It’s sad but true. I’ve been so busy lately with work and MakerEd stuff that I have barely had time to even breathe! I can’t complain, though, I have been having a great time and learning a lot of new stuff to use in my classroom. So what have I been up to?
Maker Meet-N-Greet
Last weekend, I co-hosted a Meet-n-Greet for the South Jersey Maker group with Dave Zirkle. We had a nice group of folks show up to talk about maker projects and share ideas. After the initial meeting at Panera, we made a field trip to Fazzio’s to wander the surplus store and get supplies for projects. I love Fazzio’s, they always have such a huge amount of random stuff.
Yup, that’s a lot of anvils.
Dan rocking new safety goggles.
After wrapping up the morning, my friend Dan and I continued on to North Jersey. We spent an hour or two investigating a Super Home Depot. Yes, a SUPER Home Depot! Tools and making supplies galore.
This place is amazing!
In the evening, we caught the ferry over to NYC for an educator meetup with the folks from The Extraordinaires. They were hosting a get together for educators using the Design Studio to share ideas and make suggestions on how to improve it. It was a great evening with enthusiastic educators!
On Wednesday last week, I was a guest speaker on a podcast for PAECT about STEM and the Maker Movement in schools. Friday afternoon, I spent my lunch break with several of my 5th graders who wanted to learn about video game programming. And then Saturday another whirlwind weekend started!
Saturday morning I drove up to Plainfield for edcamp Central Jersey. Along with Dan, Dave, Steve, Leila, and Jackie, I set up the Mobile Makerspace for the day. It was a small edcamp, but we had some great conversations with people while we were there, and I even won an IPEVO document camera, which I gave to Dan since I had just ordered one for myself the week before. Saturday evening was spent at Maker Depot watching videos on awesome things you can do with extremely powerful magnets.
Sunday morning we were up bright and early and off to Westwood for #CoffeeEduNJ. We had a lovely group, and our morning was filled with delicious crepes and a variety of education topics. From Westwood, it was back to Maker Depot for the rest of the day to work on curriculum for Maker Depot Academy. I am extremely fortunate to work with an amazing group of educators for this project: Marcos Navas, Dan Borghoff, Samantha Morra, Billy Krakower, and Laura Fleming. Stay tuned, we’ll have some awesome stuff happening soon!
Today, it’s back to work and continuing our design challenge in the STEM lab. It’s going to be another busy but productive week!
