My family has been attending the Maker Faire for the last five years. We also attend the East Bay Mini Maker Faire every October in Oakland CA. At these events, we are exposed to amazing innovation and brain power-sometimes it’s simply breathtaking. These events have instilled some very important concepts into me and my family. We are makers. We are inventors. We are creators. Recently, I have begun to see the Maker Movement (as it is called) bleed into K-12 schools as teachers see the value for PBL and engagement. There are now magazines, books, kits, YouTube channels, and clubs spawning all over the US and beyond. My 9 year old belongs to a Curiosity Hacked guild where they build, create, and explore with a set curriculum and badges. We’re sitting in a Scratch class right now @TheMADE; another offshoot of Maker Movement. Makers are made daily as we get up off the couch and begin building again. As a mom, I’m good with that.

One great example of the power of this new movement is “Super Awesome” Sylvia Todd via Mindshift. She’s 13 and has created her own Project Book, hardware kits, and video series geared towards kids to help them dive into this exciting world. It is inspiring to see how this movement has hooked her and how she in turn is so passionate that she is now teaching us all. This is the power of the Maker Movement.

Teachers: Don’t be shy, dive in, step aside and let the kids run the show in this new realm. They will amaze you and teach you a thing or two. If you’re unsure where to start, ask Sylvia!

I attended a medium-size high school in a medium sized city: Reno, Nevada. I attended and graduated from Sonoma State University, which is a medium sized state college and studied at smaller private college for my Masters in Management/Organizational Development. With a few rare exceptions, all of my jobs have been in medium sized organizations. Why does size matter? I believe as change agents we can make little changes that make a big impact–even in small-to-medium organizations. Completely retooling your instructional style is unrealistic in the course of a day, a week, a month, or school year, but attempting to introduce a even a slight change in your instructional style can have a significant impact on your students. Let’s say you use paper and pencil for most of your corrections on a document camera connected to the projector projecting onto your whiteboard. What if you tried using your tablet connected to the projector projecting onto the whiteboard? This would allow you movement in the room that you would not have otherwise. You could even get the bonus of handing off your tablet to a student to demonstrate a learning outcome. This is just one example of a little change that could eventually make a big difference in the student experience in your classroom. Give it a try and comment on this post with what you discover by making a little change. What’s the best “little change” you would share with a new teacher?

My nine-year-old spends every waking moment doing two things (when I let him):

1. playing Minecraft on the server by himself, with friends, or playing games.
2. watching YouTube videos about Minecraft.

I strongly encourage Minecraft as a hobby for all of the obvious reasons (Like this, this and this.) Someone sent me this resource from Common Sense Media (also a great overall media resource) on child appropriate YouTube videos for those little ones who spend every waking moment watching YouTube videos on Minecraft. I hope you find this resource useful-I plan on going home tonight and building a YouTube channel so my nine-year-old can watch only age-appropriate content. Let me know your thoughts, and any kid-friendly Minecraft channels your family likes.

Image by Deejay from SoCal, U.S.A. (SAN DIEGO COMIC-CON 2014) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons