types of apps are incredibly cool and have many interesting potential applications, "Ain't nobody got time for that." Right now, augmented reality is an extra--an add-on to the real, everyday stuff we have to do. The Internet (circa 1996) used to be an extra. Once upon a time, computers were an extra too. Once upon a million years ago, moveable type was the most advanced technology in the world. I do not think QR Codes and Aurasma are the be-all, end-all, but they are certainly part of the evolving journey.
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