STEAM

We love being able to share their stories and their work with you and hope this series continues to give other educators encouragement to try something new in the classroom! This month, we’re featuring Amanda Callahan-Mims, a STEM Lab Teacher from Tennessee, who led an amazing repurposing of a school bus into a STEAM space!

It’s become increasingly common for schools to feature these types of spaces, which are designed to promote hands-on tinkering, breaking, collaboration, failure, problem solving, and creative invention using any assortment of MakerEd tools. In fab labs, students are free to create whatever they want in essentially any way that they want.

Though Instructables has been around for quite a while now, it’s still a very valuable resource for STEM teachers or any educator who is looking for some inspirational project ideas. Instructables is home to an online library of various projects completed by students, teachers, hobbyists, and everyone in between.

While library makerspaces are a great way to advance and promote 21st century learning, we’re not exactly advocating for overthrowing the library in your school completely. Just want to make that perfectly clear. In fact, school libraries and library makerspaces have been known to complement each other, making one reason they’re so popular.

We’re excited to introduce our community to anothe “Eduporium Featured Educator.” This month, we’re featuring Nikki Lavergne, an instructional technology facilitator from Louisiana, who led an amazing repurposing of a school bus into a STEAM space! Keep reading to learn more about Nikki and this amazing project!

As we do every month, we’ve selected a recipient for our $500 EdTech grant award for the month of April. The awardee is Ashley Alden, a teacher at Dayton Heights Elementary in Los Angeles, California. We really loved Ashley’s application and how she got the inspiration for the project she wants to work on with her students.

You know us. We love advocating for the use of new and engaging mediums in contemporary education. In fact, we’re regularly advocating for the use of augmented and virtual reality in all grades—not just college—and that just so happens to be the subject of this week’s Rising Resources blog. Read on to learn more about Alive Studios!

It’s time to announce the recipient of Eduporium’s $500 EdTech grant for the month of March. And, the winner is…Jacqueline Firster, a dedicated makerspace manager and STEM teacher from Arlington Public Schools in Virginia. Jacqueline is going to be using her award to create a mobile makerspace and enriched PBL in her school.

Though they do have differing views when it comes to what the most important components of learning should be, we think it’s safe to say that both groups want education to be fun! And, that’s very appropriate because the subject of this week’s Rising Resources blog is Funology—an online database for educators to find hands-on STEAM projects.

Ordering a bunch of new technology and then throwing it into a classroom isn’t necessarily a great idea. Students might be excited, but it’s highly unlikely that them or their teachers will know how to make the most of this technology or even know how to use it at all. With advances in EdTech and a greater focus on preparing