Slovenian author Evald Flisar will be giving a series of readings and talks, including one on June 23, in the U.S. Library of Congress.  The event starts at 12 noon at the European Division Reading Room, LJ-250, 2nd Floor, Thomas Jefferson Building.  Flisar will be responding to questions and will discuss the importance of literature in today's world. Slovenia, the land of

Suzanne Barton is a "Teacher with Habitudes." Suzanne, a fifth grade Language Arts teacher at Woodward Academy, has a passion for helping her students become powerful 21st century communicators who are motivated to move beyond their own "small" worlds to touch the lives of others in a positive way. After reading Angela’s book Habitudes last winter, I decided that I would begin this school year by introducing the habitude of imagination. In each of my three fifth grade English classes, I wrote the word imagination inside a circle on the white board. Each class was unique in its responses, and a student from each class captured them for us. I was impressed by the ideas my students expressed so easily, and one idea quickly led to another. The activity had them fully engaged! After introducing the idea of imagination and talking about it among ourselves, the next day I asked my students to close their eyes and think about all of the ways they have used their imaginations throughout their childhood. Then each student brainstormed different imaginary experiences they have enjoyed, writing them down in a simple list. After they had written their lists, I asked them to choose one imaginary experience and write about it. Their paragraphs were rich in descriptions of their imaginary play: several secret agents, a world-traveling sailor, an energetic gymnast, a toy doctor obsessed with Band-aids, a Power Ranger, an air-kicking ninja, a librarian who reads to little kids, a brilliant inventor, a robotic vacuum cleaner engineer, an invisible fairy, a beautiful fairy, a construction dude, an amazing stuntman, a one-room schoolhouse teacher, a disappearing magician, several fabulous chefs, an owner of exotic pets, Spider Man, President Obama debating Hilary Clinton, the world’s greatest actor, a best-selling author, a gifted fashion designer, a charming tea-party hostess, a spell-casting wizard, Captain America, and a fighter of evil aliens. After completing their final copies in the computer lab, the students searched the net (Go to pics4learning.com for pictures that require no attribution.) for pictures to illustrate their imaginary experiences. The printed, illustrated paragraphs were proudly displayed on our bulletin boards for all to enjoy! Much of what my students learned from this writing experience is obvious. They were engaged writers because they were writing about something that was important to them, and they were writing for an audience of their peers. Beyond that, however, was the potential for much more. As a result of our conversations and writings about imagination, I hope that my students were able to visualize that if they can imagine such creative, exciting ideas as children, certainly they can do the same as they grow into adulthood. As one of my students exclaimed during our discussion, "The world is but a canvas to our imagination." (He had discovered the Thoreau quotation on his iPad during our discussion.) I hope that as a result of this experience, my students will see themselves as people who can envision something exceptional in their futures, something that has never been imagined before, and perhaps they will be the ones to accomplish great feats that have not yet been achieved. They are our future, and what they eventually do (or do not do) with their imaginations will influence not only the microcosms of their own lives but also the world we all inhabit.

Blended learning can help overcome the limitations of face-to-face delivery. Blended learning can take many forms, and is easily adapted to specific needs and technical requirements. Incorporating elearning and mlearning (including synchronous and asynchronous), blended (often referred to as "hybrid") courses can include face to face elements as well as a blend of different technologies and

 A common problem with field courses is the fact that safety is often viewed as a checklist and there can be a certain level of complacency. Given the ever-changing nature of field conditions and also the fitness levels of the participants, it is very important to develop an approach to safety that heightens engagement and also becomes collaborative and participatory. The result would be an

How did I address this tragedy in class? I hugged every last child in my classroom as he/she left for the weekend and told them that they matter, that I love them, and that they make this world better by being in it. They left smiling, believing, and feeling validated. #partofthesolution Jolie Barker- Passionate Educator   As the world watches in horror and tries to process the day’s events, every parent in the country waits for their child to come home just so they can hug them a little bit tighter or tell them a little bit louder how much they matter, and love them. Families and communities will come together in hopes of finding a way through this tragedy, and we will see the best of humanity emerge as we work to support and comfort all those who experienced this senselessness first hand. And come Monday morning, these students will arrive in your classroom with the following questions going through their minds: Am I safe? Could this happen here? Could this happen to me? What if someone came to our school? What if you cannot protect me? Why do things like this happen? Am I going to be okay? Are we going to be okay? There is no lesson plan for that. There is no magic strategy or super app that can look children in the face and assure them that the world will be well again. Thank God for teachers. Thank God you know what to do. Thank God you do what you do. You have just been reminded of why we are indispensable  and why no one can simply walk in off the street and do our work. You are in this position of privilege to do one thing like no other person on earth can do: TEACH You touch hearts every day. You will look into their eyes, and they will see in yours that you love them. You will be the voice of reason and hope. The words you share and the silence your endure will be the catalyst for the healing ahead. You will assure them with your poise and presence that the world is a beautiful place. You will remind them as you speak about this horrific and unspeakable event that there is a giving and loving community ready to ban together in force to ensure this never happens again. You will calm their fears by showing them a great school filled with wonderful teachers, leaders, parents and students who are willing to protect and preserve its every member. You will be human with them. Allowing yourself to mourn along side of them demonstrating how strong and secure one can be in the midst of our hearts breaking. You will TEACH. You will not need a lesson plan, a reminder of that standard it covers, or any special technology. You will do what you are born to do. You will do what you are called to do. You will do what students need you to do. YOU WILL TEACH. You touch hearts every day. You change lives every day. Monday is no different. The people who will have the biggest influence on how our country will heal and whole will bear the biggest responsibility for making it whole again are sitting right in front of you. They need you. You are their teacher. You know exactly what to do. YOU MATTER. Resources to Help:  Talking to Kids About Scary Things How to Talk to Kids About a School Shooting Helpful Tips on Talking to Your Kids Talking to Children About Violence Image Credit: GaryVarvel.com  

