Inspired by reality TV cooking shows, the “Quickfire Challenge” is an educational tool created as an activity in the Master of Arts in Educational Technology (MAET) program at Michigan State University (Wolf, 2009). Over the past 8 years the Quickfire Challenge has been a core of the student learning experience. Having theoretical underpinnings in Mezirow’s Transformative Learning Theory (1991), the Quickfire Challenge is structured to create a (gently) disorienting experience which challenges traditional forms of professional development models. Quickfire Challenges are carefully crafted to impose time constraints, give specific, yet vague directions, embed tangible outcomes, all the while keeping learning at the core. By experiencing failure (and success) in this format, participants begin to rediscover the joy and creativity necessary to spark engagement in curriculum development and delivery.

Four our SITE roundtable, we would like to provide attendees resources for replicating existing Quickfire Challenges (learning from practitioners who have successfully implemented the idea in K12 and teacher PD contexts) along with tools for creating their own challenges. We hope that attendees will leave with a series of experiences which can be implemented in professional development (both online and offline) contexts.  

Quickfire Resources

The following links will take you to instructions and examples for several Quickfire Challenges that we have developed and run in the MAET program at Michigan State University:

• Storyboarding & Video Recording Quickfire
• Remix, Reuse, Recycle Quickfire
• Abstraction Quickfire
• Crowdsourced Book Quickfire
• The “Quickfire Quickfire” (tips on creating your own Quickfire Challenges)

MSUrbanSTEM Quickfires

Michigan State University, in partnership with global tech giant Wipro Ltd., launched an innovative fellowship program (which ran from 2014-2018) designed to empower math and science teachers in Chicago Public Schools to create transformative, innovative, and multimodal instructional experiences for students. One thing you’ll note as a key feature present in the majority of the MSUrbanSTEM Quickfire Challenges is the “extra spicy challenge”. In order to provide the (gently) disorienting experience for all of our fellows, the inclusion of this additional element provided an opportunity for differentiation.

• MSUrbanSTEM Quickfire Warehouse
• #MSUrbanSTEM and Quickfires on Twitter
• Lessons Learned from the MSUrbanSTEM Build-a-Boat Quickfire
• The Magic Act (slides 44 – 48) and an example result!
• In the Room (a digital quickfire) and an example result!

Teacher-generated Quickfires

• Stop-motion with Yvonne Nevarez 
• Distance, rate, and time representations with James Edstrom 
• The tallest tower with Michael Kosko 
• Illinois Computing Educators Conference Presentation by #MSUrbanSTEM Fellow, Michael Kosko (2017)
• Examples and templates from Cherice Montgomery 
• Resources and templates from Dan McDowell and Reuben Hoffman 
• Screencasting with Douglas Frankish 

References

Mezirow, J. (1991). Transformative Dimensions of Adult Learning. San Francisco , CA: Jossey-Bass.

Wolf, L. G. (2009, Aug. 19). Quickfires explained. Retrieved from http://www.leighgraveswolf.com/2009/08/19/quickfires-explained/

Using the guiding questions above, I tried to think of a new way to help students see some of the key components of digital citizenship.  It’s one thing to understand the umbrella concept, but why are these components important and how do they interact to help us become good digital citizens?

Materials:

• Makey Makey 
• Digcit Scratch project
  
• Magnifying glass: Critical literacy
• Spoon:  Balance of screen time as well as “going with our gut” in digital communication
• Padlock: Digital security and protection
• Play-Doh®: Digital rights and responsibilities, advocating for ourselves and our digital footprint
• Elmer’s Glue:  Digital rights and responsibilities, how to clean up a “digital mess”
• Paint brush with copper tape: Digital law, creative credit

What worked:

• Students were active members of the discussion.  THEY were a key component, just as they are in digital citizenship.
• We plugged one item into the Makey Makey at a time as we discussed the component.  We started to make rhythms as we plugged in items, allowing students to understand the relationship between the components and how they interact.
• With the Elmer’s Glue, we got to focus on the fact that miscommunication and misrepresentation happens.  For the first time, I felt that I got to address the fact that there will be “digital messes” that need to be cleaned up.  Guess what, the digital citizenship machine still works!  We just have to learn from our experiences and do what we can to make sure to keep ourselves out of sticky situations. (sidenote: you should’ve seen their faces when the glue actually triggered the noise!)

