Switching Gears - Pay Attention!

My experimental period's students have been in the traditional class format since April 5. Next year I will have to remember if I shift gears to pay more attention. I did them wrong by failing to mention that we were reverting to the old homework policy. When I was reminded of this today, I had to add some more homework points that were lost due to my shortcoming rather than the students'.

Now I am shifting gears myself in this blog. I am in a number of online courses, two traditional in Moodle and WebVista, and the other two are radically different. They are both using RSS feeds to receive information/assignments from students. My posting this evening is an assignment for my most radically innovative course, Urgent Evoke, but I feel it is also an assignment for the other innovative course as well. Therefore, I am including both tags!

So, here I am cheating on my first assignment. I was told to pick one, and I find I must pick three secrets to social innovation:
1) think like a child - children have no limit to their thinking
2) keep learning from your customers (for me, from my students)
3) listen to the right people

1) One of my best assets is flexibility in my thinking - #1. It allows me to approach problems of any sort more like an engineer. I coopt all sorts of things for my own purposes. From a message-in-a-bottle that generated my post-spring break lesson plan, to meeting a new like-minded soul and recruiting her to host my students in an internship, to the billboard contest that ended up as a class assignment, I will use anything if it suits my needs.
2) My first and most important discovery as a new teacher was how much I learned from my students. They help me learn to be a better teacher by explaining what they don't understand, what they like, what they don't like, etc. They teach me every day.
3) Listening to the right people can help you avoid mistakes, take other variables into account, and better prepare for the tasks ahead.

And the other course asked me to do something to manifest my vision for education in the future. Here. Here it is. I am both teacher, and learner. I am sharing what I am learning with a wider audience (well if someone will read my blog, that is), I am implementing my secrets to social innovations, too!

Top that! (Okay, so there isn't video...yet!)
:-)