I love Hed Kandi’s chill and house mixes and eagerly look for them. They evoke a beach and surf vibe and even if I’m squeezed into an economy seat on a sold-out regional jet flight, I am immediately transported to gorgeous places and climates.  For example, I imagine Sayulita, a bohemian coastal village in the Nayarit Riviera in Mexico close to Puerta Vallarta, famed for its surf and Stand Up

As I look back on this fantastic year of conversations and learning, I feel so blessed to be in this conversation with you all. You have helped me grow as a learner, leader and human being. It is both insightful and inspiring to see the posts that most resonated with you and our community as a whole. These ideas and themes will guide us as we move your suggestions and insights into action. I am so looking forward to all the blessings 2013 will bring. Thank you for taking the time to share your time and talents with me. I am smarter because of you. Top Posts 2013 12 Things Kids Wants from Their Teachers  There Is No Lesson Plan For Tragedy - Teachers YOU Know What To Do 12 Most Genius Questions in the World TO BE List for Aspiring Leaders  The YOU MATTER Manifesto  12 Most Must-Have Habitudes for Social Media Success  Living Our Story Means Embracing Our Imperfections The New Habitudes  The 5 C’s of Passion Driven Leadership Forget About NCLB-Leave No Genius Behind I am looking forward to continuing the journey with you in 2013… ’till then remember #YOUMATTER. With Love, Angela      

Design for Learning focuses on how to transform existing educational situations into desired situations where it is easier to achieve learning outcomes (Guislandi & Raffaguelli, 2015). The emphasis is on quality, and in doing so, the approach links the vision of how quality should be enacted in a program to the actual activities and procedures that are built into the learning program.In the

Walk into an English teacher’s classroom, and you might be able to guess how long they’ve been there. Take a look at the classroom library. It takes time to collect hundreds of books for your kids to read, and veteran teachers have worked for years to amass those giant collections. Luckily, modern technology gives us an alternative: extend your classroom library with free eBooks. There are literally thousands of free eBooks available for your students to read, and with free apps your students can turn their smartphones or tablets into eReaders. The biggest logistical problem is turning that vast digital catalog into something more personal. You need to use a tool to collect a small number of books that you think your students will be interested in, and then put those books in front of them. Today, we’ll look at three methods for creating and sharing a digital classroom library with your students. In all three cases, I’m going to assume that you have a source of free eBooks (Amazon’s Free Popular Classics, Google’s Play Store Top Free Books, or Project Gutenberg) and an app to read those books (Amazon’s Kindle app, Google’s Play Books app, Aldiko for Android, or iBooks for iOS). Option 1: Create a Simple List with Linkli.st There are a number of websites that allow you to create and share lists of URLs. Many of them could be appropriate, but I like Linkli.st for it’s simplicity. You can create a list right from the homepage. Give it a title, and then find a free Kindle book on Amazon. Copy the URL of the book into the form on Linkli.st and click "Add." Presto! Instant list. Your list will be created with a shortlink that you can write on the board, put on a handout, or e-mail to your students. Of course, you’ll want to add a few more books to the list before you do that. This isn’t going to give you much organizational power, so you’ll want to keep your list short - a few dozen books at most. This might be a good way to share a short reading list, like the options for an independent project or for summer reading. Option 2: Create a Library with Springpad Springpad is a web clipping app, similar to Diigo and Evernote. I found it in the Chrome Web Store, and I love it. You create a "notebook," and then you can make entries into it called "springs." The visuals are strong and appealing, but there’s a flexible tagging structure to help you organize things, and there’s awesome integration with Amazon. First, you’ll need to create an account and create a new notebook. Make sure that you leave the "Public" option selected, so that other people can view your notebook. Then add a new link, and copy and paste the URL of a free kindle eBook. Springpad will recognize it’s a book, grab the thumbnail image, and grab the description. It’ll also create a "Buy on Amazon" link that takes you right back to the book’s listing. Of course, "Buy" is a loose term. You’re "Buy"ing that free eBook for $0.00. After you add a book, you should tag it in some way. These tags will allow your students to sort and filter the books. For example, you could tag each book by genre (Fantasy, Science Fiction, Romance). Or, you could tag it by mood (Happy, Funny, Tragic). It’s up to you; just make it intuitive. Since the tags will help you keep organized, this is a much better choice for creating a larger library. The only thing I don’t like is that Springpad doesn’t seem to recognize the Gutenberg or Play Store books very well. This works great with Amazon, but not with other sources of free eBooks. Option 3: Integrate It Into Your Classroom Blog Let’s say you already had a classroom blog with a service like WordPress. You could create a digital library and integrate it there. Maybe you wanted to create a complete library with a hundred or two hundred books. I would create a set of pages, titled by genre. On each page, create a bullet list with the title of the book, the author, a description, and a link back to the source. For example, you might create a "Science Fiction Books" page and add The Time Machine by H. G. Wells as your first book. This is going to be your most time consuming option, and it requires a larger skill set than either the simple list or the Springpad notebook. However, you’ll be rewarded with greater flexibility in how you include and display the books. This makes the most sense if you already have a classroom blog, because you won’t need to go through the added hassle of sharing another external link or service. Choose an Option and Build a Library At the end of the day, all three options are viable choices. They fulfill our main objective: creating a list of links to free eBooks and sharing that list with our students. So choose the option that best fits your needs, and go make your own classroom library. I’d be interested to hear what books you include, so let me know in the comments! Brian Rock is a high school social teacher in New Jersey and a graduate student at Rutgers University. He publishes Tech and Teaching, a blog about educational technology. He is currently researching the relative merits of tablets and Chromebooks in a one to one school setting. You can connect with him on Google Plus.