Things to change for the next go-round:

• I changed some of the noises in my Scratch project because I found they were too quiet in the classroom setting and weren’t distinct enough to be heard in the mix of components.
• My goal was to have enough time to have the class join hands and play together, to demonstrate how a community of good digital citizens can take on bigger challenges.  Unfortunately, I only had 30 minutes for this lesson so we could only discuss this and didn’t get to the culminating activity.  I am hoping that by streamlining some of the setup, we can get this in.

Because of the nature of my job, I will be doing this lesson with a few other classrooms so I’ll be sure to update the post with new takeaways.  Here’s to Makey making digital citizenship come alive in a new way for students!

Makey Making Digital Citizenship Connections by Candace Marcotte is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

“What things do kids take away?”

First, there’s the question of literal takeaways.  What do students physically carry out of the space and keep?  Currently, students can keep some of the items that they create, but not everything.  Because we are 1:1, a lot of artifacts that they create are either digital and housed on their individual devices (movies, etc.) or we turn them into digital artifacts by blogging to document their learning/experiences with images, videos, and text.  Due to cost, students can’t keep the kits and more expensive items, so that’s one of the reasons why we blog.  They always have at least a picture or a video to take away!  We do allow them take home/keep the consumable items like conductive thread, coin cell batteries, conductive tape, LEDs, and crafting materials (paper, cardboard, felt, etc.) because they have a lower price point.  I’ve even had a few students borrow goggles to work on reverse engineering at home. Now that our Makerbot and Cricut are all set up, they will begin to take home those artifacts and the prototypes that they have designed as well.

More importantly, I think that they’re taking away some bigger things like independence, perseverance, creativity, and critical thinking.  They are learning how to share their knowledge, collaborate in positive manner, and connect with others.  They are learning how to appropriately make their learning public.  They are learning that with a little effort, they can do some pretty extraordinary things! Now those are some incredible takeaways…and it’s only just the start!

Getting a MAKEover: Part III…What do they take away? by Candace Marcotte is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

“What things do you do and make?”

I first need to state that the level that this has reached this year wouldn’t be possible without collaboration.  Take a look at our collaboration story below to see how we connected with members of our personal learning networks (PLNs) to bring maker magic to our students.  There are definitely more elements missing from this story.  For example,  attendance at events like Maker Faire allowed us to connect with other makers or including some of our other favorite hashtags for gaining ideas and knowledge like #STEM.

With all of this collaboration occurring, other teachers began to stop by.  The music teacher has come up to help students learn about how speakers work and in turn, students have repaired speakers and an old record player that teachers found in their classrooms.  The music teacher is going to come back and help students build dulcimers!  Another teacher dropped in to teach students proper stitches when we started sewn circuits.  The makerspace has allowed for teachers from all content areas/grade levels to come together and share their own maker skills!

Ok, so back to the question…what do we do and make?  Our vision for the space is to allow students to explore what they are interested in and to create independence in them so that they can figure out their issues and seek the solutions.  Being so student-centered can be somewhat chaotic, but it is so incredibly exciting!  When we first started the year, I heard a lot of, “Ms. Marcotte…?, Ms. Marcotte…?”  I’d say that over the last month is when students started to shift and turn the “Ms. Marcotte?” into “Ms. Marcotte!”  Yes, they still ask for assistance occasionally, but much more often they are asking for more materials, digging deeper with bigger questions, or just want to share the excitement of what they have discovered or created.  Here’s some of what our students have done this year:

A little explanation about some of the items above:

• Reverse Engineering (introduced to get students to think about how things work and looking past the surface):  Became so popular that teachers now drop off all of their “junk” in my office!  Students have also brought their family’s “junk” in with permission.  They have been enamored with this for the duration of the year.  We have been creating labeled display boards to place on exhibit.  A parent also came in to share in this experience, which was really fun!
• Maker Show (student-named):  Students bring in projects or items from home that they are either working on or are curious about.  We now start every Wednesday makerspace with a student sharing.
• Each member has a personal maker blog that they reflect on using Kidblog.  Not fully public yet because we have to get a bit better at it first
• We JUST launched a shared, public blog with the other middle school’s makerspace and appointed social media managers from each group to share our stories.
• We created a twitter handle, @WildcatMakers, a few weeks ago as well to allow us to connect with field experts and “real-life” makers as the students like to say.

