Social–Emotional Learning

After months of finalizing the structure of the grant opportunity and evaluating deserving applications, we’re pleased to announce that the two recipients are Anne Lotito-Schuh, a librarian from the Robert Frost Middle School in Deer Park, NY, and Margaret Fiorello, a makerspace manager at the Saint William the Abbot School in Seaford, NY!

Over the last couple months, we’ve teamed up with professionals from some of our top partners to bring educators a webinar series focused on addressing social-emotional learning and STEAM education. Throughout this time, we’ve worked with some great colleagues and, now that it’s wrapped up, we wanted to put all the resources in one place.

To wrap up our back-to-school STEAM and SEL webinar series, we partnered with our friends from the Ozobot Education team. Led by Melissa Toohey and Tara Reynen, we discussed the importance of CS education, creating SEL connections with the Ozobot Evo, and how the Ozobot Classroom LMS helps simplify coding instruction and prep work.

We were joined by iRobot’s Anna Elzer and Daniella Bonazzoli, who shared the iRobot story, including how, despite being known for the world-famous Roomba robot, every member of their organization is also committed to education. With help from the audience, they discussed the Root robots, the tech within them, creating SEL connections, and more.

In offering these grant opportunities, we’re looking for educators who have creative ideas for addressing these deficiencies. Whether your primary focus is on helping students overcome learning loss or boosting their social-emotional health, this award is designed to help teachers reclaim normalcy starting in the next few months.

This first webinar is scheduled for Wednesday Sept. 15 at 3:30 PM ET. Since SEL (understandably) is very closely tied to students experiencing new emotions and communicating their thoughts, it’s connection to hands-on, exploration-based learning continues to grow. So, we’ll be focusing on how to integrate SEL in the classroom this school year.

According to the broad acceptance of how learning loss is defined, a large percentage of students will be affected. In order to begin truly addressing this gap, however, teachers might be better off starting with SEL to allow students the chance to adjust and process emotions. From there, they can get in better position to address academics.

Luckily, students still have the potential to use STEM tools to boost their overall social-emotional connections. It comes down to finding the right technologies and aligning those tools with accessibility and relevant projects. Other SEL tools are built more for the classroom and that’s okay, too. Here are a few of the best for combining SEL and STEM.

MakerEd tools allow students to connect their heads to their hearts using their hands. And, up until a year ago, so much good was being done in the classroom to advance social and emotional stability in students by using technology in creative ways. Now, however, there are all new reasons to focus on SEL in remote learning.

Some schools will not be reopening on the first day of classes but, in other districts, it’s yet to be decided what the approach will involve. Throw in this political pressure and you have a pretty volatile, potentially dangerous, and likely fluid situation for the rest of this summer and into the first few weeks of the year as everyone