Claire Amos

This week I was lucky enough to be invited to be a Learning2 Leader at Learning2 Asia - a fabulous practitioner led conference that was developed by an innovative group of educators frustrated by the conferences they had available to them. Learning2 is now spreading across the globe with upcoming meet ups in Johannesburg, Milan and Ecuador. For my extended sessions I looked at  how Teaching as Inquiry can be used a mechanism for leading change. As a result of attending the NoTosh  edition of Google Teacher Academy last year in Sydney, I decided to combine what I knew worked about Teaching as Inquiry with what I picked up at GTA last year, resulting in what I think makes perfect sense - Teaching as inquiry through a Design Thinking lens. Below is an outline of my workshop activities. Much thanks to Ewan, Tom and Hamish ( NoTosh ) for their generosity in sharing many of these ideas and resources. Intro and PPT Presentation  Link to slides Introduction to Te...

Google Teacher Academy, Sydney 2014 Last week I was lucky enough to attend the Google Teacher Academy in Sydney, completing two days of workshops run by the NoTosh team and a group of fabulous GTA mentors. It was a jammed packed two days where delegates were taken through the design thinking process so as to realise our ' Moonshot Thinking ' and make a plan for changing up education and us all to take our aspirations for education and multiply them by 10. My Moonshot So what did we do? The first day was mainly about taking us through the design thinking (see NoTosh explanation of design thinking here ) phases of immersion and synthesis , so as to explore and define our 'Moonshot thinking' - this was basically an issue or opportunity we saw for implementing change in education. We used strategies such as hexagonal thinking to connect/arrange our thinking about our issues and ideas before we then tried to capture our moonshot plan within a writing frame....

Tuesday morning this week I am lucky enough to be flying away to Sydney to join 49 other educators at the Google Teacher Academy. Below is the video I submitted as part of my application to be considered as one of the GTA Ambassadors for Change. So why did I apply for the academy? Whilst I am actually an advocate for educators to be as device and brand agnostic as possible, I have to admit, I do really like Google Apps for Educators. The reason GAFE appeals is simple. GAFE is a suite of tools that supports the pedagogical approach I value - co-constructed, sharing, transparent and supports student agency. The other reason I applied was the company who was taking over the GTA. This GTA is the first academy to be run by NoTosh  an international education consultancy "which challenges the status quo in schools, public services and creative companies. We work together with clients to improve the way people learn, the results of the organisation and the spaces in which...