Problem-based learning has proved to be highly effective for careers and industries in which a great deal of hands-on learning / skills-based practice is required and also in team environments. Examples include petroleum exploration and development, pipeline construction, manufacturing / processing, construction, medicine, pharmaceutical sales, allied health industries, and hospitality /

If you read my blog regularly, you’re probably a bit surprised by the subject header. But this was a rough week, with a mix of highs and lows. The low is easy to explain; I woke up on Wednesday with a hacking cough and an ominous feeling, which I wished away. By evening, things had gone from bad to worse. I planned to take it easy on Thursday, but with my husband on a business trip, I first drove my kids at school. On my way home, I realized that bed rest alone was not going to cure me. I went straight to the doctor, who told me I had a bad case of the flu and mild pneumonia and sent me home with expensive prescriptions and an admonition to lie still in bed for 48 hours. I don’t need to tell you how poorly I followed the "lie still in bed" part. Four hours later, I struggled to breath, and finally called my friend, who left work to drive me to the hospital. Happily, at that point, the highs of the week kicked in. My friend must have broken a speed record on the way to my house, as she arrived minutes after I called her and whisked me to the hospital. I was met by a remarkable team of doctors who stabilized me and set me firmly on a gradual path to recovery. My husband had taken an early flight home to meet me in the hospital and bring me home, and my mother drove two hours to care for me in the way that only a mother can. This time, I was more faithful to orders that I just lie in bed. Honestly, I only peeked at Twitter on my phone five times, and received the absolute high of the week when I learned my 17yo son Ryan was soliciting good wishes for me from my followers. These wishes worked, and I have all but fully recovered. As I struggled over several days to overcome my challenge, I mostly thought about the ambitious plans I have for 2013, and how hard it can be to change the world when the hard knocks of life keep dragging you down. As an advice junkie, as I lay in bed, I thought about all the inspiring material I’ve read about overcoming the low points on the road to success. Many times I’ve read that people who enjoy success rarely enjoy an obstacle-free ride to the top; they simply learn to overcome whatever challenges they came across. The most successful people are the ones who never believe that they have "won;" they follows Kipling’s admonition that if you "meet with Triumph or Disaster, treat these two impostors just the same." As I lay in bed, in between breathing treatments, I thought also the words of a friend who recently explained to me "The Stockdale Paradox." Admiral Jim Stockdale was the Vice Presidential running mate of Ross Perot in 1992. He famously and clumsily opened the Vice Presidential debate in 1992 by asking "Who am I and why am I here?"  His performance was badly misunderstood, and he faded from the public eye and died in 2005. Being misunderstood in his most public moment was hardly the biggest challenge of Stockdale’s career. He spent 7 years as one of the most senior ranking prisoners of war in Vietnam, and was tortured more than 20 times. His experience spawned a philosophy that is now well known in management circles as "The Stockdale Paradox": "You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end - which you can never afford to lose - with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be." Can you think of a better prescription for daily life? Anyone who has ever met me would testify that I have "unwavering faith that I will prevail in the end" - after all, I routinely invite near strangers to help me change the world. Yet, I will confess, that my faith in "prevailing in the end" is sorely tested in my lowest moments, such as when I lay still in bed on Thursday, hoping that my situation would stabilize. But this week I realized that often it’s the other part of the philosophy that I fail to abide by. From the moment my cough began, everyone who heard it urged me to get immediate medical care. Did I? No; I had too many other important things to do, and I allowed my faith that I would "prevail" to stop me from confronting the brutal facts of my current reality - that I was quite sick and needed medical care and rest. As I make plans for 2013, I have unwavering faith that I will prevail in the end. I will continue to help transform education one district, one leader, and one teacher at a time. Through the Choose2Matter movement, I will help people realize that they are geniuses, that the world needs their contribution, and that they can change the world, and I can’t wait to watch them do so. But the next time that life throws me a curve, whether it be as simple as a hacking cough or something far more complex, I will learn from my experience this week. I will have the discipline to confront that brutal reality, whatever it may be; treat that disaster as the impostor it is; and rest assured that my unwavering faith and commitment will lead me to a triumph waiting just around the bend.

