Do you have several little makerspace devices that need to be charged but also stowed securely? Me too! I was so excited to have funds to order 10 phones to use for VR and a set of Ozobots this year (which I still need to play with and learn how to use the Ozobots), but then I needed to think about where, when, and how to charge them. For this year, I plugged two power strips in on the Makerspace counter and kept the phone chargers plugged into that and charged the phones when I could keep an eye on them, but clearly that wasn't ideal. And then my Ozobots came in towards the end of the school year, and I thought I might just have to have the Ozobots and phones take turns charging when someone could keep an eye on them. Hmmm...what to do? Our building tech, who I often work with and our roles sometimes overlap, mentioned to me this spring that some buildings were getting rid of tech carts they no longer needed. They had been used for laptop carts, iPad classroom carts, etc. before our district was fully one to one. He asked me (and other folks in the building too) if there was a need for any. At first, I wasn't interested and thought it'd be one more thing to take up space, BUT then he mentioned several of them have locks AND outlets with power. And my interest went from low to through the roof! YES! Pick me! I'll take two! I immediately envisioned one being for the phones and VR and one for the Ozobots! I started putting them together and thinking this out a little bit on my last work day before summer break as you can see in the pictures below, but there's still some work to go for sure. The smaller one, I started fashioning to be our VR cart. As you can see in the third picture over, I put 33 cardboard headsets in it (11 per shelf) on 3 of the left shelves and plugged in the 10 phone chargers on the right side. Yes, I did write their on them in Sharpie in two spots on each of the VRs. They're cardboard! In July or August, I will plug the phones into those chargers, and I plan to put our portable AUP we use for Google Expeditions on the remaining open shelf to the bottom left. Before students start, I plan to put some labels in the cart about what pieces should go where in the hopes of keeping it organized. I will also type up some instructions or tips for teachers and put them somewhere in or on the cart.
The larger cart, I'm planning on using for our Ozobots. But I think I could easily fit the Ozobots in half of the cart space if that even with chargers, markers, etc. for a set of around 15. I'm not sure yet what I'll do with the remaining space. I might just leave it open until something else that needs a lot of chargers comes along. We'll see. I didn't have time to start that cart much due to other priorities that day, and I need to play around with the Ozobots more too and learn how to use them. I will hopefully do that towards the end of summer break. I try to make as many things in the Makerspace as I can able to be checked out. This will help make those items more mobile, while allowing for them to be charged and secured when not in use. I'm excited I had a chance to start this before summer began and am excited to see where this could take us next school year! I'll write a post with updates after they're done.
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