Leslie McBeth Earns Google Innovator Certification

4/6/2016

Leslie McBeth

The program brought together 34 teachers from around the world to unlock creativity, translate insights into solutions, experiment rapidly, and build an effective innovation culture in schools and organizations.

The Academy was the kickoff of our yearlong project in which each participant will build a project that will drive change in education, impact educators and students, and be documented for other educators to follow. Over the next year, Leslie will work with members of her cohort, coaches and mentors to implement her project.

One might assume that the Google program would focus primarily on technology tools; however, the core belief of the program, and Leslie’s philosophy, is that technology is not in itself a solution for education, but rather it can be leveraged to support good pedagogy.

Over the course of the three-day Academy, Leslie learned from many innovative and inspiring leaders in education and innovation, ranging from the Co-Founder of Google Drive to a Google Search Evangelist, to Google’s Director of People Development. Each speaker offered insights into how Google has developed a culture of innovation and provided “sparks” for teachers to apply their thinking to education. In between each “spark” the teachers completed “sprints” to develop their projects, loosely based around design thinking principles.

Over the course of the next several weeks, Leslie will work with her mentor, Kevin Jarrett (co-founder of EdCamp) and coach, Kevin Brookhouser (author of the 20Time Project) to begin prototyping her vision for her Innovator Project, which will focus on empowering teachers to implement interdisciplinary, student-driven learning that combines Design Thinking and Project Based Learning in their classrooms. Her project will consists of a toolkit for teachers to use in the classroom (lesson plans, design thinking protocols, student-facing handouts and presentations) as well as an app that teachers can use to assess and track student progress in a highly personalized learning environment. In the meantime, she has been blogging about each of the speakers from the Google Innovators Academy, which can be found on her blog.

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The 2016 Google Innovators. Photo courtesy of Alicia Zeoli.
Leslie and her team rapid prototype a solution. Photo by Kevin Brookhouser.

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