GUEST POST - BRETT CLARK This past December I ran a series on Education Dreamer called The 12 Days of Dreaming. Over a course of three weeks I posted twelve different blogs by guest blogger/educators who wrote about their dreams for education. I wanted to take this idea to the next level. So, I talked to Zak Malamed of #StuVoice and Angela Maiers of #Choose2Matter about an idea where we give our students a platform to share their dreams for education. I have always want to help my students have two things: voice and choice. This is an opportunity to provide students with a chance to share their vision! That’s why Education Dreamer, StuVoice, and Choose2Matter are putting on The 12 Days of Dreaming: Student Edition. We are looking for at least 12 guest student bloggers to share their voice with the world. These ideas can be submitted by filling out this FORM by February 8. The posts will run on Education Dreamer at the end of February. I also believe nothing is worth doing if it doesn’t benefit those around us. In that thought, at the end of the #12DOD: Student Edition we will publish an iBook. The proceeds of the iBook will be donated to the Sandy Hook Scholarship Fund! Educators and parents, please share this idea with your students. Students, please take the time to share your dreams with us. Your dreams are worth sharing and they are worth pursuing! Together we will change the world! #YouMatter Brett Clark (@Mr_Brett_Clark) is director of technology in Jeffersonville, Ind. His interests include the flipped classroom, creating a student-centered classroom, technology integration and professional development. He is a conference presenter and recently presented at the Flipped Conference in Chicago. Learn more about Brett at his website.

I recently had the honor of meeting with Michael Cooper, the new Superintendent of the North Cedar, Iowa School District. Open enrollment has created stout competition for students in the Northeastern part of Iowa, and Michael is steadfastly determined to transform North Cedar into a magnet district into which students will want to transfer. After spending a day with Michael, his leadership team, and most importantly, the teachers of the district, I know they will succeed. Soon, students will be leaving nearby districts in droves to attend North Cedar. Michael was reflecting on what he had learned in a half-year in the Superintendent’s role. He was frustrated that perhaps the district was trying to do too many things at once. One of his leaders said, "We need to become great at something, because we know we can’t be great at everything." This is true of every school district, everywhere. If you try five initiatives at once, you are buying a ticket on an express train to mediocrity. In this short video, Michael analogized the situation to his days of coaching football, and why he began each year focusing on "one play." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsuFeC9tDKg What’s your "one play?" What will your school become great at?  

    I’ve recently begun blogging for The Huffington Post. On a regular basis, I’ll be publishing posts there that are appropriate for that broader audience. I’ve also begun to appear in segments on HuffPostLive, the organization’s online TV show. Of course, I’ll be alerting you to my posts and appearances through Twitter, Facebook and other social media accounts, and likely mentioning them here. My first post sought to change the conversation around STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) in school by changing the words we use to describe it. The second post focused in on two words that I believe are particularly powerful, when shared with young women making important decisions about their education and career: You Matter. My future posts will cover a broad range of topics. I will still be blogging here on a regular basis.

Regular readers of this blog know that, to me, words matter. I’ve long encouraged teachers to choose their words wisely, because the words we choose have a powerful effect on learning. Yesterday, I came across a stellar example of this principle in the workplace. 72andSunny is a communications company that was recently named  AdAge Agency of the Year. It has a stellar lineup of cutting-edge clients, including Target and Samsung, which is "taking a big bite out of Apple," and displacing it as the coolest company on earth. Yet for all the agency’s success, there is one word that 72andSunny CEO John Boiler tries not to use: "Client." If you’re an ardent fan of "Mad Men," you may have just fallen off your chair. But in "5 Reasons You Should Quit Using the Word ‘Client,’" Boiler explains that when his agency was created, all it had was a few good friends for whom it did work, and whom it referred to on a first-name basis. This culture of treating clients as friends has continued as the agency has grown. Boiler goes on to explain: By referring to people by their names, you "tend to think of them more as the people that they are as opposed to cogs in some machine." When dealing with complaints, by removing the label, the agency has "found it easier to empathize with our partners and their situations." The old approach of listening to a client’s needs and going into isolation to develop an idea is over. Instead, agencies and clients work together in a manner that is "fluid and collaborative." By "putting ego aside and trying stuff together, things get better. It’s like improv." Avoiding the "client" label and the artificial divide it creates, 72andSunny promotes "a culture of respect, understanding and open-mindedness. This affects the way we treat each other as well. People rise to a higher standard of human interaction." In sum, "we can all benefit from this simple mental switch. It may seem an insignificant thing, but considering the importance of relationships in advertising, it can make all the difference." Now it’s your turn. What "simple mental switches" can we make in the classroom that might "make all the difference"?

