Don't Lose Your Dongle!

My crafty, art teacher background comes in handy quite often. This time, it's helped me to come up with a way to keep my bluetooth dongles from being lost and/or forgotten after being plugged into a student chromebook! 

My littleBits code kits have a bluetooth dongle that needs to be plugged into the students' machines in order to function correctly. Well, despite numerous reminders and attempts at attention-getting signage, students would still leave the room with the dongle still plugged in. Other devices utilizing "dongle" technology include wireless mice, the keyboard for the Kano computer kit, and pretty much anything else that works wirelessly and needs an adapter to connect. 

By the way, I could totally call this a bluetooth adapter, but the word "dongle" is wayyyy more fun. And I teach middle school, so that's where my humor is at. Dongle it is then! 

So... I had some extra yarn lying around from the time I tried to crochet some Dot and Dash hats, so I decided to repurpose the leftovers into chunky tassels that I could attach to each individual dongle. I'm (pretty) sure no one will walk out of the room with a giant purple and gray yarn tassel attached to their chromebook... fingers crossed! 

Making a yarn tassel is fairly simple. I used a tutorial graphic found on Pinterest, much like this one below, to guide me:

via craftberry bush blog

Now, depending on the shape and size of your dongles, you may or may not be able to attach your tassel to it by simply tying. Mine are fairly small, so I utilized a combination of tying and hot glue to create a strong attachment between the two: 

It's basically a blob of hot glue over the yarn knot and around the plastic. You know, super fancy. Just be careful to leave the metal USB plug part intact with enough room so that it still plugs in completely.

Ta da! It's now infinitely more difficult to lose these babies! If you're feeling extra, try customizing your tassels to your school colors or create a color-coding system for your devices. Enjoy!

- Mrs L.

DIY Techie Craft Ideas for Back-To-School

It's that time of year! I'm back after taking some summer time off to recharge, be a mom, and do some home improvement projects over the summer. It's been great, but it's time to start thinking about school again. My five-year-old starts kindergarten this fall, and he loves looking at school supplies. Hmm... I think he gets that from me?

So we were watching some YouTube videos about DIY school supplies and came across some super fun tech-related projects that Iggy and I had to make, and that I just had to share here.  Check it out!

Cord taco vs cord donut. Who will win?

Earbud cords are forever getting tangled, or lost/broken in your backpack or pencil case, amirite? We've got two new different solutions that you can try out this school year! The past couple of years, I was totally pushing the "mint-container-as-earbuds-holder" craft idea, but I've got a couple of new ones that I think are equally as functional and fun.

The first one is a "cord taco" made from craft foam and velcro dots. My son decided to try his hand at the "cord pizza," and loved it so much that he made one for his dad, too. Here he is, hard at work:

He's not exactly coordinated enough for painting (or patient enough!) just yet, so Iggy opted to decorate his foam cord keepers using colorful permanent markers. I used acrylic paint though for mine.

The second item was a "cord donut" made from Perler beads. This is actually where our crafts all started. My son is hooked on these tiny plastic beads that you place onto a pegboard, and then melt to fuse together using an iron. He started out making flat images of Ghostbusters and monsters and such, but has started to graduate to 3-D creations. I was researching the best glue to use when I came across the DIY for a cord donut. How could I NOT try it out? It's a donut!

And once you go down the YouTube rabbit hole of ideas, it tends to snowball. I became obsessed with the idea of a lipstick USB drive, and had to try to make one for myself:

The trick here is finding a USB drive that's small enough to fit into your empty lipstick tube! I got mine on Amazon, but still had to do a little tweaking via a sanding block to get mine to fit just right... but it's super cute, don't you think? 

Here's my complete playlist with the DIY directions on how to make these (and other) fun tech and school supplies!

BONUS CRAFT: 

If you follow me on Instagram, you probably saw how I made myself the ultimate finger pointer stick for my whiteboard this school year, inspired by one of my all-time favorite movies, School of Rock:

Heavy metal rock hand for the win!

Hope your school year gets off to an awesome start!

- Mrs L.