THE MAKER COMMUNITY
Cohort meetings were always a lot of fun - online and in person! When I went to cohort meetings I always felt like I learned SO much from the other people there. The mentors are incredibly talented in each of their own areas. The other members brought just as much with various perspectives on how to approach a task we were doing in our meeting. Going to these meetings was always refreshing because it was time that I could be surrounded by people with creative minds (which isn't something I always got in my Math courses).
Cohort
meetings
Workshops! Weekend workshops always pushed me out of my skillset. From building snow globes that had microbits in them to sing jingles for the holidays to sewing together booklets, or flying drones - workshops taught me new tools for my maker toolkit. In the picture to the right, my mentor Natalie was teaching us how to mathematically bind pages together by designs inspired by Japanese binding techniques. This is a perfect example of what workshops covered - they were something you probably had no idea about beforehand but be a master of by the time you left!
WORKSHOPS
Remote Making
Remote making definitely had it's challenges. However, I feel that I became more equipped to make in my student teaching semester because of all of the Maker to Maker Community Sessions I attended. At these meetings, we would talk about the hardships of remote learning early in the pandemic, and how it was really difficult to incorporate things we loved from in person learning onto Zoom. Checking in with these small groups from week to week was really important to me and made me feel in community with other people that were going through similar struggles. Being able to have a support system through the beginning of the pandemic prepared me for my student teaching semester by learning a variety of approaches to online teaching.
Friendships
Maker has brought me a ton of friendships. I was able to get so much closer to people I worked with or new through the UTeach program because of Maker. We always had something to talk about and celebrate together. This small group of people in Maker is something I will cherish forever!