Last week I was honored to participate in Dell’s Innovation in Education Think Tank at the Texas Association of School Administrators 2013 Conference. It was a great day of learning.   CLICK HERE to see a clip in which I discuss why innovation is not a one-time project. CLICK HERE for a second clip in which I discuss what children want from teachers.   In the clip below, all of the panelists share their takeaways. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ok_pYfUm2sI

Photo credits: positiveimperative.com "Nothing great in the World has been accomplished without passion." — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, German philosopher, 1832 I recently spoke at the Dell Innovation in Education Panel at the Texas Association of School Administrators 2013 Conference in Austin. When we were invited to sum up at the end, I realized that one guest had not been invited to the table: Passion. I was the first to interject this word, saying that "passion should not be the number one thing on the agenda, it IS the agenda." The #TASA13 hashtag on Twitter, which had been moving moderately, exploded, with several dozen tweets supporting my statement. At any other conference in any other industry, passion is on the lips of nearly every participant, but at some education conferences, you are far more likely to hear the words "assessment," "standardize," "common core" and "pedagogy" than you are to hear the word "passion." There is a passion gap in education, and students are falling through it and drowning in ennui. This is not to say that students are never passionate at school. As a teacher at the K-2 level for 14 years, I had the privilege of spending each day with children eager to learn and explore. Yet this begins to change somewhere around the fourth grade. Why does passion matter? What are the real-world implications of an education system that discourages passion? In a recent column in The New York Times, Thomas Friedman explained that "we need everyone to be innovating new products and services to employ the people who are being liberated from routine work by automation and software. The winners won’t just be those with more I.Q. It will also be those with more P.Q. (passion quotient) and C.Q. (curiosity quotient) to leverage all the new digital tools to not just find a job, but to invent one or reinvent one, and to not just learn but to relearn for a lifetime." When Bill Gates appeared on "The Colbert Report," Colbert asked Gates whether data or passion was more important to him in pursuing his foundation’s aims. Gates response? "I think passion is probably the most important…backing scientists who have great ideas." So if passion is so essential in the work world, how do we invite passion to stay in school past fourth grade? How do we bridge the passion gap between school and the rest of life? Schools mistake passion for an emotion, as something kids like to do in their spare time. Those are hobbies. Passion is what you must do, even if you have to suffer to do it. Passion is the genius of all geniuses. It’s discipline at a level we can’t comprehend. To release a passion, a student may need above all else a role model. It may be a parent, an aunt, a neighbor, a coach, but as often as any of these, it is a teacher. To lay the groundwork for students to develop passion, teachers must do two things - greet students — by name — when they walk in and hug them (either physically or metaphorically) when they leave. Whatever happens in between, students will remember that you notice them and they mean something to you. Teachers must let students know that they expect that students will accomplish great things. All of this may sound trite, but it is derived from the responses we received when we asked 500,000 students last year, "What would make you run to school?" These responses are not confined to the young; they mirror the results when a similar question was asked of 7,000 adults. Sir Ken Robinson writes, "Passion is a deep attraction. It can be for someone else or for a process: music, maths, cooking, sport, entrepreneurship, teaching… whatever fires your imagination and stokes your energy. We all have different aptitudes and we have unique passions. The challenge is to find them because it’s in the fusion of both that we live our best lives." When will your school declare that its mission is to help students find the fusion of their aptitudes and passions to live their best lives? This post was originally posted on SmartBlogs.

