Not long ago I was able to attend the Sydney 2018 Google Certified Innovator Energiser. I wasn't going to miss this! Many innovators, that had already been to previous events around the world, raved about it and Sydney was just as fantastic!
It was another chance to connect with educators who have a passion for driving education forward, changing the way we've always done things and looking into ways to solve education problems that are common in many parts of the world, so the rushing, organising and rather stressful end to the week to get there wasn't going to stop me.
Before the serious part of the day kicked off there was food - of course we were at Google so the food as always was awesome...
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| Enjoying breakfast before we get really serious |
During the course of the day we took part in sessions on culture change by he Obyrant group, heard from Googlers about Jamboard and caught up with what was happening in the Innovator program. We also had the chance to explore and innovate a few education problems through opening another teams pandoras box. To round the day off before the celebrations we had the privilege of hearing from some of our innovator colleagues in our spark sessions. The day ended with a celebratory cruise on Sydney harbour.
One of our first tasks as a team was to come up with a team name. I was part of - Rovers, a name that we generated by thinking about our team theme - curiosity and combining it with the mars rover that was curious about Mars ... hence Rovers. We also had a greeting the extra special mind blown fist pump or fist pump with exploding action including sound effects.
We had the opportunity to explore our super powers, comparing them to our team mates and thinking about both the differences and similarities in what we're good at. We looked at superpowers under various headings I decided mine were the cloak of invisibility -
After some intense discussion on which problem we were going to have a go at solving we decided the "We've always done it this way" was actually a reason for many of the other problems we found when we opened pandoras box. To solve this we created a representation of curiosity and the cat being run over by our rover... Curiosity killed the cat. Basically let's run this whole 'we've always done it this way' out of our schools, let's completely change the way things are - remove the furniture and see what happens, remove textbooks, pre-planned units, and whatever else is causing the mind set of we don't need to change because it's okay, it worked before it'll work again.
It was an interesting concept to think about, we discussed a lot about how much you'd need to change surroundings in order to help foster curiosity and innovation. If we get stuck in the same surroundings for too long does innovation and curiosity start to stagnate or not happen at all?
There are so many more great ideas, challenges and affirmations I could go on about that happened during the course of the day. Including the sharing from fellow innovators that really made the day a great success. It was so good to hear from those in the room and what they had been doing, were going to do, as well as the challenges and innovations they'd come up with along the way. Maybe I'll write more about those later.
The day finished with a boat cruise on Sydney harbour with some laser clay bird shooting and mast climbing thrown in.
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