TED Masterclass Opportunity

One thing I love about this magnificent universe is that the more you ask for opportunities to just appear in your life, the more they do.

When I was a new teacher.... one of the goals I had, was to be one day coaching and mentoring incredible teachers; being of the calibre of those incredible teachers who were mentoring me.  And amazingly, later in my career, the opportunity came up to be a coach and mentor.  Talk about excitement!

As I left a role in the classroom, where I'd done everything from teaching Japanese and Environmental education to coaching squash, being a union representative, taking children to the mountain on a week-long ski camp and being an associate teacher and Within School CoL teacher... I vocalised how interested I was in pursuing the art of public speaking, in my new role.  I knew that I'd have the opportunity to speak more regularly at staff meetings and school gatherings, but I didn't realise what actually lay in store for me.

During our time at the Google Certified Innovator Academy in Sydney 2019, we were offered a world-first: TED Talks (the incredible world-renowned library of incredible talks given by a multitude of experts all around the world)  was offering Google Innovators the opportunity to be one of the first cohorts to use their TED Talks Masterclass App and later, the opportunity to submit our own talks to be chosen for the TED library.  I could not believe my luck!

Fast forward to this morning, and we had the opportunity to connect with our first cohort of people and hear suggestions from Grace Ahren, from TED on how best to undertake the Masterclass.  This video covers a lot of information about the Masterclass process itself and truly gets me excited about this additional opportunity that has been afforded us.

(Unfortunately, I can't share it with you, so you'll have to join up yourself to find out about all the fun!)

How great is it, that joining the Google Innovator community has led me to also be part of the continued communication through the Google Hangout national Innovator chat, the SYD19 Innovator chat and the NZ Innovators chat.... as well as joining a group of educators ready to take on their next challenge of submitting a talk about what they are most passionate about?  My mind is seriously blown.  Thanks, Google.  And thank you TED.

Collaboration Models

Part of the exploration I'm undertaking for my Google Innovator project is to look at how teachers and community resources (read: The Mind Lab, Tairāwhiti Museum, Waka Hourua, etc) could better collaborate to produce high-quality digital resources that are visible and rewindable in order to involve learners in real-world learning that is engaging and accessible to all.

Collaboration is a challenge when working across a whole region.  Many people are time poor and overwhelmed by other tasks, so although they are excited about the idea of collaboration, it's either not achieved or it's not turbocharged to the level that it could be.

This video was an interesting watch:
James Hopkins on Collaboration

This also led me to look at some new information around Practitioner Research and I found this "Inquiry on Inquiry" here.

Looking further, I realised that Google Scholar has a number of recent resources available as well.  

A bit of light reading for later: here.

Loads to unpack, but I'm excited about the impact it could have for our region if we can explore best practice for regional collaboration.