Archives for September 2019

September 19, 2019 by John Hendron

Operation Teamwork

I’ve been around long enough, talking about student collaboration, to know that some educators find getting students to work together a challenge. But today I witnessed levels of high student engagement around what I thought was a complex set of tasks. A worksheet helped keep these tasks organized for members of the teams. Except they weren’t really teams. They were rock bands.

As part of the #rockyourschool day at Randolph Elementary School, Ms. Eastwood, Ms. Gates, Ms. Vaughan and Ms. Demas supervised these bands toward coming up with a band name, designing a CD cover, creating a band logo, and creating a cover song using GarageBand. This was after the students got a demonstration and got to ask questions from the guitarist of Carbon Leaf.

It’s always interesting to walk into a learning space and notice that the students pay no attention to you (whether or not I have a camera in hand). They’re interacting with one another, they’re deeply engaged in a task on their iPad, or they’re relaying their progress to one of the adults in the room. The theme around rock bands made the whole day special, but what really made the event sing (pun intended) was the emphasis placed on how we can cultivate group work (collaboration, cooperation, teamwork).

All the groups weren’t perfect. Some were great in working toward one of the team’s goals. But some of those goals required conversations. Compromises. And trying to overcome one idea to accommodate another. The songs they were creating had to represent their band, and every decision was tied to a book the students were reading.

I feel blessed to be able to witness these learning events firsthand. Beyond the obvious creativity these teachers had to plan the lesson and the entire day, they took risks in implementing new activities that championed deeper learning. And it didn’t hurt that so many students were having an awesome day!

September 16, 2019 by John Hendron

Printing in Plastic

Oh, the adventures in melting a nearly endless string of polylactide through a blaring-hot nozzle onto a warm, if not slightly hot, plate of glass! Or perhaps it’s acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, melted at an even higher temperature, onto that same glass bed, on top a fresh glaze of purple glue, rubbed on from a common purple glue stick?

What are we talking about?

3D printing is still a very young but exciting innovation found in schools. And today there are different kinds of ways to print in 3D, and in some cases, the “printers” are subtractive; they’ll take material away. The ability to make a physical object from base materials, anything you might imagine, seems born from science fiction. “I see a cube. And I shall make a cube!” We are still a long ways away from the replicator, the device omnipresent in the StarTrek series, that made food to eat, with a greater convenience than today’s microwave oven.

Our 3D printers melt plastic strings (called filament) through a small nozzle to print, or lay lines of plastic onto a bed. Over time these passes of the print head give height to the object. But while building a cube or a cylinder might seem simple, there is software involved before the printing that figures out how the machine will actually make the object. We call this slicing software.

And where do these objects come from? Well, they have to be designed. Computer-aided design software (CAD) allows us to create 3D objects in software. You can rotate the objects on the screen, and eventually, you can see your creation in real life, once it’s printed.

While all of these processes can be fulfilling as a designer, to have an idea for an object, then to create it, then slice it, and then print it, there are better reasons to have access to 3D printers beyond bemusement. A 3D printer can be used to print a tool, such as a wrench. Or a part to better attach your camera to a tripod. Or the perfect platform to display your art piece. Or to re-create a model of another 3D object. Specifically, we downloaded a scan of Abe Lincoln’s life mask, made while he was still alive, from the Smithsonian Institution. Imagine being able not only to see the face of Abe Lincoln, but to touch it, too.

The adventure is in the printing at this point. At the GHS Learning Commons, we have a Ultimaker 3 Extended 3D printer that makes very good models, but like most of them, can be finicky. Sometimes the print doesn’t take to the bed. Or the filament gets stuck. Or… sometimes it just prints out brilliantly.

So if you’re new to 3D printing, consider some of the new vocabulary:

PLA – a softer, easy to print plastic filament type
ABS – a harder, more heat resistant filament type
model – a file (.obj or .stl) that represents a three-dimensional shape
slicer software – makes files (.gcode) that tells a 3D printer how to print the 3D object
CAD/design software – for creating 3D objects; some are easily made from primitive shapes such as cubes, rectangular solids, pyramids, and more

3D printers are available in each of our schools. That doesn’t mean they’re all working. But at this point in their evolution, we’re all learning a little bit of engineering along the way!

September 16, 2019 by kdemas

Cloudy with a Chance of Green Screen

Developing young writers comes with its own challenges. Like with any new and complex skill, young writers can struggle with how to be successful early on, to find their voice, to incorporate new vocabulary into thoughts. Oh, and the spelling!

Fourth grade teacher Sarah Prusinowski is using a familiar children’s book to inspire her students to write. She is launching a project where students will be challenged to recreate the popular story Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs by Judi Barrett. Students will use descriptive language to describe various foods falling from the sky. As the culminating part of this project, students will utilize a video app with green screen and Sketchbook Motion to bring their stories to life.

So how do these tools help?

One of the processes involved in writing a story is conveying a sequence of events. Students today are avid consumers of media. A TV show or a movie has already been designed to be interesting. There’s a sequence of events that makes following that story easy for us. But what about when you’re in the writer’s chair? It makes perfect sense to us watching our favorite television show, but having to do that ourselves?

By asking students to create their own media they can be more objective in the creation of their story. They might have left something out, or they might want to add more detail, so that the part that comes later makes sense. Creating a story is more than just putting words to paper. There’s the generation of ideas, then the language we use to best represent those ideas.

And as a reader, we want to know the details about what is described. Was it just a day? Or a cold and blustery winter morning, the likes of which I’d never once experienced?! Students often find their favorite books are those where the descriptions are palpable; great books take us to far-off lands and on incredible adventures. Learning how to convey our ideas using descriptive language helps our stories come alive. Like meatballs, falling from the sky!

Stay tuned for some student created examples!