We just started our first design challenge to build their innovation muscles.  Other than this, we haven’t done any formalized group activities besides the first meeting where we created LED nametags (shout-out to MAET at MACUL 2014 for the idea!).  This allowed us to talk about circuitry which is really important for them moving forward and provided an opportunity for a discussion around good hacks vs. bad hacks.

Looking forward:

• Division of specialized teams: We have something called “Maker Modes” right now which students have identified as their greatest interest areas.  We want to have these groups work together on things like the Arduino, Raspberry Pi, film production, crafting, wearable electronics, robotics, etc.  and stick with them to really become experts in the technologies or skill sets.
• We are looking to hold some video chats with different makers (hobby or professional makers). We just held our first chat last week and are working on getting connections to more makers!
• Robot battle
• Mini design challenges to help build student exploration and innovation muscles
• knitting, crocheting, jewelry making

There’s really no limit to where the remainder of the year will take us because we really let student-interest guide us.  And, we are willing to beg for materials/resources from anyone!

Getting a MAKEover: Part II…What do we do? by Candace Marcotte is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

If you don’t know about the Edcamp craze, check it out here.  We started the day with a bit of a keynote that the three of us prepared, which reviewed TPACK and SAMR.  After a brief discussion, we prompted our staff to participate in a Quickfire Challenge to demonstrate their understanding of the framework and model.  Quickfire Challenges are a concept which can be attributed to Dr. Leigh Graves Wolf of Michigan State University (see her post here about them).  Having been a student in the Master of Arts in Educational Technology program at MSU, I have lived through so many Quickfires and love how they sparked my interest and brought energy to learning (I even used them with students when I was a classroom teacher!).  Below you’ll see the guidelines for our Quickfire and if you click on the image, it will take you to the Thinglink with live links.

Teachers then had to share their creation on a Schoology discussion board.  Note that they were only given 10 minutes to complete this task.  Here are three examples of what they created and shared.  When you take a step back to think about it, it’s actually pretty cool.  We gave them NO instruction on how to do any of this, from the technology they picked to uploading to a Schoology discussion board.  They had to play with it and they were immersed in creation with a looming deadline.  Was it stressful?  Yes.  Was it meaningful? Yes.  Did they enjoy it?  After it was done :).  We had everything from videos to Haikus.  They also got to see how allowing for choice with a choice board was simple and meaningful to the learner, because they experienced it as their students would.

After this recap, we then discussed how Edcamps work and how you “vote with your feet”.  We then asked the teachers what they wanted to learn that day.  Now, we did do some pre-planning when it came to this and planted some seeds because we weren’t sure what teachers would do in the face of being given total choice.  We knew we wanted to have at least 6 sessions going at one time.  We thought of 3 sessions which we knew teachers would be looking for and created a “Playlist” of resources that they could explore as a part of their breakout discussion for a bit of scaffolding into the open world of Edcamps.  We also planted some seeds in terms of talking to a few teachers ahead of time and asking them to share their learning interests if the crowd got quiet- luckily we did that because teachers were at a loss initially when posed with the challenge of getting to voice what they wanted to learn.  Once a few of our seeds spoke up, it got the ball rolling and we were able to find teacher facilitators for each session.  We purposefully did not facilitate any sessions. While breakouts were occurring, we rotated through rooms to offer conversation or answer any questions of difficulty.  We made sure to have an “App Playground” during all breakout sessions to assist teachers who simply needed to focus the day on growing their technological knowledge in terms of the functions of the iPads and apps.

