It was a Thursday evening. The Deadline for INTED paper is up in a few hours. John has generously offered to fly me to Madrid. I am all excited, but feeling badly about being a “mouch”. I get 3 emails within 10 minutes.

One is from John and Tracey inviting me to help edit the documents and beginning to write the second document.

The second one is telling me that my funding is not going to go through.

The third one is from SMART asking me to speak at a combined conference, CIO Congress and Education Congress. These will be the top Chief Information Officers and then the top Superintendents from the US.

It is funny how coincidences happen. On one hand, it is an opportunity to reach a larger audience and I am having a hard time to find the resources to go to Madrid. On the other hand, I feel like I am letting John and Tracey down. I am in, then Im out, then I’m in and now I am out.

John and Tracey were most generous, looking at the big picture. This will allow the message of Philio-engineering in general and One Million Lights specifically get to a larger audience. The plan was hatched for me to speak to the North American Audience while John and Tracey speak to a world-wide audience in Madrid.

I really wanted to spend some professional and fun time with John and Tracey in Madrid.

Two talks were accepted to INTED’15 in Madrid. It is a research based audience.

The first talk was about the research I have done around the COLLABORATIVE CLASSROOM.  Acceptance_letter_INTED2015_Paper_id_42578

The second talk was a collaborative talk with John Howe and Tracey Winey at Preston Middle School about One Million Lights.

The Student Services Module and Assessment Modules are now complete. Both were good, but I really liked the Assessment module. I think that this is one of two big pieces of High School Renewal. When we figure out WHAT is important, then we need to reconsider Assessment. If we do not change how we assess, we will get what we always got.

In November 2014, I was awarded a fellowship by Microsoft Partners in Learning. IT is a privilege to be amongst such fantastic teachers.

Agora Mobile has created a very nice programming language that is visual. It creates Web Apps.Ryan from last year’s Science 12 class used it to receive the automated greenhouse data. He was featured at the STEM expo and now in their promotional materials.

Wainhouse Whitepaper on the Role of Soft Skills in Education  I was most fortunate to be asked to contribute. Turns out they quoted me numerous times. Who would have thought when they also got contributions from great people including Lord Knight (who introduced me at BETT), David Whyley (who I work with at Pheasey Park School and ISTE), and Boris (who keeps pushing me to think about global collaborations).. I find it so interesting that I interact with this group of people on a regular basis and that a third party research groups sought out teachers from a world of educators and we came together…

My physics students have always been encouraged to investigate mysteries. 3D printing brings a new dimension to creativity and mystery investigation.

When I was a student and did the Wave Table Labs, I was given a very specific and detailed procedure designed to get students to the physics learning quickly and efficiently. However, it did not give me a chance to explore or create. We were little robots learning what was also written in the text book. The advantage was that it was quick, easy to test and we could get many more chapters done.

As a teacher, I gave my students an opportunity to be creative. Their groups were given vague instructions such as, “Discover something about how waves reflect. You will need to collect some data and include a graph in your report”. Students would often bring some things from home such as Lego to build walls. Every year they demonstrate creativity in the way they measure amplitudes or create computer programs to track waves in a video. They were always limited in the kinds of barriers they could have. This style of teaching takes much more time, so we cannot cover as many chapters and the grading scheme is based around experimental design rather than a particular law or piece of knowledge.

This year, a new level of creativity and problem solving became possible. Now students are having the next level of conversations. “What would happen if we had a barrier that looked like this? I wonder if the energy would be focused if we had a wall like …?” In the past, that was the end of the conversation. But now, students are taking extra time to learn Tinker CAD, design their own barriers and then using them in the next iteration of their labs.

The design process of the new barriers became a whole new group activity where individual creativity became a group discussion. Although they gathered around the SMARTBoard so that they could work together, the person at the keyboard and mouse operated the software. The SMARTboard and Tinker CAD were not that compatible for direct interfacing with the software.

The 3D printer gives students a quick chance enact their creativity and grow their brains.