I recently had the privilege of keynoting the Heart of Innovation Conference for Heartland Are Education Agency in Iowa. Their conference centers on using technology in the classroom and ways to build up our competency as educators so that we can work with students more effectively. My keynote, “Starting, Exploring” looks at technology as a starting point for building connections in our educational communities and how we can build competency in ourselves towards a better tomorrow for education. Check out the slides and resources below:

Role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons are a wonderful way to provide opportunities for students to learn storytelling, collaboration, and communication in a classroom environment. Through learning by doing, participants in this session will learn how to create and play a classroom role-playing game with students.

One of the most difficult things for educators, particularly with more tools available than ever, is to find tools and resources of value and put them into action in their classrooms.

Whether an educator is trying to build their understanding of a particular pedagogical practice (UDL, UBD), a technology tool (AI, SAMR, TPACK), or creating a list of possibilities for their students, curating and correlating resources can be the most difficult part of our jobs.

In March 2022, I attended SXSWEDU week. After an amazing session on comics in education, I walked across the hall to the d.school’s Future(s) Museum. I knew the d.school, like many, from exploring design thinking and its applications in education, but I was not prepared for what I was in for at the conference. The d.school had set up an amazing maker space that guided participants through designing for their future descendants.

One of the fundamental issues facing educators is a two-fold problem. One is the amount of attention we are able to give each day to the larger educator community. Whether it is a new program in your school, a strategy from your local or state board, or a blog post from a national figure, finding attention to give each day come be complex and difficult.

I started taking goal setting seriously when I started teaching K-12. I had just completed a grad program in English and was just about to finish my second degree in education and I realized that I had not read for fun in years. My life was a mess of professional goals and obligations (conferences, new courses, lectures) and lists of books that I needed to read, not wanted to read. So, after a few adjustment months, I started reading for fun again.

One of the consistent things that I have learned and continue learning about Utah education is that there are a lot of incredibly dedicated and hopeful individuals working within the system for teachers and students. Funnily enough, a good chunk of those individuals in the last few years have been connected to the Utah Teacher Fellows.

Open Educational Resources, or OER, is an underutilized part of education. I know many educators who head first to Teachers Pay Teachers rather than spending time looking for something in OER.

Gitte Frederiksen’s TED Talk “Great Leadership is a Network, not a Hierarchy” hit a deep chord with me. Leadership often takes on the role of gatekeeping with workers sharing ideas or their struggles with their leadership and the ideas being struck down or the struggles ignored.

After yesterday’s post about AI, I feel like cannot escape it now. That afternoon I was reading You are not a Gadget and much of the chapter was on the associated problems of artificial intelligence and algorithms. This morning I opened my email and there was another edtech company sharing their latest AI-driven project (more on that in a future blog).

There are conversations that I have as a podcast interviewer that I wish could go on forever. Speaking to them for hours and hours just sounds like a delightful way to spend the day. Often it is because the interview sits in this great sweet spot of my own personal interest in the subject and the interviewees are so knowledgeable and engaged in their own work that their passion just shines. Dani and my interview with KnowledgeWorks experts Virgel and Lillian were one of these interviews.

During the Thanksgiving break, I spent a lot of time thinking about Shankar Vedantam’s TED talk. The idea is simple: the person you are is not the same person you will be in 5 or 10 years, maybe even tomorrow. Given that we will all change in myriad ways, many unknowable to us, how can we plan for that future self? Shankar offers simple ideas: stay curious, add humility to your work, and to be brave in our choices. We often forget to look beyond the few minutes each day we have to reflect on our lives; what Shankar is proposing is that we think about the person we will become and start building towards that goal today. Simple, but not common.