Links and Loves Friday, November 5, 2021

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 🍂🍂Happy November all! 🍂🍂


If you live in Wisconsin or the midwest I hope you are enjoying the fall-like weather and the cool temperatures. I feel as though we have finally gotten into a rhythm of day to day school, teaching and learning. 


It's been a creative week of STEM projects in our Innovation Lab. During Excel this week my colleague, Teri and I, led a Cricut Design Space Activity to create a personalized name plate. Students were able to show understanding of scale, positioning, layers, welding and weeding, which are all graphic design concepts.




Another project my youth apprentice and I worked on is a balsa wood airplane cut out on the Cricut machine. We wanted to add weight to the nose of the plane, so we used Tinkercad.com to design and then 3D print pieces to add to the nose.  It may seem like a simple project, but a lot of design, critical thinking and troubleshooting went into these gliders. On Monday we plan to have a friendly competition to see who's design will fly the glider the farthest. Wish me luck!

Cricut mat with cut out pieces

Assembled gliders with 3D printed nose weights added


Norton on the left / Youth Apprentice on the right

We have many other STEM related projects planned which I will share with you all as we dive into others. 


In other news, I subscribed to a few new podcasts this week. Brave New Teaching by Marie Morris and Amanda Cardenas, two ELA educators.  I enjoyed the episode called,"Makerspace in the ELA Classroom".

I also listened to The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast by Betsy Potash. I listened to the episode called, "Creative Escape Rooms without the Fuss".

I have a lot to learn and improve upon when it comes to producing a quality podcast. I'm learning and I know I have a ways to go. But the only way to learn is to dive in and give it a try, right? Have you listened to my new podcast, "Life is But a Google" yet? This week I published an episode about the features of Screencastify. 


Here is a useful extension that I recommended to a colleague for splitting screens. Here is another extension I recommended to our tech group for text to speech on a PDF or webpage. Did you know that on an iPhone you can move the cursor by tapping and holding on the space bar? 



The awesome and creative Georgia Dean (@redefineed in Instagram), an educator I met through the AI course that I teach, shares awesome educational inspiration on Instagram! Recently she shared this post on Instagram. Adobe for Edu, along with the Smithsonian, developed an interactive augmented reality experience for students to explore the ocean's coral reefs. AR and VR bring the most engaging and educational experiences for our students.  I love it!


I hope your weekend gives you time to unwind and enjoy some time outdoors. The weather in Wisconsin looks great for this time of year. I'm planning to go for walks each day and enjoy a new audio book that I'm getting ready to listening to. 🎧

Comments

Mrs. Rucinsky said…
These projects have been so fun and exciting for us, but also our students! I can't wait for our next STEM session! I love seeing how engaged the students are, and how they keep coming back to ask about the next project we have planned. It just shows the power of STEM and how engaging it is for our students!
November 8, 2021 at 2:40 PM
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