Nick Provenzano is a new school teacher with an old school mission. At Grosse Pointe South High School, he’s educating students and preparing them for the future by integrating modern technology in his curriculum. There and within the entire Grosse Pointe School District, Provenzano is also an outspoken advocate for enhancing student learning with leading technology. It’s a passion that cannot be confined to the four walls of a classroom.
He blogs regularly on his website nerdyteacher.com, hosts podcasts at #NerdyCast, consults with educators to integrate technology into their classrooms, and is one of the founders of Edcamp Detroit, among many other highlights. As he’s written, enhancing education with tech is about giving students “access to the best tools to prepare them for a world that expects them to know how to use them once they leave school.”
At Grosse Pointe South HS, he’s true to his word. By teaming up with the school’s media specialist and administration, he helped secure funds to open a Makerspace earlier this year. In the school’s library, you’ll find the Blue Devil Maker’s Lounge with 20 Chromebooks, a green screen, an IdeaPaint wall, a 3D scanner, art projects galore, a MakerBot Replicator® Desktop 3D Printer, and more.
Their Makerspace is open to all students at the school. For Provenzano, it’s where any student can work on projects from their classes, explore new media, new technologies, new interests, and collaborate. For teachers, he sees the Makerspace as a free zone where students can critically think through problems they find interesting and create original things that demonstrate what they’ve learned. It’s been an all too prevalent notion in education that a space is for only one kind of activity, which can discourage innovative, off-the-wall thinking and problem-solving.
Much of how he views the Makerspace plays into how he and his students use their MakerBot 3D printer. He teaches four sections of English and a digital seminar class. As a 1st quarter project in his digital seminar, students find a simple, everyday problem and tweak or design a solution in TinkerCAD. By searching on Thingiverse, students have found free designs for 3D printed earbud wraps, toothpaste squeezers, and more. One student even designed his own GoPro case. In the 2nd quarter, the projects ramp up in complexity. Students are asked to find a problem anywhere in the world and then design a solution.
Through these 3D printing projects, his students can tackle problems they find relevant. In so doing, they’re more inclined to learn, to stay engaged, and eventually develop new skills through the design process.
Having 3D printed with the Smart Extruder+ for a few weeks, Provenzano has noticed a huge difference, “The Smart Extruder+ has made 3D printing faster, more accurate with higher detail which gets students more excited about design and 3D printing”. At the time MakerBot spoke to him, he had printed for a week without a single jam or filament-related hiccup.
