How To Teach Teachers

 

To have great students, we need to have great teachers as well. In this Ask Us Anything episode, Tom and Tracy Hazzard talk about providing teachers what they need to teach 3D Printing. They break down the essential components in preparing educators to teach 3D Print Design and explore the resources they need to have on hand to get started and remain informed. Tune in to this brief yet insightful conversation!

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Listen to the podcast here:

How To Teach Teachers

This is the Ask Us Anything segment.

It’s anything education this week.

What’s our question on this episode?

It’s about teaching the teachers. How hard is it to teach the teachers?

That’s a loaded question.

It is and I think that it’s something that you should ask yourself. If you’re a school district or if you’re a principal or if you’re deploying 3D printing into your program, you need to think about that preparation. You are giving both the teachers plenty of time and resources to learn what they need to learn before they start teaching.

You’ve got to equip them to do it. You can’t just throw them into it and ask them to do it. It takes some concerted effort and planning.

It’s because you have to think about it. This is not like you have a teacher who teaches physics or science of some kind, math and art. You’re asking them to delve into an area, at least one area that maybe they’re not comfortable in.

I think schools are probably struggling also as to where to put the 3D printer.

Do you put it in your computer classes? Do you put it in your science room? Do you put it in your art? Anyone of those poses a problem though if those teachers are not completely educated in all those areas and there aren’t many people who are. It’s not that easy.

One thing we heard from our friend, John Bokla, who we’ve interviewed a couple of times on our show. He is directly involved in educational programs.

i3D Creatives as his company and he has an i3D.club that’s out for kids. I think that’s going to be great in helping to make a community of students, but where do the teachers go?

That’s it. He told us his story that shocked me about being in a class and the teacher would always ask the students to ask three before me. Meaning, ask three other students your question before you come to me.

I was horrified by that, to be honest with you.

 

I don’t like that at all. That says to me that the teacher doesn’t know the answers and the kids know more than the teacher does.

It is dangerous. You’re talking about a situation in which they’re supposed to be leading. If you don’t give them the resources and the time to learn enough to be able to be leaders in these classrooms, then you’re doing the teachers and the students a disservice.

This is a realistic struggle going on in the education system.

We’ve heard of it.

It’s a completely new subject and nobody has the knowledge to teach the teachers.

A teacher finds out that they’re going to teach this in June as soon as school ends and they say, “By fall, you need to be ready. Here’s everything.” That’s not enough time. If you don’t give them money to go to take some classes. If you don’t give them a printer to access until the fall, which is what happens is the printers don’t show up until a week before school starts. You’ve got to make sure you give them the class resources and the money. Pay them to take the class. It’s unfair to expect them to do it on their own or they expect that they can learn it online and not be paid for their time over the summer. You’ve got to make sure that those things happen and give them a printer. They’ve got to experiment. They’ve got to try these things before the classes start.

You’ve got to give them the resources to learn how to manipulate things to be printed. They’ve had issues that are probably more difficult for someone to learn than operating a printer.

The printer operation should be easy. The other thing is that when you’re equipping these teachers with their programs, you better make sure that you’ve gotten training packages or service packages or other things from your equipment suppliers or whoever is supplying your machines and everything. That should not be the teacher’s burden all the time to service those machines either.

You’ve got to have more of a plan and a system set up for managing your deployed fleet.

This is IT. If you’ve got IT managers, you need to have someone on staff who can handle that. You may even have to have them trained.

I understand there are some software and programs available out there to help schools manage this. We’re going to do a little more homework on that and make another episode about that particular show in the future. You need to be thinking about all these issues if you’re trying to bring 3D printing into your school system.

For all you teachers out there and educators, we want to offer up our Ask Us Anything services. We are always happy to help you. If there’s a question you have, if you come into problems, we want to hear about them because if it’s a recurring problem for many educators, then we definitely need to find you a service for it. We need to find some answers. We will do our best to help you from that standpoint and our service is free. You can go on our website, HazzDesign.com and you can hit a SpeakPipe button and leave us a voicemail.

You can also send us an email or reach us on social media anywhere @HazzDesign.

We both think that the future is in educating our youth of all ages. We’re starting at age six with our daughter, but it could go all the way up through college. Educators at all levels have to be exposed to this. We want to help.

There’s no question too big or too small. Thanks for reading.

Important Links:

• John Bokla – previous episode
• i3D Creatives
• i3D.club
• HazzDesign.com
• @HazzDesign on Facebook

• Here’s How »

• 3DStartpoint.com
• 3D Startpoint Facebook
• 3D Startpoint LinkedIn
• Hazz Design Twitter
• 3D Startpoint YouTube