2 Who, Meme?!

This week for the CLMOOC Connected Learning activity we had to make a meme or two.  I had dabbled in making memes last year for the ISTE 2013 conference so I already had some experience.  Here are my previous attempts and the blog post about them.

Now, it was great to look at the different resources that were provided for this assignment and learn more about the history and theory behind memes.  The blog about memes and why they matter by Eli was informative and interesting.  I especially liked the in depth information about how difficult it is to make a successful meme and the steps to follow to (hopefully!) make that happen!  I don't think I'll be reaching any viral numbers any time soon, but it's good to have some guidelines to get started!  The other really informative site about meme's was know your memes which goes into some of the famous and trending memes on the internet today.  It certainly gives a great bank of ideas to search!  Ultimately, my very favorite site was the Visual.ly page giving information and clarification on how to say the word meme in the first place! Glad to have that cleared up!

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2 Gr5 Inquiring About Circuits with Makey Makey!

Today was a new chapter in the development of our makerspace at our school!  Prior to today, we've been using it to stimulate creativity in our school utilizing recycled materials to create prototypes and design projects.  It's a great space and it is working really well with our English department in helping students think "outside the box" on their assignments.  However, now that the space is about to celebrate it's first birthday, we felt we needed to push it even more by jumping feet first with programming and designing.

We bought some Makey Makey kits last year and have been looking for ways to thoughtfully incorporate them into our curriculum.  We've identified a unit in grade 8 where the students will be using them to make games/ interactive programs with Scratch.  To get the grade 8 students ready, we created a display about Makey Makey and Scratch in a common space in our Learning Center.  The students have been investigating this display for about 2 weeks.  Recently a grade 5 teacher asked if we could use the Makey Makey kits to explore circuits for the electricity unit starting this week.  We've identified this as a unit that we wanted to integrate technology into so it was great to see that we were in the same line of thinking as the grade 5 team.  We met with the teachers and soon decided that Makey Makey would be an excellent provocation into the world of circuits to help students understand insulators and conductors.

We started the session letting the students explore the Makey Makey boards with the purpose of answering the question "What will make Makey Makey work?".  We had set up the computers ahead of time with three different examples of Scratch programs: Makey Makey DJ, Makey Makey Piano, and Makey Makey Drum Kit.  Each group was asked to find materials around the lab that would get the program to run.  When they found something that worked, they had to send someone to the front to write the item(s) on the board for others to see and test as well.  The only "clues" they were given were that one cable needed to be grounded to the Earth part of the Makey Makey and that the other end of that cable needed to be in their hand.

Students investigating what makes a Makey Makey work with found materials in our Imagine Lab via Instagram http://ift.tt/1m5TGyQ

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