Karen Blumberg

Technology is special.

Notes from our tour of the Marymount's new Fab Lab with @JaymesDec

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I just got back from a tour of Marymount's new Fab Lab led by Jaymes Dec (@JaymesDec) and Lesa Wang. (Fab is short for Fabrication) Lesa has been teaching art at Marymount for years, and she says her whole curriculum has changed as a result of having the Fab Lab available to her. Marymount is an all-girls PreK-12 independent school on the Upper East Side. Visiting along with me from The School at Columbia University were Greg Benedis-Grab (science), Gina Marcel (K-2 Technology), Dena Rothstein (5th Grade), and David Waterbury (Tech).

Jaymes learned about technology as a graduate student in the ITP program at NYU Tisch. (ITP = Interactive Telecommunications Program). He has experience teaching afterschool robotics classes at Vision Education. Jaymes helped establish GreenFab in the Bronx, and when their 3-year funded project ended, he happened to be consulting for Marymount to set up their Fab Lab. Currently, he is employed by Marymount working on projects with grades K, 5, 6, 7, 8.

In terms of building their 3D designs, Jaymes prefers Tinkercad over 3DTin. He says Google SketchUp isn't designed to create 3D files natively - for that, you need to install a plugin. 

In the Fab Lab are a ridiculous number of printing machines including an Epilog Laser ($30K) and the corresponding filter system. There are also multiple CNC printers including Makerbots and ShopBots. (CNC = Computer Numeric Control) The Shopbot is a 3D milling machine that can drill on 3 axes. This particular unit has a digitizing probe that can act like a 3D scanner so you can scan, modify, and print!

There were awesome examples of student work on the whole 4th floor:
- In the Science room, students were constructing workable prosthetic arms.
- In the Art room, students were redesigning toothbrushes, building their "dream car," and making models of buildings.
- In the Fab Lab, students were building a variety of functional 3D objects.

Our ultimate ulterior motive for visiting was to see examples of innovation in education and to find a way for our 5th graders and Marymount's 5th graders to collaborate on a project. Both schools study Ancient Greece, so one possible collaboration may involve The School kids designing temples and outsourcing to Marymount kids for actual printing (and vice versa). Or maybe we even have kids collaborating "long distance" on a design project using GoogleDocs and Skype.

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5th graders are recording narrations for their "Day of the Dead" altars created with #Inspiration:

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Yesterday, I worked with the 5th grade Spanish teacher, Nicole Haleen, to help her students search and cite online images for their Day of the Dead (Día de Los Muertos) altars. They built their altar in Inspiration, as it allowed them to quickly create tiers in order to populate with images and text. Their three tiers represented what the person they were commemorating liked to eat, drink, and do.

After gathering and citing all the images, kids were told to write brief descriptions (in Spanish) for why they chose each image for their altar. To record their voices in Inspiration, students highlighted each image, went up to Tools in the menu bar, scrolled down to Insert video or sound and then over to Record sound. For this recording step, students were told to grab a pair of our Logitech USB microphone headsets. We previously used a different Logitech model that was not as kid-friendly, and the earpieces kept snapping off. Having a microphone headset is a huge advantage as they drastically cut down on ambient noise. Students will probably need to change their input/output sound settings in System Preferences. They will also probably need frequent reminders to do this.

5th graders are updating their #GoogleSites digital portfolios in preparation for parent conferences

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All students in grades 3-8 at The School at Columbia University are keeping a personal digital portfolio created with GoogleSites. I wrote an earlier post here about how we are using a really simple Announcements template to organize their New Posts.

Today, I worked with 5th graders in Dena Rothstein's class to gather some of their work and archive it digitally. We talked about labeling their posts with the subject so that they align alphabetically and clustered by subject in the sidebar. Kids wrote about their Spanish calacas, Spanish altars, Math locker problem, Math Handshake problem, and more.

Kids either took pictures using PhotoBooth on their MacBooks or with an external point-and-shoot camera. Dena provided them with a short list of writing prompts: Describe the process, Describe any challenges, Describe what you makes you proud...

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