Celebrating the National Week of Making

Tomorrow marks the first day of the national Week of Making, a week dedicated to celebrating makers and providing opportunities for people across the country to make. We are excited to take part in highlighting the diversity of makers through our three-part video series featuring maker learning happening at different Maker Promise schools across the country. The Maker Promise, a campaign led by Digital Promise and Maker Ed, is a commitment made by school leaders, in-school and out-of-school educators, and community advocates to become a champion for making, support spaces to learn through making, and showcase what students have made.

Our video series began in Sitka, Alaska, where we saw maker learning happening across all schools in the district with support from all members of the community. In Greenville, South Carolina, we followed a middle school library club as they worked together to design a solution to issues they identified in their community. This final video in the series features students at English High School in Boston, Massachusetts, the oldest public school in the country, as they collaborate to learn new skills in design, robotics, and media production to both compete in and tell the story of their entry into the FIRST Robotics competition.

We are working on several new resources and opportunities to support maker learning and Maker Promise signers. In response to Nation of Makers’ call to action for Week of Making, Digital Promise would like to share the following commitments:

• For school and district leaders, this fall we will publish a Maker Learning Leadership Framework. This Framework will provide resources and tools for school and district leaders to develop and integrate maker learning at their schools. We will begin to share some of these tools in the coming weeks leading up to publication of the full framework.

• For maker educators, particularly those just getting started with maker learning, we will host an online course called “Deeper Learning through Making.”  This course, launching in August on Edmodo’s Spotlight platform, will use the Challenge Based Learning framework to connect core principles and practices associated with both maker learning and deeper learning, and guide educators towards earning micro-credentials in both areas. We will be offering special access to this course for Maker Promise signers.

We hope the videos in our series inspire you to make a commitment to the maker movement in education, too. Sign the Maker Promise here and get involved with the National Week of Making here.

And, check out Maker Ed’s Ask a Maker Educator series on Wednesday, June 21 at 4pm PST/7pm EST, featuring Xavier Rozas and Roma Liani, two teachers featured in the English High School video, to learn more about their work.