Innovation Culture

You never know how your desire for something different might impact others around you. This year I decided to start my journey to become a CALT (Certified Academic Language Therapist) and got a position within my district servicing students with dyslexia. This meant moving yet again to a new campus. Any of you that have done this know how nerve wrecking this can be. Will my new co-workers like me? Will we get along? Will they think I'm weird for wanting to use so much technology?

I was assigned a campus that had a veteran DT (dyslexia therapist), Carli, and we started the year off with matching t-shirts and scoring our staff pickle ball game. We quickly sat down because pickle ball scoring is weird and we weren't doing a great job. We named ourselves "Team Awesome" and still had fun! I quickly started sharing my love for tech with Carli and she shared that it isn't her favorite thing, but that she wanted to learn. I thought this was a neat relationship as I was clearly going to be learning so much from her being in my first year as a DT.

One day we were working together and I showed Carli my Student Dashboard. Her response was immediately, "I want one!" So I shared my Google document with her and she got to work. She wasn't shy with questions about how did I do certain things or what if she wanted to customize hers in a different way. Carli was once afraid of Google Sheets and has now started making her own sheets for other organization needs within our department.

What I love about Carli is that she has a true Growth Mindset and is truly willing to learn and innovate. I recently shared with her another passion app of mine, Canva, and she immediately dove in as well. (PS - if you love to create beautiful things with easy templates, check out Canva for Education... It is free! And guess what, your students can get free accounts as well. The possibilities are endless!)

While some teachers are afraid of tech and aren't sure about new things, Carli is challenging herself to try new things and I am loving getting to share my knowledge with her! She has a contagious spirit and will be an evangelist for things that work. We need more teachers like her in our schools who are willing to take risks with tech. She lost nothing by trying something new and now she has a beautiful dashboard she uses everyday.

Carli has been so inspired to try new technology that she has actually made this her professional learning goal for the year. I think it is awesome that we have such a cool collaborative relationship where we are both learning from each other.

Share the things you love with the teachers and co-workers around you. Establish a culture of innovation. Start an ePortfolio and get your ideas out there. A student showed that students who presented their ideas online vs hard copy had more of a growth mindset and grit (Singer-Freeman & Bastone, 2017). You never know who's interest you may spark and how you might change someone's day to day routine by introducing something as simple as a spreadsheet! Carli now jokes that I have created a Google Sheets and Canva monster. I don't think monster is the right word... but she is definitely letting her technology creativity colors fly!

Singer-Freeman, K., & Bastone, L. (2017). Changing their mindsets: ePortfolios encourage application of concepts to the self. International Journal of EPortfolio, 7(2), 151–160.