This is a great resource for any teacher who wants to create a “maker space” in their classroom or begin to incorporate Maker Space learning into your curriculum.
I have taken a workshop with Gary Stager and know him online (find him on twitter here. His work is really great.
here is a summery:
Join the maker movement! There’s a technological and creative revolution underway. Amazing new tools, materials and skills turn us all into makers. Using technology to make, repair or customize the things we need brings engineering, design and computer science to the masses. Fortunately for educators, this maker movement overlaps with the natural inclinations of children and the power of learning by doing. The active learner is at the center of the learning process, amplifying the best traditions of progressive education. This book helps educators bring the exciting opportunities of the maker movement to every classroom.
“Any classroom that employs a holistic model of learning will also be a place where teachers grow, and are empowered by the process. That empowerment cannot happen if we refuse to be vulnerable while encouraging students to take risks.”
Imagining Learning Listening Session at Unboundary.m4v (by Bo Adams)
Five days to provide this experience for more students for more young people. Every 500 dollars raised allows us to travel to one community and give 8-20 young people a chance to have their voice and ideas heard. If you seen the video of the students after the session, you can see their transformation and their own belief in their capacity to positively change education.
Through Imagining Learning, Listening Sessions are arranged across America to ask students how they want to learn and change their education. By providing a forum where students can trust educators with their honest opinions, Imagining Learning has the potential to change education as we know it. Read more from founders and GOOD members David Loitz and Charles Kouns.
Check it out, Imagining Learning was choose to be part of their Saturday push for good series! This is for our young people and the future of our planet. From my heart I ask you to donate today. Every dollar donated will be repaid ten-fold in positive energy. Just remember what it was like to be a young person and how powerful it was or is to be listen to and be asked to engage in a project trying to make the world better! You can bring that experience to young people all over the country! Please donate today!
Each time teens meet in a Listening Session with Imagining Learning they are transformed into facilitators of change, collaborators with hope. Over three hours they create a vision of what education can be…what they need it to be, and the result is literally a work of art. Learn more here.
Imagining Learning has held 20 Listening Sessions already and have been invited to do another 38 across the country. (See the map above.) But they can’t get there without a little help from believers like you, people who know that young people have important wisdom to share.
Let’s break down what’s possible when a few committed people get together to enact change:
Each Listening Session costs about $500. Just 20 people giving $25 each can make that happen.
For the price of a $10 lunch, 50 people can bring the Imagining Learning revolution to a city that’s begging for it.
If you and two of your friends agreed to donate $20 each and then each found three more people to do the same, that would only need to happen 4 more times to raise over $21,000 for Imagining Learning!
How systems change is a topic that has been on my mind for quite some time. Not in these concrete words, more as a feeling that I have gotten when trying to explain some new ideas or new approaches to people I am working with.
I like change and to look at my work from new perspectives. Especially in the field of education I see a big need to find a new system that is more directed towards people’s passions, needs and dreams.
So, here is a video about how systems change. I tried to write up a short summary, however, just watch the video, it is 6min and explains it really well.
The woman talking in the video is Deborah Frieze. And more background information on the system changes and Berkana you can find here.
They fail because they are afraid, bored, and confused.
They are afraid, above all else, of failing, of disappointing or displeasing the many anxious adults around them, whose limitless hopes and expectations for them hang over their heads like a cloud.
They are bored because the things they are given and told to do in school are so trivial, so dull, and make such limited and narrow demands on the wide spectrum of their intelligence, capabilities, and talents.
They are confused because most of the torrent of words that pours over them in school makes little or no sense. It often flatly contradicts other things they have been told, and hardly ever has any relation to what they really know—to the rough model of reality that they carry around in their minds.
“I have a holistic view of the educative process. The universe is one … Instead of thinking that you put pieces together that will add up to a whole, I think you have to start with the premise that they are already together and you try to keep them from destroying life by segmenting it, over-organizing and dehumanizing it… The educative process must be organic, and not an assortment of unrelated methods and ideas.”