Years before there was an Apple watch there was the Pebble watch on Kickstarted. The pebble was unlike anything I had ever seen and I had to have it.
Maybe a year or so after backing the watch it arrived. The learning curve wasn’t too big but it was pretty amazing. I remember people thought it was nuts, no one wanted a watch that did things other than tell the time.
I am also always on the lookout for newer technologies or alternatives to what is already in existence. Anytime I step outside of the norm I am ready for issues. My tolerance level goes way up as I know I’m getting ready to spend tons of time making it work.
Yesterday I bought an Amazfit watch by a huge company in China but relatively unknown here in the US.
If I was given this watch as a gift I might now put that much effort into figuring it out. This makes me think of the classrooms and students. Choice drives more effort. How might we allow more choice and less rubrics? We saw a teacher today during a site visit who talked about how, in his experience, rubrics drove all projects to generally look the same.
These thoughts are still fresh and I have no idea how to bring them to life…yet. The classrooms we saw mimicked the actual world and not what you would typically see in an average high school classroom.
How might we…
- create problem-based classrooms that were more like the actual world the kids will inherit?
- allow for more student-generated questions without clear answers?
- tolerate more risk?
- make school suck less?
Tiny Slice Of My Life 
I’ve been thinking about a lot of these same questions, especially how we make school look like the real world. We have to give kids ownership, but it’s so hard to let go of it ourselves…
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