This month, we’ve heard from Jeremy Osborne, who’s the Innovative Learning Coordinator for the Berkeley County School District. With a background as an elementary STEM teacher, Jeremy knows all about the kinds of hands-on learning experiences kids want and need and he’s now very much involved in ensuring all students have access to those.
Joining eight previous STEM grant recipients for the calendar year of 2020, we have presented September’s award to Michellea Millis, an administrator with the BrownSTEM afterschool program that’s based in San Antonio, TX. She works with underrepresented African-American and Latinx students to help create STEM experiences and we’re excited to award her this grant!
When schools first started to shut down, we saw how STEM and MakerEd really began to take a back seat in favor of more traditional educational requirements as teachers tried to find a rhythm in remote learning. At the same time, however, we—and plenty of others—knew just how important and beneficial STEM learning could be.
Despite so much uncertainty, there’s one thing we know for sure: We don’t want students to veer off course in terms of STEM and real-world skills development, so we’ve been working on creating custom STEAM kits that can be used to help educators teach key topics, allow students to work independently, and are conducive to different environments.
Reopening our school buildings will likely involve one of three action plans: in-person learning, hybrid learning, and remote learning. Once schools first physically closed doors in March, we did not think that things would still be in such a state of uncertainty come August, but the reality is that almost all school leaders are preparing for a back-to-school season unlike
We’re ramping up our Eduporium Featured Educator series to share more accomplishments from teachers, librarians, makerspace leaders, and others! For this post, we’re excited to introduce Sharon Clark, whose made great use of technology in her instruction as a STEAM teacher, using it to help teach both real-world and soft skills.
This month, the award goes to Save Our Children Elyria, a big afterschool program in Elyria, Ohio! The group helps support many local K-12 students throughout the Elyria City Schools with various academic and nutritional assistance year round and, since learning has transitioned largely online, they’ve created a virtual makerspace for students!
As schools have been closed, teachers and students have been closely monitoring the latest updates surrounding the pandemic. With that comes a need for strong digital literacy skills and the need to identify accurate information from reputable sources. Checkology is an online tool that students can use to develop key media literacy skills.
It’s the start of a new month, so that means we have some news regarding our EdTech grant from last month. For the month of February, we’ve awarded our grant to Michelle Shea, who’s a librarian at Texas A&M University Central—the first time we’ve given the award to somebody in higher education!
We have awarded our final $500 EdTech grant of the year (and of the decade!), closing out 2019 with over $5,000 worth of technology contributions to schools and teachers around the country! For the month of December, we’ve awarded our grant to Ellen Peterson, a STEM and technology teacher at the Smithfield Middle School in Smithfield, VA.
