Innovation 4 Everyone

It's been a week or so since I came back from Costa Rica where I attended the 36th Annual Educators' Conference . I had the opportunity to listen to inspiring keynotes, participate in a pre-conference session led by the legendary Michael Fullan , attend a number of concurrent sessions, and also present my own session that focused on facilitating virtual field trips. Great personalities delivered the keynotes: Michael Fullan , Allison Zmuda and Heidi Hayes Jacob , and Douglas Fisher . However, throughout the conference I felt I was hearing the same things over and over. In a good way I mean! So, using the notes I took from all of these sessions, I created this word cloud using Wordle . This way I could quickly see what were the main ideas discussed throughout the event. This is the word cloud based on my tweets during the event: Taking the top words that appeared in the word clouds, I related them to each of the sessions or keynotes that I attended or prese

Challenge Back in March, the TI team ( Doug and I) was approached by the principal to see if we could help with the design of a brand new science space. At that time, we were under the impression that there would be a brand new STEM lab for Elementary, apart from the existing science lab. With the adoption of the Next Generation Science Standards , this made perfect sense. However, throughout the process we learned that it was not a new space, but rather the relocation and redesign of the current science lab. We also learned that our budget was going to be smaller than what we had thought. Process To get started, we called a meeting with the science reps, the school's projects team, the admin team, and of course, the science lab teacher, Ms. Georgina . This was the first of several meetings. We decided we'd follow the ASFM design process, created in partnership with design expert David Jakes . Provocation: How might we design  a learning experience  that allows stud

Hi all! During the most recent edition of Live Curious, Go Beyond , I was fortunate to attend 4 different sessions. With so many sessions of such high quality, the choices were difficult to make. - Gotta Catch All Students Through Pokemon Go I was especially looking forward to attending this session. Some time ago, a Kinder teacher had expressed concern with the Pokemon craze and wanted to find an activity to focus their attention on the educational aspect of it. In this session, Ms. Rachel Lanquist, from the American School of Guadalajara, explained different approaches to leveraging the Pokemon excitement. One suggestion was to create activities centered around the Pokemon theme and characters. Another approach is to create activities that incorporate the same technology of augmented reality. The presenter demonstrated an app that could easily be introduced to Kinder students or any other grade level. This app is called Klikaklu . It's basically an app to create scavenger