Every so often we get stuck. It is easy to loose perspective when we meet an obstacle. The daily grind can put limitations on our ability to make the connections necessary to make a leap forward toward success. Instead of getting frustrated, bored or irritated you can use the skills you already obtain, and a little confidence, to develop thoughts into brilliant and practical innovations for everyday living. Ideas can be built from scratch. In this video Debra Kaye the author of Red Thread Thinking and the Red Thread can show us how just by solving an everyday problem, we can innovate. The things we don’t like, and things that bug us are a great place to start, because chances are if it bothers us, than other people may find it irritating too. These unhappy people are our market and the red thread can begin to show us a solution that is an innovation waiting to be carried out. The book, Red Thread Thinking:  Weaving Together Connections for Brilliant Ideas and Profitable Innovation by Debra Kaye, shows us that we all are born with what it takes to innovate in our own lives. It gives us the guidelines we need to take the tools or "threads" we already have and weave them together to make connections that lead to brilliant insights that will inspire innovations. Defining what it is that bugs you and using the Red Thread Thinking process you can take an idea and turn it into a profitable innovation. In the video, Debra Kaye and the red thread demonstrate that it bugs her that hybrid cars are so expensive, and the vital role they play in a cleaner environment and reducing our dependence on foreign oil.  She illustrates that technology advances will inevitably bring the cost down but has developed an idea to make them more affordable so that we can get them on the road now. If a partnership was made between a car manufacturer and utility company they could provide a loan as an up front incentive. She explains that to make the initial price more affordable to the consumer the lender would calculate the gas money an average driver would save and putting that saving into the car upfront. In this short video you will see that the red thread is a very playful, and clever tool. It would seem it has a mind of its own.  Like the red thread with a little confidence and practice we will be able to innovate more freely in our daily lives. We are smart, and research shows if we think we are smart than it will be so. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1bAJeyrJOY

Did you know great innovators formulate new ideas by making connections between observations, experiences, facts, history and feelings that on the surface do not seem related—but are—to uncover fresh, brilliant insights? You can do the same. A new book, RED THREAD THINKING: Weaving Together Connections for Brilliant Ideas and Profitable Innovation by Debra Kaye reveals how to activate your own knowledge and resources - what you already have at your fingertips - to make connections for big insights and smart, innovative ideas.  Here are just a few examples from this simple, common-sense approach that is as almost easy as tying a red string around your finger: Look for new ideas within those that already exist.  Most "original" ideas aren’t completely original.  For example, the Gutenberg Press, which forever changed the world of communication, was based on ancient Chinese moveable type, the wine press from the vintners in Rhineland and Gutenberg’s own metallurgy experience.  Old ideas put together in a new way to change the world. Ask unexpected questions.  How you frame a question is often the biggest path to new ideas.  Jay Walker, the creator of Priceline.com, could have created another aggregator traveler site that offers the best prices and schedules.  Instead he turned the tables.  He asked hotels and airlines what they might accept.  Consumers are now in a position to set prices, and as a result he opened a whole new way of doing business. Look what can play into people’s existing behavior.  Many innovators make the mistake of thinking a new product must change people’s behavior. That’s hard to do.  It is much easier to look at their habits and just create a new fit. Returning from a family vacation and lugging baggage around the airport, Bernard Sadow saw a customs agent effortlessly roll a heavy machine with the help of a skid with wheels.  A little jerry rigging and the first wheeled luggage was born. Sleep on it.  Sleep not only provides rest and restoration but it is essential to our ability to create and innovate.  Research shows that your brain is very active when you sleep and information transfers from one part of the brain to another, so that new associations and connections can be made more freely without being from some sort of experience in your life. Think that you are a genius.  Attitude and belief in your own abilities makes you more curious and open-minded and more willing to take professional and intellectual risks.  The more you believe you can stretch yourself, the more you will think of your capacity to be smarter and you may just be so. Red Thread Thinking is a process you can use to develop ideas from scratch and innovate in any situation - from coming up with new business ideas to coming up with ways to solve a sticky situation in the office.  It helps you achieve and succeed even in a weak economy.  With practice, you can become as naturally good at developing successful ideas as many well-known innovators.

We continue to develop the infrastructure for Choose2Matter, busily preparing a re-launch this spring. This week, we’ll launch a fund-raising campaign to support the Quest to Matter, a five-week program that will launch on April 15, in which K-12 students from around the world will be encouraged to declare that they matter and then take action to change our world. Ian Coon, an Iowa student with a brilliant future, produced one of the signature videos of the movement: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWMC3S8BT_A The Quest will accelerate Choose2Matter, but it is not the end of it. As with all great revolutions, students will lead it, but they will not be alone in it. Choose2Matter will become a broad, sweeping revolution in which people of all ages and all walks of life, and organizations of all sizes, all around the globe, choose to matter and change our world. How can we make an audacious statement? Everyone needs to matter. Even Oscar winners need to matter. As we wait to see who brings home the gold statuettes tonight, we’re reminded of the closing words of Reese Witherspoon when she accepted the 2006 Oscar for Best Actress for her performance as June Carter in Walk the Line: "People used to ask June how she was doing, and she used to say - ‘I’m just trying to matter’. And I know what she means. You know, I’m just trying to matter, and live a good life and make work that means something to somebody." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4P0smMYhLsg

