iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

"The mission of the Young Scientist Lab is to foster a new generation of scientists who are inspired to improve the world with science. For teachers, students and parents seeking a place to explore the world of scientific innovations and opportunities, Discovery Education and 3M developed this interactive portal filled with engaging activities and standards-aligned teaching tools, anchored by the award-winning annual Young Scientist Challenge."

Consider the remarkable individual we call the “modern innovative educator.” For such a one, gone are the days of teaching from the hip. Today’s children are, in many ways, different from any other student since the technological climate has changed so exponentially. Now our students need strategic, well-thought-out solutions that respect the culture in which they live. That’s what is meant by modern innovative teaching.

We can narrow the characteristics that define this teacher down to 5 of the most crucial and relevant. Which ones do you have, and how do your students benefit most from you having them?

In Agbogbloshie, a community in Accra, Ghana, people descend on a scrapyard to mine electronic waste for recyclable materials. Without formal training, these urban miners often teach themselves the workings of electronics by taking them apart and putting them together again. Designer DK Osseo-Asare wondered: What would happen if we connected these self-taught techies with students and young professionals in STEAM fields? The result: a growing maker community where people engage in peer-to-peer, hands-on education, motivated by what they want to create. Learn more about how this African makerspace is pioneering a grassroots circular economy.

The following is a guest post by Fran Kompar.  Fran is the Director, Digital Learning for Wilton Public Schools in Connecticut, who offers us insight into a fabulous professional learning exercise surrounding making, design thinking and entepreneurship.  It is my hope that readers will bring the learning experience that Fran outlines, back to their own school districts.

I am thrilled to be a guest author for this blog.  The following details the “Making to Learn” journey taken by teams of educators from Fairfield County, Connecticut. The experiences of this group, provides a connection to GREAT Makerspaces and the endless possibilities they provide in supporting a school’s plan for Social Emotional Learning, STEM, Personalized Learning, Inquiry, Reading, Math and Computational Thinking.  In fact, we can expand on the 21st Century Skills and develop our own 2025 vision for our students as confident, creative, collaborative and caring citizens – the new 4C’s.

Teachers have awesome ideas but it can be challenging for school systems to surface them and turn them into reality.

In my previous column, I looked at two school systems that created structures that did just that. Gwinnett County Public Schools teamed up with The Teachers Guild to help create a mechanism to do this and KIPP LA Public Schools created an in-house mini grant competition. Minnetonka Public Schools, a K-12 school district of 10 schools serving 10,500 students in Minnesota, has also tackled this and come up with a solution of its own: The Big Hunt for Ideas.

When Eric Schneider joined Minnetonka Public Schools seven years ago as associate superintendent, the district was already pretty innovative, but the ideas were coming top down from the superintendent and executive leadership team. Schneider was charged with developing a culture of innovation where the ideas come from the workforce. He looked at private companies in the Twin Cities area including 3M, Target, US Bank, and United Health and learned about their crowd-based internal innovation, where ideas are sourced from within. After modifying these structures for the school setting, The Big Hunt for Ideas was born.

If you’re working with an innovation management platform, then you know the importance of building a community. The success of these programs is intrinsically linked to the spirit and engagement of your community: how much they participate, how they’re participating, why they’re participating.

In fact, many companies partner with their HR departments in order to use innovation management as a means to improve employee engagement. And the programs that regularly deliver on and communicate change do actually succeed in improving organization-wide employee engagement. That’s the virtuous cycle that can be created from innovation management.

But how do you get it to work? And how do you know when it’s working? Well, here are three places to start."

Launching a new idea or business isn’t easy. Ever. That much at least we know and acknowledge. But it’s also not a solo effort. As individual creators and entrepreneurs, we instinctively believe we bear the full weight of responsibility for bringing the new and wonderful to life. And we’re dead wrong. In fact it’s this belief perhaps more than any other that raises the odds that your brilliant, groundbreaking dream won’t come true.

The fact is, successful innovation is the job of the many, not the few. Indeed there are countless roles to be filled before, during, and after the ideating, far too many for any one person to sustain. It all adds up to the one thing every groundbreaking creator not only needs, but must actively seek out and cultivate: community.

Companies and government agencies often make the mistake of viewing innovation as a set of unconstrained activities with no discipline. In reality, for innovation to contribute to a company or government agency, it needs to be designed as a process from start to deployment.

When organizations lack a formal innovation pipeline process, project approvals tend to be based on who has the best demo or slides, or who lobbies the hardest. There is no burden on those who proposed a new idea or technology to talk to customers, build minimal viable products, test hypotheses or understand the barriers to deployment. And they count on well-intentioned, smart people sitting in a committee to decide which ideas are worth pursuing.

Instead, what organizations need is a self-regulating, evidence-based innovation pipeline. Instead of having a committee vet ideas, they need a process that operates with speed and urgency, and that helps innovators and other stakeholders to curate and prioritize problems, ideas, and technologies.

My daughter looks up from her cereal and says, “You know what day I can’t wait for?”

“Um, your birthday?”

She shakes her head.

“Next Christmas?”

She shakes her head again and then says, “The first day back to school. I can’t wait to see my friends and my teacher. I don’t know what projects we’re going to do but I know it’s going to be awesome.”

She’s right. It will be awesome because her teacher is always trying new projects. She is always taking creative risks and my daughter is excited to be there as a result.

