Mr Hammerlund

I started this post a few months ago, November I think, and am now just finishing it.  The Why - Why start a Maker Space? I have often wondered what students do when they go home. Especially those who live in a city, where do they go? Are they allowed to wander through the alleys? Do they have access to resources they can use to build? Do they have the time to do it? Parents want the best for their kids. So, they try to set them up for success by enrolling them in programs the parents think would be beneficial. I look at elementary students here in Taiwan, and many are busy every night of the week. I asked my high school student how their weekend was, and he replied, "I studied all weekend. I have a test coming up and a few projects that will be due." When did kids lose their time to be bored and find out what they are interested in? Kids need time and space to do the activities in which they are interested or try activities they have not yet experienced -- giving s...

A post shared by Thomas Hammerlund (@thomashammerlund) on Feb 13, 2017 at 11:36pm PST When I heard about the Apple Teacher program, I was interested and went to apply. Unfortunately, my Apple ID is registered in Japan, and Japan was not one of the countries where the program was available. So, I decided to make a new Apple ID and I took the Apple Teacher Certification. I have gone through several tech certifications and after each one, I kept thinking how much better each would be if teachers got together and went through the certification together. I am not talking about the test, but rather the training that most certifications have to study for the test. I could see that some interesting conversations could come out of sharing experiences with each other. We tried this at KAS with the Tech Ambassadors this year and it was awesome. One takeaway I had was to use Keynote's Instant Alpha for greenscreen images. Apple's Planning Guide

This post is out of date and my extensions have changed. The updated link to the extensions I have created is here. Below is a screenshot of extensions I have installed in Chrome; these might be helpful to students. Mercury Reader Websites are getting better about design and making sure the pages are not cluttered. However, there are still some sites that are not reader-friendly and have additional content that distracts from the articles. Mercury Reader is a Chrome Extension that cleans up websites and removes clutter to make websites easier to read. Stay Focused     Many students spend too much time on some sites. For some, it might be Facebook, others it might be a gaming site. The Stay Focused extension allows you to set the amount of time you want to spend on a site per day. When you are close to reaching the limit, you are warned, and after you exceed the limit, you are blocked from the site for the rest of the day. While you can simply adjust the t...

At KAS, teachers are required to coach a sport or supervise two activities a year. This year was an active one for me; I coached MS Softball and MS Soccer and did seven sessions of Maker Club at all levels. KAS does not have a design thinking/maker culture, so part of the challenge was to create it. This year's maker club schedule looked like this: Elementary Last year I was asked to do a tech-related club, so I started with an Elementary Coding Club. A few weeks into it, I was told that a few rambunctious Middle School Students were really good at coding and were far ahead of their classmates, so I thought it might be a good idea to enroll them to help with the club. For them, it was a good way to help their self-esteem and give them a little leadership experience. For me, it was a good lesson in learning to help students structure lessons they give and give some "problem" students a chance to show their skills to younger students and hopefully increase the...

Social media gives us the ability to talk in real time with others who might not be in our space. The hard part is determining the audience and how to reach them. #KAStw A post shared by Thomas Hammerlund (@thomashammerlund) on May 10, 2017 at 5:26pm PDT Grade Seven is just starting an interdisciplinary unit with English and Science and talking about how to communicate science using social media. The platform they will be using is Twitter, so I helped them set up their accounts. The two biggest issues we ran into were students who had previously signed up so their accounts are suspended and kids not having phone numbers. For the students who have previously signed up, they will just have to open a new account. Students who do not have a phone will need to ask their parents to use their phone number as for verification. So today the students [in Grade 7] all gathered in the Dining Hall to Skype with Sam Stacey, an expert in Social Media Marketing for different sci...