This post was original featured on Smartblogs on Education in Inspiring Others "Nothing great in the World has been accomplished without passion." — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, German philosopher, 1832 I recently spoke at the Dell Innovation in Education Panel at the Texas Association of School Administrators 2013 Conference in Austin. When we were invited to sum up at the end, I realized that one guest had not been invited to the table: Passion. I was the first to interject this word, saying that "passion should not be the number one thing on the agenda, it IS the agenda." The #TASA13 hashtag on Twitter, which had been moving moderately, exploded, with several dozen tweets supporting my statement. At any other conference in any other industry, passion is on the lips of nearly every participant, but at some education conferences, you are far more likely to hear the words "assessment," "standardize," "common core" and "pedagogy" than you are to hear the word "passion." There is a passion gap in education, and students are falling through it and drowning in ennui. This is not to say that students are never passionate at school. As a teacher at the K-2 level for 14 years, I had the privilege of spending each day with children eager to learn and explore. Yet this begins to change somewhere around the fourth grade. Why does passion matter? What are the real-world implications of an education system that discourages passion? In a recent column in The New York Times, Thomas Friedman explained that "we need everyone to be innovating new products and services to employ the people who are being liberated from routine work by automation and software. The winners won’t just be those with more I.Q. It will also be those with more P.Q. (passion quotient) and C.Q. (curiosity quotient) to leverage all the new digital tools to not just find a job, but to invent one or reinvent one, and to not just learn but to relearn for a lifetime." When Bill Gates appeared on "The Colbert Report," Colbert asked Gates whether data or passion was more important to him in pursuing his foundation’s aims. Gates response? "I think passion is probably the most important…backing scientists who have great ideas." So if passion is so essential in the work world, how do we invite passion to stay in school past fourth grade? How do we bridge the passion gap between school and the rest of life? Schools mistake passion for an emotion, as something kids like to do in their spare time. Those are hobbies. Passion is what you must do, even if you have to suffer to do it. Passion is the genius of all geniuses. It’s discipline at a level we can’t comprehend. To release a passion, a student may need above all else a role model. It may be a parent, an aunt, a neighbor, a coach, but as often as any of these, it is a teacher. To lay the groundwork for students to develop passion, teachers must do two things - greet students — by name — when they walk in and hug them (either physically or metaphorically) when they leave. Whatever happens in between, students will remember that you notice them and they mean something to you. Teachers must let students know that they expect that students will accomplish great things. All of this may sound trite, but it is derived from the responses we received when we asked 500,000 students last year, "What would make you run to school?" These responses are not confined to the young; they mirror the results when a similar question was asked of 7,000 adults. Sir Ken Robinson writes, "Passion is a deep attraction. It can be for someone else or for a process: music, maths, cooking, sport, entrepreneurship, teaching… whatever fires your imagination and stokes your energy. We all have different aptitudes and we have unique passions. The challenge is to find them because it’s in the fusion of both that we live our best lives." When will your school declare that its mission is to help students find the fusion of their aptitudes and passions to live their best lives?

Words matter. I encourage people to choose their words wisely, because the words we choose have a powerful effect on other people. As this post showed, the words we choose matter not only for teachers, but for anyone else who plays an important role in someone’s life. Some decry "political correctness" when a class of people seeks to change the words we use when referring to them. But as Aimee Mullins, a world-class athlete, actress and activist discussed in a 2009 TEDMED talk titled, "The Opportunity of Adversity," we must think carefully about the values our words convey. Mullins read from a decades-old thesaurus the synonyms for "disabled." They were hideous, and conveyed low value and little hope for any human being pinned with this label. Before anyone could dismiss these values as relics of a less-enlightened era, Mullins read from a modern thesaurus, and the words had not changed much. Here is the current thesaurus.com entry for disabled: broken-down, confined, decrepit, disarmed, hamstrung, handicapped, helpless, hurt, incapable, infirm, laid-up, lame, maimed, out-of-action, out-of-commission, paralyzed, powerless, run-down, sidelined, stalled, weakened, worn-out, wounded, wrecked What upset Mullins, she said, weren’t the words themselves, but rather "the values behind the words and how we construct those values." For a child to overcome the low expectations set by labels or value constructs, Mullins said, "all you really need is one person to show you the epiphany of your own power and you’re off. If you  can hand somebody the key to [her] own power, the human spirit is so receptive, if you…open a door for [people] at a crucial moment, you are educating them in the best sense. You are teaching them to open doors for themselves." If empowering students to reach their true potential is the root of education, how do educators do so? If we choose our words wisely, our language can help students envision success, stretch their thinking, and advance independent behaviors and actions. Like any skill, the careful choosing of words develops over time, and takes practice. The following tips can help build your awareness of the words you use and help you harness the power of our words. Hit Record! - With free recording tools such as Audacity, it is easy to record the actual words you use in the classroom. Record, and play them back to yourself. Hear the words you speak, as well as the tone and context of that dialogue. Lesson Language - While lesson planning, take a few minutes to think through the language you are going to use with students. Often we think we are modeling skills and strategies for students when we are really just telling and assigning, The few minutes we spend thinking through our language can impact the flow and dynamics of the instruction. Repeat, Repeat, Repeat - Phrases - Keep your radar up for repeated words and phrases. These mantras resonate in students independent work. Be alert to the language not advancing student independence. Ask a colleague to listen in as it helps to have two ears at work. Breathe - Before speaking, take a few seconds to plan words carefully. Think about what we could say that would encourage, stretch, challenge, and acknowledge our students thinking and contributions. Build Collective Intelligence - Invite colleagues to join in. Great things can come out of a brainstorming session. Here are notes from one five minute conversation I held with educators about the language we use:     

