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How to Start a Makerspace When You're Broke

How to Start a Makerspace When You're Broke
Everyone’s Favorite Excuse I’ve had the honor and privilege of sharing with hundreds of librarians and educators about our makerspace. Unfortunately, I see many educators hold back on starting a makerspace because of funds. I’m always hearing excuses like: “I’d love to do (insert cool Maker activity) at my school, but we don’t have a budget for that.”“We can’t really afford a 3D printer right now.” What many people don’t realize is that the idea that you need a lot of money to start a Makerspace is a myth. Share Your Vision with ALL THE PEOPLE You want to start a makerspace. Recycled materials can make for awesome projects Seek out Donations Never discount the value of donated materials. Consider putting out a bin for donations of recycled materials. We first started our makerspace with bins of K’nex found in a storage room Work with What You’ve Got Since you’ve started sharing your vision, you might have found out that your school already has some maker supplies lying around. Go Make Stuff :)

http://knowledgequest.aasl.org/start-makerspace-youre-broke/

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Taking Notes By Hand May Be Better Than Digitally, Researchers Say Laptops are common in lecture halls worldwide. Students hear a lecture at the Johann Wolfang Goethe-University on Oct. 13, 2014, in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Thomas Lohnes/Getty Images hide caption Makerspace Resources All the Makerspace resources you could hope for (and more) I first started learning about the Maker Movement in education and makerspaces in late 2013. Since then, I’ve been using this page to compile and curate some of the best articles, videos, blogs, books and other resources that have helped me along the way.

Launching a Makerspace: Lessons Learned From a Transformed School Library Excitement about school makerspaces has been in the air, but many educators eager to create hands-on learning spaces in their schools still aren’t sure how to get started or why it’s worth the effort. New Canaan High School librarian Michelle Luhtala recently jumped headfirst into creating a makerspace in her library and documented what she learned, how her space changed and how it affected students along the way. Her experience was very different from elementary school librarian Andy Plemmons, whose makerspace started with a 3-D printer obtained through a grant and blossomed into a core teaching resource at his school. Luhtala is blessed with a big library, but for most of her career it has been dominated by large bookshelves. Over time, Luhtala has pared down her collection as she increased the digital reading material the library offers, but in order to make room for a makerspace she cleared out 7,000 books.

(Rethinking) Makerspaces Kids have always made in my library. We encouraged digital and visual and dramatic and rhetorical creativity before, during, and after school. But for a while, I’ve questioned the value of using already heavily used real estate to randomly carve out space for a 3D printer, electronics stations and sewing machines.

How Libraries Are Becoming Modern Makerspaces If you could ask Ben Franklin what public institution he would like to visit in America today, I bet he would say the public library. And if you asked him which part of the library, I bet he would say the makerspace. Ben Franklin is well known as a founder of the early subscription library, the Philadelphia Library Company, almost 300 years ago. It may be less well known that Franklin used the library’s space for some of his early experiments with electricity. Digital Collections, Available Online Collection Alan Lomax Collection The Alan Lomax Collection includes ethnographic field documentation, materials from Lomax’s various projects, and cross-cultural research created and collected by Alan Lomax and others on traditional song, music, dance, and body movement... Contributor: Association for Cultural Equity - Archive of American Folk Song - Lomax, Alan - American Folklife Center Date: 1933 Collection Items: View 6,612 Items Collection Alan Lomax Collection The Alan Lomax Collection includes ethnographic field documentation, materials from Lomax’s various projects, and cross-cultural research created and collected by Alan Lomax and others on traditional song, music, dance, and body movement...

Makerspace My MakerSpace Journey at The Public Library of Mount Vernon and Knox County Small Tech, Big Impact: Designing My Maker Space at The Public Library of Mount Vernon and Knox County (OH) (School Library Journal article, February 2016) 1 Year Later, What I’ve Learned Evolution of a Maker Space, From “Monstie Stuffie” Projects to a Giant Catapult littleBits activities at the circulation desk in Colleen Graves’s school library. Two years ago, I was asked to write an article for Knowledge Quest about how I created a maker space at Lamar Middle School in Flower Mound, TX. That first year of programming is so different from what I do now that I thought it pertinent to chart how our maker programming (#Makered) has evolved. During my first year as a librarian in 2012–13 my Teen Advisory Board (TAB) helped me redecorate a small office located behind our circulation desk.

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