[CASL-L] Fwd: [aaslforum] The Innovation Destination

[Shelley Stedman]

Check out the innovation destination for help encouraging creativity and innovation in kids.
Shelley

-------- Original message --------
From: Ruth V Small <drruth at syr.edu>
Date: 11/20/17 1:38 PM (GMT-05:00)
To: aaslforum at lists.ala.org
Subject: [aaslforum] The Innovation Destination

We were extremely excited to be able to launch The Innovation Destination website to a receptive audience of school librarians and teachers at the American Association of School Librarian’s national conference in Phoenix. This site is funded, in part, by a National Leadership Grant from the U.S. Institute of Museum & Library Services (IMLS).

The purpose of this totally free website is to provide a one-stop site containing a wealth of information related to youth and innovation. For adults, it provides resources for encouraging, motivating, supporting, guiding and informing their young innovators, as well as a number of resources and training just for adults. It is also a site where the young innovators, themselves, can go on their own to watch the videos, find good books to read (fiction and nonfiction), and more.

When you click on the URL, https://theinnovationdestination.net, it will take you to the site’s home page. Here you’ll see brief descriptions of the site’s contents and, at the bottom, you will see our “Young Innovators Wall of Fame.” This is a gallery of 50 young innovators (grades 4-8) who participated in our video interviews. You can click on any picture in the Wall of Fame be introduced to that young innovator and the main interview questions that he/she answered. You can click on a question to see how it was answered. You can choose to go through each child’s responses or start exploring more of the site.

If you go back to the home page, you will see that there are now four different young innovators in the Wall of Fame. This will happen each time you go back to the home page. (For each child, =his/her first name, state, and invention and/or entrepreneurial business is revealed).

At the top of each screen, you will see that the site contains four main sections plus a monthly blog. The sections are:


  1.  Inspiring Innovation: In this section you will find a searchable database of hundreds of video segments from interviews with young innovators (grades 4-8). While there are over 300 video segments in the database at this time, we will have more than 500 by spring of 2018. You can search the video database by type of innovation, interview question, gender, and/or grade. Of course, as with any database, the more search terms you use together, the smaller number of results will result.


  1.  Educating for Innovation: This section contains lesson plans and independent learning activities created or adapted by school librarians nationwide, targeting school librarians, teachers, parents of home schoolers, and others who support young innovators in grades 4-8. These can be searched by STEM subject or Other, Keyword, Grade Level and Resource Type (either lesson plan or learning activity. Each lesson plan links to a learning activity (and vice versa); the person using it can teach a lesson that incorporates the learning activity or use the learning activity separately. These are all tied to STEM standards, inquiry-based. Our goal is to have at least 200 of these teaching/learning resources on the site within the coming months. We are still looking for more librarians to participate in creating lesson plans and learning activities for this site. If you are interested, let me know (there is an honorarium for each original pair created that meets our criteria and we provide examples, templates, etc. to help you).


  1.  Supporting Innovation: A resource database with 330+ books, articles, websites, videos, etc. in it---all of them related to youth and innovation. The purpose of the database is to provide a variety of resources to use with kids, by kids, and by adults (e.g., webinars, research articles). This database can be searched by grade level groups (PreK-12) and Adults, by keyword, and by format. Most items also have a description or abstract and other information. We are aiming to have a collection of 1000+ resources in this site.


  1.  Mentoring Young Innovators: This section provides free mentor training through a series of six learning modules, designed to be self-paced and self-directed and based on Zachary’s Mentoring Model. It is intended for educators who wish to provide effective mentoring to young innovators, particularly those who have no adult mentors available to them. Our research shows that an adult mentor who guides and facilitates the mentoring process and offers encouragement from the sidelines is one of the elements that ensure success for young innovators. However, not all kids have such an adult in their lives so we thought school librarians might fill this role perfectly, due to their flexible schedules, their frequent interactions with all students in their schools, and their ability to provide access to resources both in and out of the library. The training is also useful to parents, youth innovation organizations and others who wish to fulfill this role. Registration is required to access the training (so that we can track who participates).

The blog’s first post (November) is up and was written by me, but in the future, we will have a variety of guest bloggers, even including some of our young innovators. Also, While the site is currently designed for grades 4-8, we are working on getting funding to expand it to preK-12. So, if any of you have younger or older children who you would like to have included in the site’s video database, I will post here again when that funding comes through with a call for additional young innovators to interview.

We hope you find this site useful and fun!

Ruth V. Small, Ph.D.
Laura J. & L. Douglas Meredith Professor
Project Director, Project ENABLE, Young Innovators Project
Project Co-Director, Targeting Autism
Founding Director, Center for Digital Literacy
School of Information Studies
Syracuse University
drruth at syr.edu<mailto:drruth at syr.edu>; 315-345-9546
https://ischool.syr.edu/people/directories/view/drruth/


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