A failure is still a success, because you've learned from it and grown from it. How can we create an environment where we talk about failures? First full day of ISTE, I spend the morning going to poster sessions and playgrounds. Then I go to my first session. I thought I would go to ISTE and learn ALL the educational technology things (cue the all the things meme guy). I thought people would only share their successes, because that's often what we hear at conferences and see on social media. Wrong. So delightfully wrong I was. And I started seeing that at my first session titled "#EpicFailures by Women Leaders in Educational Technology #oktoplayoktofail." The panel consisted of Kelly Sain, Heather Lister, Sarah Thomas, Rusul Alrubail, Kim LeClaire, and Diane W. Doersch. In addition to the two quotes above that were taken from this panel, Heather Lister also said this during the discussion, "If we normalize sharing our failures, if others see people they idolize sharing failures, we'll realize there's no such thing as a perfect leader, but until we see that, we hold ourselves to it. It's doing everyone a favor to talk about failures."
These brave, failure warriors gathered a large group of strangers in a room, shared their own failures, had us share out our career epic failures at our tables, and managed to make me feel empowered when I left the session. Talking about failure is vulnerable and scary, but once it's out there, and you see others sharing theirs, there truly is something freeing and empowering about that. Ironically I then proceeded to try to show up to my BYOD session an hour early, and then stumbled upon Carl Hooker having a Fail Fest in ISTE Central. One thing he mentioned was the barriers to creativity. He listed anxiety about being wrong, discomfort with unknown, fear of
0 Comments
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. Oh my gosh, folks! I just needed to share that I feel like it is finally starting to happen! A few years ago I had a distant interest in starting a makerspace. A little over a year ago that started to become a reality as I had funds and could began brainstorming, pricing, and ordering. About six months ago I began the process of organizing, barcoding, labeling, and beginning implementation steps. Then I started sending out information to teachers; then classes came through to try out items; then I started leading meetings with different departments and grade levels to show them what the items are and help generate curriculum specific ideas; and then I created a shared folder of all the documents I had emailed, shared at meetings, etc.
And this week, it happened! This week a 7th grade science teacher used one of my ideas and checked out 4 of my 5 sets of Bloxels as a project option for students to replicate the water cycle Another science teacher asked to chat about using Google Expeditions on fossils. A 6th grade Humanities teacher checked out several of our My setup mistakes My school talks a lot about grit, learning pits, and growth mindset. I definitely started out in the pit and revisited it a few times while I was working on setting up our two 3D printers! I didn't know anything about setting up a 3D printer and had never used one before when I sat down to do it about two weeks ago. If I can set one up, you certainly can too, but maybe you can avoid a few of the rookie mistakes I made.
The printer I ordered (New Matter's MOD-t) came with a few setup instructions and directions on where to go for full instructions and pictures on their website. The website's instructions were thorough and very user friendly. They made setup easy! I got one of the printers up and running on the counter using my laptop quickly and was amazed at how easy it was...but then I realized I had made two mistakes that would need fixed: Mistake #1 was setting up the first of two printers through my teacher laptop instead of through the computer it'd be hooked up to on a regular basis. I thought we'd be able to house the printers on the counter and print wirelessly. Nope! The printers do have that capability, but my space just can't support that the way I wanted, and the computers I'll need to use for printing are all hardwired to the internet. So I then quickly enlisted the help of our building technology specialist, who helped me remove two of the computers to put a 3D printer on each end of that front row of two of computers. We had to undo the wiring of those, and then I setup the wiring of the printers to connect them to those computers. |