I feel this close to the end! I had my EdTech 592 Portfolio submitted to the TaskStream this week for final review. While graduation will be done virtually this year, I’m excited to know that it’s basically a formality at this point. As for my Maker journey, it’s coming to an end for this class, but I am excited to implement some of the hands-on learning I’ve experienced with this course with students in my district.

This week has been quiet on the Maker front. With everything happening with the emergency distance learning in my district, I had gotten a little behind on my Portfolio. And not just the Maker Portfolio that was the goal for this course. This is my final class in the Master’s of Educational Technology program, so I am concurrently taking the final class where I create my full EdTech Portfolio. That process has been my focus this week. I’ve spent a little time pulling together screenshots of my Scratch projects, but that’s about it for this week. Next week will be focused on my Maker Portfolio.

I was happy to have been given the suggestion to make all the Makey Makey projects related a few week back. That made the Instructional Unit project for this week much easier. The best part of the week was being able to see how easy it was to incorporate these Maker projects into a normal curricular unit that was still meeting standards. Beyond the traditional Common Core standards being meet, these activities allowed other digital learning standards to be met as well.

Tutorials are important in adding to the comfort level of new users of any digital device. While some people are willing to just jump in feet first and see what happens, many are not so confident. The creation of tutorials adds support for those learners that are a little less confident things will work out. I’ve been making a number of tutorials for different digital tools the past few weeks as teachers in my district are trying new things to connect with their students at home.

Voice Thread has not been a tool I’ve used to create those tutorials before. I was fairly impressed with the site. I would use it for more than a simple tutorial if I were to use it again. I really liked the ability to allow interaction with the viewers through recorded voice responses. For a simple tutorial where essentially all that was happening was the new user being talked through how to make it happen, I likely wouldn’t have chosen that platform. But I do like that it has more than one use, as well.

Week 10 was a challenge. The development of a third Makey Makey project wasn’t the issue. Instead, I was working non-stop preparing my district for emergency distance learning. As the only person in our district technology department with a teaching degree and experience, I was relied heavily upon to help the teachers in the five schools in our district to plan for at-home learning. My project was adequate this week, but it definitely was not the most important thing I was working on this week.

This week I became more comfortable with the Makey Makey. My initial impression about the device changed somewhat when I learned that you can remap the device. You don’t need to keep using the arrow keys, space and enter for everything! For my simulation project, I had three vehicles traveling on the same stretch of highway, going different speeds, and some in different directions. I was able to program the Makey Makey to use keys that were more easily associated with the different vehicles. The Scratch program itself needed a 7th key to make the vehicles go, so that was still a problem with the Makey Makey and it’s 6 keys.

This week was my first experience with the Makey Makey. I struggled to get it to work at first, which was slightly frustrating. One of the causes of my frustration was from my current view of the device. It essentially lets you change the input device. While the device is neat, I’m struggling to see how changing the input will make the experience that much better. I don’t see the difference between hitting an arrow key on the keyboard or a chunk of PlayDoh. Some of the better applications I’ve seen make displays interactive and things like that. That’s better, but I still struggle to see it as a big add to a project.

This week I learned to use loops and repeat while creating simulations. Even though the simulations were mostly modifications from programs that were already created, it was interesting to see how the “forever” loops were used to repeat commands. Being a math teacher, I found the repetitions through having a condition met to be very logical and quite easy. To be honest, this week was probably the easiest one so far, likely due to the fact that I have a good comfort level with Scratch at this point.

This week was a chance to work with conditionals, simple if-then statements and if-then-else. I really enjoyed the challenge of creating a simulation. While working through the projects this week, I was challenged with with keeping items from repeating. The “not” command was what I learned would do the trick for me. I also learned how to use these conditionals as a menu. I had not thought of that application and look forward to implementing that in future projects.

This week was working with variables. As a former math teacher, I felt very comfortable with this topic. I did become frustrated with some of the limitations with the mathematical functions. I wanted to make things cleaner, keeping the slope in fraction form, for example. I did enjoy learning about how lists work in Scratch. I haven’t used them prior to this problem, and anticipate using them in the future. I am curious to learn if I can use a “unique” command, so that each item in the list is only selected once.