Blake Maxwell - archives volunteer, future teacher, makes a cast of Lincoln's head and his own stereoscopic viewer with a 3-d printer

 

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Above is my volunteer processing student Blake w a 3-d life mask of Lincoln he printed from Scan the World, an online site of scanned museum artifacts and other fun things. This is a great site with a lot of potential for educators.

Both of my interns and my one volunteer graduated in December. I wish them all well. Here is a blog from Blake. 

Hi I am Blake Maxwell. I am a secondary education history major and math minor. I have been working as a volunteer archival processor in the Clarke Historical Library in the processing room since late September. The main project that I worked on during my time here is processing the athletic archives for Central Michigan University. I took each folder, organized the documents in them, and rehoused them in the box with a new folder, according to archival standards and best practices. I also typed box and folder listings and encoded a box about coaches and athletics staff.  I am about to move on to student teaching in East Lansing. I decided to work at the archive because it would teach me skills that would be useful as a future History teacher like how to find historical documents in an archive and what the archiving process looks like. I intend to teach my students how important those who document and archive historical information are to historians. My experience working in the archive has improved my ability to instruct my students about the significant role that archivists play in preserving history. 

                                                     Here's the head with festive seasonal cap

Blake came to the Clarke without any prior experience and was a quick learner and a great help to me this term. He also gave me helpful feedback about archival collections, especially visual examples, to help introduce students to primary sources or encourage thoughtful conversations about them and what they teach us and document about history. During this time I showed him stereoscopic views and viewers. Thinking this would be a fantastic way to excite students in younger grades, Blake wondered how he could bring stereoscopic views into his future classrooms. I showed him examples online. Blake has access to a 3-d printer. Online he found a way to make his own stereoscopic viewer and downloaded available stereoscopic views available on the the Library of Congress website. We were both thrilled this is so easy and possible. Other teachers may find this helpful for their classrooms. Here's a view of Blake with his homemade stereoscopic views and viewer! Congrats Blake. I am going to miss you. Your students are so going to enjoy those stereoscopic views and your enthusiasm.