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By Phil Goerner on

Our library at Silver Creek High School in Longmont, CO is an active hub for extracurricular activities. We host an Anime Club, monthly Poetry Slams, and Book Buddies, but I felt like we could do more. I wanted something that I could tie to student learning which would promote inquiry, giving students opportunities to solve problems and find answers to questions.

My assistant and I began looking at innovative library programs and community partnerships. Many of the teacher librarians in my professional network have been expanding their libraries by adding makerspace opportunities, classroom collaboration, and even 3-D printers. I used these folks as inspiration. Libraries across the country are doing what libraries do best: continuing to explore and reinvent the purpose of the library and what they offer to their patrons.

Makerspaces are a natural evolution for libraries. We need to make the resources available to our students that will help guide their inquiry and exploration. Who can predict what our students will create when given the space and tools necessary?
No need to reinvent the wheel
We have great models to guide us as we select the equipment to purchase and the procedures to follow. I was lucky enough to have the cofounder of the very successful community makerspace, Tinkermill, volunteer in my library. He encouraged me to visit their campus several times to see their woodworking and metalworking labs and their huge 3-D printer area. Most importantly, through this, we started to grasp how individual creative ideas could grow into an invention or huge collaborative effort fed by resources and very smart people. We garnered lots of advice and initiated some great partnerships. We even had Tinkermill members donate to our makerspace. They, along with other librarian colleagues, helped us figure out the resources we needed to acquire, experts to contact, and a direction to pursue as we begin to set up a makerspace within our library. While we are still very much in the planning and early implementation stages, things are coming together. We are in the process of setting up a workable location, have ordered supplies, and have begun promoting our program.
Where to get the money?
There are several online fundraising sites to help raise funds for our venture, such as Kickstarter, GoFundMe.com, and adoptaclassroom.org. You can even sign up for online fundraising with PayPal. We chose to use DonorsChoose.org and I'm glad we did. DonorsChoose has a great model for fundraising. They walked us through what we needed to do to be successful. For example, we briefly described our students and school, wrote about our project, and pitched the sale. A quick online shopping trip filled up our cart, and then we began promoting our project. As people donated money, we wrote immediate thank you notes, and before we knew it, our project was funded, which was a pretty big deal. We also received a grant from our district and local school education foundations to help us purchase a 3-D printer. Each funded grant added up and now we have a solid initial toolkit to offer our students.
Next steps
This week we will receive our first purchases. To launch our makerspace, we decided to start with the following tools: the Arduino starter kit, Snap Circuits, light and motion kits for simple circuitry concepts, Cubelets, the Sphero Robotic Ball, and a Makerbot Replicator2 3-D printer with supplies. We will soon begin our student-centered Makerspace club, guided by community volunteers and myself. It is amazing how interest grows and new connections are made. Several volunteers come from Tinkermill, while others were grant readers or donors for our project with interest in its success. Others just started showing up, hearing about the project through word of mouth and local press. These Makerspace volunteers will assist with mentoring, training and learning, and recruiting other experts to work with our kids. As we grow, student projects will inform how we move forward. Their interests will direct who we seek out to collaborate with and the tools we'll need to acquire to meet their needs.

Embarking on this journey has been, and continues to be, an incredible learning experience for all involved. Neither my assistant nor I are experts in this field, but we refuse to let that stop us. I fully anticipate that our students will be kind as they teach us what they discover, and what they hope to create.

See also:
Phil Goerner is a teacher librarian at Silver Creek High School, Longmont, CO.

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Phil Goerner is the teacher librarian and tech innovator at Silver Creek High School in Longmont, CO. He can be found on Twitter @pgoerner. Phil is also an adjunct professor with University of Colorado at Denver in the School Library and Instructional Leadership program.

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Creating a School Library Makerspace: The Beginning of a Journey | Tech Tidbits

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By Phil Goerner on Our library at Silver Creek High School in Longmont, CO is an active hub for extracurricular activities. We host an Anime Club, monthly Poetry Slams, and Book Buddies, but I felt like we could do more.

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In our elementary school library, we read, wonder, discover, and create!

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Hi friends!

For something different, I made a video intro for this blog post!

I strongly believe that your library centers and makerspaces should have a standards-based learning goal on display. Any student, teacher, or other library stakeholder walking through your space should be able to see (at a glance) that you are focused on attaining specific goals with your instructional time.

We do want to be taken seriously as teacher-librarians, don't we?

This isn't difficult, because the AASL Standards for the 21st-Century Learner are all about creation and collaboration. These skills are at the center of makerspaces AND our students' future success!

I've created nine printable signs for you to post in your library, to show the world that our students are not "just playing." They are becoming the inventors and innovators that we need in our world!

Click here to download these PDF files. They're free, from my Google Drive. Here's an example.

Of course the standards are copyright by the American Library Association. I've put them in a fun font and added cute borders. After you print these signs, you can laminate them, or place them in a page protector or acrylic sign holder to display them in your school library. I think you'll use them again and again.

I hope this simple graphic helps you to show everyone what an awesome instructor you are! (And let me know what you think about adding video to my blog posts. Thumbs up or thumbs down?)

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Hi friends! For something different, I made a video intro for this blog post! I strongly believe that your library centers and makerspaces should have a standards-based learning goal on display. Any student, teacher, or other library stakeholder walking through your space should be able to see (at a glance) that you are focused on [...]

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Diana Rendina, MLIS, is the media specialist at Tampa Preparatory, an independent 6-12 school. She was previously the media specialist at Stewart Middle Magnet School for seven years, where she founded their library makerspace. She is the creator of the blog RenovatedLearning.com & is also a monthly contributor to AASL Knowledge Quest. Diana is the winner of the 2016 ISTE Outstanding Young Educator Award, the 2015 ISTE Librarians Network Award, the 2015 AASL Frances Henne Award & the 2015 SLJ Build Something Bold Award. She is an international speaker on the Maker Movement and learning space design and has presented at conferences including AASL, FETC & ISTE. Diana co-authored Challenge-Based Learning in the School Library Makerspace and is the author of Reimagining Library Spaces: Transform Your Space on Any Budget.

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Diana Rendina, MLIS, is the media specialist at Tampa Preparatory, an independent 6-12 school. She was previously the media specialist at Stewart Middle Magnet School for seven years, where she founded their library makerspace. She is the creator of the blog RenovatedLearning.com & is also a monthly contributor to AASL Knowledge Quest.