One of the challenges of learning today is that it depends on the contributions of other people. Scholars of the past could lock themselves in a room, read the printed literature on a topic, consult with a few mentors, and emerge with a product that builds upon the historic work of others. This isn’t an option for today’s researcher. While there are many famous instances of collaboration throughout history, none rise to the level of what’s possible today. Now, dozens or hundreds or thousands of people from around the world can work collaboratively on a project around the clock and produce extraordinary results in a short timeframe. As Clay Shirky says, today most people "over estimate the value of access to information and underestimate the value of access to each other." This is why I wrote a few weeks ago that we all must invite to our "table" individuals who can influence our thinking, challenge our ideas, and demonstrate the behaviors and attitudes we seek to emulate. Today’s "tables" are not roundtables of writers in a smoky hotel bar; no, today’s tables consist of hundreds or thousands  of mostly virtual contacts around the world and across all ages groups and professions. How can our students learn to begin to invite people to their table? By being part of a classroom that reaches out to passionate leaders, experts and eyewitnesses to history who can demonstrate first-hand what it means to learn directly from another person. This is why I have long been an advocate of Skype in the Classroom, which has a passionate commitment to supporting educators as they venture, virtually, with their students out into the world. This past week, at SXSW Edu, Skype announced that it was offering free group calling, formerly a premium service, which will enable classrooms to connect with multiple other parties at once. Author Katie Davis speaks with studentsin Van Meter, Iowa, via Skype. Rather than write on and on about the benefits of using Skype to connect with the world, I will instead share two recent presentations that share actual examples of incredible learning experiences that a Skype connection has fostered. The first is an article from one of my favorite sites, findingDulcinea, that synthesizes the experiences of more than a dozen classrooms that used Skype to reach out to authors, politicians and eyewitnesses to history. The last category includes World War II veterans, civil rights activists, East Germans who lived behind the Berlin Wall, and first responders on September 11. The second is a Google doc created by Louise Morgan, a second grade teacher at Sycamore Elementary School in Fort Worth, Texas. The document collects (and thus by itself is an excellent example of the power of collaboration) and shares the experiences of classrooms around the world who have learned to use Skype to appreciate the value of access to each other.    

Tessa Hardiman is the author of Surviving and Thriving: 21 Tips for First Year Teachers. You can find out more about the online community for first year teachers by visiting the website: Surviving Your First Year. When I was in college, my professors warned my classmates and me about teacher burnout. They quoted the haunting statistics right and left. It was like they were saying, "None of you will ever make it for longer than five years." I know the statistics on new teachers remaining in the profession aren’t great, and teachers today face greater obstacles than ever before. Even in these tough times, there are ways to avoid feeling burned out. 1) Realize you can’t do it all. You are given a finite amount of instructional time. It’s hard enough to squeeze in the required curriculum, much less implement some new tool or website you found. This can be frustrating to many new teachers. You want to share the next great resource that your kids will love. One suggestion: start an idea folder for next year. When you stumble upon a great resource you want to use, write it down and put it away. Just make sure you remember where the folder is next school year. 2) Don’t sign up for everything. In an effort to prove to the administration you are a valuable asset to the school, you will be tempted to sign on as yearbook sponsor, debate club leader, scholar’s bowl sponsor, and the underwater basket weaving head coach. These activities will leave you with less time to refresh and recharge after a long day at school, which is where your focus should be when trying to avoid burnout. Transitioning into full-time teaching is hard. You are going to need opportunities to reenergize for your students. Give yourself a break the first year around. 3) Solicit the help of expert teachers. Many new teachers avoid this step because they don’t want to appear ignorant or dumb. When you ask an expert teacher for help, they won’t think you’re stupid. They’ll think you are trying to get better at your job. The teacher of the year is a great place to start. Sit by him or her at the lunch table or at faculty meetings. Carry a notepad with you to jot down ideas they mention. Visit their classroom to see how it is arranged. Make note of the procedures and policies. Chances are if they’ve been using them for years, then they must be doing the trick. Teaching is a difficult profession. It can be time-consuming and frustrating at times. That’s why it’s helpful to be prepared for your first year on the job. It’s different than anything you may have experienced in college. Accept the fact that you won’t be able to do everything. No one expects you to. They want you to teach and do it well. If you remember the above tips, then you’re well on your way to thriving as a first year teacher.