When we returned from the breakout sessions, we had a “Show what you know SLAM”, which is a derivative of an App Slam or Demo Slam that you see at Edcamps.  We asked teachers to share something that they learned in a breakout session, which prompted lots of “Ooohhs and Ahhhhs” from the audience.  Of course, each teacher only had 1 minute to share what they learned, so it was a rapid fire race to talk about their big takeaways.

Overall, we had a lot of great feedback about the day.  What would we change?  We would notify all staff to come with ideas for conversation topics that they were interested in.  I believe that if we do this again, now that all of our teachers will have 1:1 experience under their belts, the conversations will spark more readily and their comfort with guiding their own learning will also increase now that they have exposure to this style of PD.

Some things you should know about our distribution are that we had summer employees tag, scan, and assign iPads to students.  They also had the fun job of removing them from their boxes, labeling the iPad for the student, and placing the iPad in our new cases.  We are using Apple’s new Mobile Device Management program this year and parents were asked throughout the summer to create an Educational Apple ID for their student(s) under 13 years old.  We pair Apple’s MDM with Cisco’s Meraki MDM. Now that we have all of the technical specs out of the way, let’s take a look at the actual event details.

We scheduled one day, a week before school started, from 1pm-7pm for students to pick up their devices.  Students had to have their iPad Handbook signed and hopefully had created an Apple ID before coming to the event.  We decided to not split them into certain time frames by alphabetical order or ask them to schedule a time for pick up since we were doing distribution for just one day.  We had 26 teachers in our building volunteer to help (our teachers rock!), in addition to about six student Tech Squad members.  The helpers were arranged in shifts from 1pm-4pm and 4pm-7pm for the most part.  Let me tell you, I can’t imagine doing this with any less number of helpers!

We set up the event in stations so that the tasks were separated.  At each of the six stations we had a poster with the steps of the station so that individuals could start the station steps on their own while they waited in line.  We also had handouts on each table with the same steps.  We tried to have at least 2 helpers at each station.  For some of the more challenging stations, we had three helpers.

Breakdown of Stations (You can find our complete station guides here.):

• Station 1:   We initially separated individuals as they entered into two lines: 1.  Have an Edu Apple ID, 2.  Don’t have an Edu Apple ID yet.  Then, when they had taken care of business at Station 1 with either just signing in or creating an Apple ID, they received a ticket so that they could proceed to Station 2 and pick up their iPad.
• Station 2: The red ticket was used so that Station 2 knew that the student had checked in and had turned in their signed iPad Handbook.  This worked really well.  Students told the helper their last name and as the helper searched for the iPad, the student found their name on a sheet of labels.  Students then immediately labeled their chargers.  After getting their iPad, they proceeded to Station 3.
• Station 3:  Students went through the startup configuration of the iPad, until they got to the “Get Started” message and home screen.
• Station 4:  Students renamed their iPads so that we could manage them by building and grade level.  They also turned on items in the app store so that they could receive apps.
• Station 5:  Students set up their student email and found their Meraki email so that their device could receive apps.
• Station 6:  Students checked to make sure they had the Meraki profile on their device and then completed an expectation checklist so that they were aware of the big iPad rules before leaving the building.

Overall, we had more success than issues and after the first two hours of a non-stop line of people, we were easily able to get people in and out in under 20 minutes.  The biggest hang up which caused for some people to be there longer was due to our issues accessing Apple’s website through parent email.  When parents were clicking the “Consent” button, the webpage was redirecting them to the wrong page and was not allowing them to create an actual Educational Apple ID for their student.  We ended up just forming a line where we took the parent’s information so that we could help them create an Apple ID at a later time.  Being flexible and creating a plan on the go really helped!  We had about 700/853 students come through to pick up their devices that evening and it was truly an awesome showing of our learning community with the number of staff, students, and parents involved!

iPadeology: Staff and Student Resources for iPad Deployment:  My colleague and I presented on the key characteristics of the mindset that we developed to guide decision making during our first year in our district’s 1:1 pilot.  We share the steps we believe made us successful, how we managed to keep the focus on instruction and not the device, student development resources, staff development resources, and parental resources for deployment.  Click the image below to be taken to session resources.