It has me thinking of a brilliant blog post that A.J. Juliani wrote last year, imploring teachers to use the new year as a reboot to take new creative risks.So, with that in mind, I’m going to share a few of my own thoughts on creative risks teachers can take with the start of a new year.

Nothing matters more for economics and human living standards than innovation. It’s innovation that has allowed us to cure diseases and extend life spans. It’s innovation that has drastically increased the pace of transportation and communication, and ultimately it’s innovation that has let most people do high-wage work rather than subsistence agriculture.

What the researchers found is fascinating. They discovered that both an actual ability to invent things and early life exposure to a culture of innovation and opportunity are crucial to driving inventions. Ability itself is, of course, unevenly distributed. But in the United States, so is opportunity — with huge numbers of highly skilled children from unfavorable backgrounds seemingly locked out of pathways to careers as inventors.

On the surface, it seems like big companies and startups are worlds apart. Startups want to disrupt existing markets. Established organizations want to squelch the competition. But in reality, the big company-startup marriage may actually be the secret to sustainable innovation.

It used to be that a key success factor of business partnerships was cultural fit. If the companies were too different, thing would fall apart. In today’s world where disruptive innovation is the name of the game, you want to embrace differences of all kinds – in organizational culture, technology, business models, and anything else that will advance the business.

If we want to see innovation happening in our schools, we need to trust, encourage, and empower teachers to transform their practice. Too often, teachers are forced to teach inside the box and it can feel frustrating. In this post, I explore why teachers are the innovators, what’s getting in the way, and what we can do about it.

Today’s problems can sometimes seem almost insurmountable. Although we’ve made strong progress over the last decade in many areas such as violence, extreme poverty and global health, issues like climate change, income inequality and a rise in populist authoritarianism still loom large.

Education could be a possible bulwark against many of these problems, providing a greater supply of skilled people to solve them, but here again we have issues. The US routinely scores poorly in international PISA tests and the OECD recently found that the US is falling behind other countries in college graduates.

100Kin10 is a non-profit trying to help turn things around. It realized that it’s not enough to simply deal with surface problems, you need to get at root causes, but those can be devilishly hard to identify. Nevertheless, they found that a productivity hack called the 5 Whys from the famed Toyota Production System was able to help point the way forward.

Be more chef.

It is a mantra I’ve adopted and taken to heart these past few months as my brother lay in a hospital, seemingly impacting the world more from that bed, then many of could do with bodies that were not full of tumors and cancer.

My brother was a chef in every sense of the word. He took the circumstances that life gave him and turned them into something wonderful and new and beautiful.

When my brother passed away a few weeks ago, my thoughts turned to my own four children. How could I help raise them to be chefs? How could I raise them to not follow the recipes of life, but instead make their own recipes for their life? But, it is not just my kids, it is all of our kids.

The question is, “Are we raising/preparing/teaching our students/children to be chefs or cooks?”

Spread the loveAre you looking for edtech tools that will allow your students to tap into their creativity? We got you covered. In this article, we will profile 38 amazing edtech tools for student creation and innovation. Guess the Code: While this app is presented as a game, it is actually a great way for children to look at patterns and sequences, and try to figure them out. The app generates different color combinations, and it is up to the user to decipher the pattern and enter the next color. SimplePhysics: Physics can be a daunting subject, but the new …

Spread the love

If your goal is to engage and educate students to the greatest extent possible, you need to consider the benefits of an innovative classroom. An innovative classroom will possess several key traits, including:

Creativity in the classroom provides a more relaxed and open environment for the students to freely express their opinions and to learn faster. Here are some tips for helping teachers add creativity to the curriculum.

Creativity and innovation are two skills that are highly coveted in today’s society. People that are creative and innovative have managed to blaze their own paths and remake the world in their own image. As a result, creativity and innovation will continue to be the most sought-after skills in our global economy. Because of this, schools have to prepare students for this workforce of innovation and put them the best position to be successful. So how can educators help their students cultivate their inner creator and innovator? I am glad you asked. Below you will find a graphic that lists 27 ways that you can help your students be innovative. I hope this helps.

Ever try rushing from a solo project into a team brainstorm? Switching gears on the fly isn’t easy–even when the thing you were doing alone is just as much a creative task as the thing you’re suddenly try to do in a group.

Ayse Birsel understands why. “When we’re working alone, it’s more contemplative. You only have you and your ideas, and there’s not somebody else there to judge you,” says the cofounder and creative director of design studio Birsel + Seck. In collaborative environments, she points out, “It can get competitive [and] really chaotic,” so it’s smart to “let people know ahead of time that the process could get messy, so trust the process.”

How do you prepare people for creative collaboration, though? Birsel has a few warm-up techniques up her sleeve. Here are three of them, none of which take longer than three minutes.

The Open University offers a free course on design and innovation. The course includes a set of six short videos that provide a broad overview of the history and development of modern design. That playlist, beginning with the video on the influence of arts and crafts on design, is embedded below.

“Innovation” is one of the most used words in education right now. It is something that I am obviously passionate about, hence the reason I wrote the book, “The Innovator’s Mindset”.  I am scared that we use the word “innovation” in the wrong way when there is power to this type of thinking. Words do not become “buzzwords” because they are used too frequently; they become “buzzwords” when they are used frequently in an incorrect manner.

Here are some misconceptions about the word that we need to dispell to protect “innovation” in education from becoming a buzzword.