Digital literacy to make a better world

I’m attending EdMedia 2018 this year and it opened with two parallel workshops. I decided to attend “Making with kids in Europe – to foster digital literacy, to make a better world, and to build a new entrepreneurship education”. It was so inspiring. The team began presenting the ideas that underline their practice: the maker movement and the implications of new digital gadgets, fabrication tools and spaces for creative learning and teaching.

Than, just to wam up, we did the marshmallow challenge. We organized in groups. in fifteen minutes, teams must build the tallest free-standing structure out of 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string, and one marshmallow. The marshmallow needs to be on top. And my group won it =) I have to say we did really well, collaborating to create the best structure and then building it. It’s all about working together and being able to try things out. It was fun, but just the beginning.

What came next was demonstrations of many different activities that would introduce kids to really complicated themes in a fun way through the mediation of technology. What I liked the most about it was the whole number of possibilities it opened my mind to. I mean, my student teachers explore digital tools in our multimodal literacy classes at the university, but I really never dared anything in the field of programming, robotics or 3D printing. The thing is that as I don’t feel qualified in these fields, I felt I couldn’t guide my students there. But in fact I can, cause it is not about what I can do. It should be about what my students can imagine and do.

In the workshop we had some  hands-on experiences with simple maker tools and projects with children for beginners and insights into diverse European approaches and experiences with maker education. We saw some experimental projects from the European initiative DOIT , we saw how we could program educational games in Scratch, and we played with a dough piano and with conductivity using a MaKeyMaKey set.

I will begging by buying my Makeymakey kit and plying with my 2,5 year old kid. Then I will think how I can bring it into my teaching and how I can make a better world with all that. I still don’t know exactly what will come out of it, but I wanted to share the links and the joy of this morning with you.