The MakeShift: What is a maker?

What is a maker, anyway?  Makers (a noun) and making (old verb, new meaning) are words applied to a popular movement being embraced by public museums,  libraries and, now, the classroom. We all make things. We have our students make things. But being a maker means moving beyond the step-by-step process where outcomes are predictable.  Instead, makers approach problems with an open mind and creative outlook that result in innovative solutions.  So a maker is a THINKER, a DESIGNER, an INVENTOR. 

Want to shift your projects up the SAMR scale? Classroom projects that engage students as "makers" ask open-ended questions and applaud a student's attempts (and sometimes failures) as learning experiences.  What a student produces/designs/invents is unique from other examples in the classroom, fostered by the student's ideas and creativity.  

Today's school libraries may be shifting to school-wide maker-spaces, but the most important shift occurs in the mindset of the classroom educator and the school-wide community.  As learners become a community of makers, they move beyond "looking up answers" to designing solutions and contributing new ideas to our collective understanding.

“I think a lot of people view a library as ‘a place you go to borrow a book’, rather than somewhere that provides a portal into re-experience. Yet a really important function of libraries in this era is to reinterpret the great resource of knowledge that they contain, in a way that strips away the fusty connotation of what a library is and lets people peer into the wealth of possibility that lies there for anyone to access.”  ~Peter Miller, musician and remix artist