Final ImagineIT Report
I cannot believe I’m at the end of my ImagineIT project. It seems like yesterday I started the planning of this ten-month project. In my eleven years of teaching, I never had a project that spanned over the entire school year. Even though, this report marks the end of the project, I feel like I am just getting started. Over the past ten months, I feel I have created a family within my dreamMakers. Being an enrichment teacher, I rarely get the opportunity to spend a full year with my students. This project has allowed me to not only see my students more than the 36 times a year as an enrichment teacher, I’ve seen them every day since the start of school. Since we first started back in September, I have seen dramatic changes in my students’ mindsets as well as their desire to learn, explore, tinker, and fail.
I’m grateful to be a part of MSUrbanSTEM, as this program has re-energized my passion to teach, and also reminded me why I came into teaching in the first place. Throughout this process, I have learned that I wasn’t just changing the mindset of my students, I was changing the mindset in the way I teach, learn, and communicate in my classroom and in the educational technology realm. I experienced failure, just as my students did, and I found a way to persevere through my own trials.
As I look back at this year, I could not have imagined the camaraderie my students have developed with each other. Not only did most of these students never worked with each other, but also most of them never even knew their names. Last week, in our focus group, the students mentioned how it would be sad to see this class end, because we are like a family that grew together not only in our technical knowledge, but also in our experience of becoming a dreamMaker.
When looking at my student’s maker’s statements, I know my students have transformed their mindsets since the beginning of the year. Here are a few quotes from these maker statements that really stuck out to me.
“To be a maker means being not afraid of failing, it's what you do with that failure that makes the cut. Sometimes being a maker means you have to take chances and if it doesn't go your way, pick yourself up and try again.”
“A maker BELIEVES that they can create anything. A dreamMaker knows that failure is part of the process and without it, we would never learn from our mistakes. For us to grow, we need to fail.”
“Being a dreamMaker to me means you have to think above the normal to create amazing complicated things…You have to know how to get through things independently and figure things out without the help of a teacher.”
Even though this ImagineIT project is done, we still have one more month of school left. Over the course of this month, my students and I have been talking about next year, their thoughts on the direction of where the dreamMaker space should be, ideas for change, and reflecting on their journey through it all.
The video below was created for CPS Tech Talk and shows a glimpse of my dreamMakers.
I’m grateful to be a part of MSUrbanSTEM, as this program has re-energized my passion to teach, and also reminded me why I came into teaching in the first place. Throughout this process, I have learned that I wasn’t just changing the mindset of my students, I was changing the mindset in the way I teach, learn, and communicate in my classroom and in the educational technology realm. I experienced failure, just as my students did, and I found a way to persevere through my own trials.
As I look back at this year, I could not have imagined the camaraderie my students have developed with each other. Not only did most of these students never worked with each other, but also most of them never even knew their names. Last week, in our focus group, the students mentioned how it would be sad to see this class end, because we are like a family that grew together not only in our technical knowledge, but also in our experience of becoming a dreamMaker.
When looking at my student’s maker’s statements, I know my students have transformed their mindsets since the beginning of the year. Here are a few quotes from these maker statements that really stuck out to me.
“To be a maker means being not afraid of failing, it's what you do with that failure that makes the cut. Sometimes being a maker means you have to take chances and if it doesn't go your way, pick yourself up and try again.”
“A maker BELIEVES that they can create anything. A dreamMaker knows that failure is part of the process and without it, we would never learn from our mistakes. For us to grow, we need to fail.”
“Being a dreamMaker to me means you have to think above the normal to create amazing complicated things…You have to know how to get through things independently and figure things out without the help of a teacher.”
Even though this ImagineIT project is done, we still have one more month of school left. Over the course of this month, my students and I have been talking about next year, their thoughts on the direction of where the dreamMaker space should be, ideas for change, and reflecting on their journey through it all.
The video below was created for CPS Tech Talk and shows a glimpse of my dreamMakers.