Check it Out:

It’s a Year of STEAM at CMLE!

Orville the Official Office Bear helps to prep the VR/AR kits, after a busy day of podcasting. That’s his window art on the wall.

We have a theme going this year: STEAM!!!

Sure, we are always full steam ahead on the projects we do to help our members. (insert groan at the dad joke…)

And this year we have some great new resources to make that happen!! Thanks to an LSTA grant from the MN Department of Education, the State Library Services, with money from the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), we were able to buy VR/AR kits we will be sharing across our member school libraries!!

A year of being in virtual reality – it’s going to be great!!!!

Please read more information below, but if you’re interested in using these VR kits at your school, email us at admin @ cmle.org

These are going to be a big event, and a significant investment of our time and energy this year to get this program up and going. (Sorry in advance for the mistakes we are going to make as we get it all worked out!)

And we want to spend some time all year thinking about STEAM projects and ideas you can consider for your library – whether or not you happen to have the VR kits in your library.

So if you are doing some neat STEAM work – send it to us, so we can write it up to share with everyone! We will also put up weekly information on STEAM projects we find, in articles, in write-ups, from podcasts, or anywhere else we find them.

We will also specifically collect material on using virtual reality in schools and in the workplace, so you can browse them and get ideas for your library and your school.

If you want to request one, we would love to hear from you! Send us an email: admin @ cmle.org. We are working on creating an application but for now, just email us and let us know who you are planning to work with when you get the kits, and what you are planning to do with them. (You can make changes once you get the kits; but we want you to have some plans before they arrive!)

Libraries will be able to borrow the kits for about three weeks. It’s not a lot of time, so we want you to be ready to really be able to use them!

You can get started on our vendor’s website – browsing around to get some ideas you might want to try when your kit arrives.

You need this document! It’s the setup and user’s guide. You also NEED to show this to your IT people before your kit arrives, so they have time to make any modifications. (Show them page 27: Technical Guidelines.)

Feel free to take a moment to thank the Department of Education and IMLS for these kits! IMLS is on social media at @US_IMLS in your tweets and www.facebook.com/USIMLS.

This program is funded in part with a grant from the Minnesota Department of Education using federal funding, CFDA 45.310 – Library Services and Technology Act, Grants to States Program (LS-00-19-0024-19).