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Back-to-School Project – Corridor Class 5
What is the Back To School Project? We place community and business members back into high school as students to: provide them a new and fresh perspective by “walking in the shoes” of real students better understand the opportunities and challenges facing schools, teachers, and students add their voice to the education conversation in the […]
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Student Takes Initiative in Starting Her Own Cancer Research
What happens when a student wants to learn between the lines of traditionally defined classes? For most, the interest in knowledge goes untapped outside of the school walls. For BIG student Tianyi Han, a senior at Kennedy High School, that passion for learning has taken her into the field of Immuno-Oncology. “I’ve always been interested […]
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BIG Student Holds Conference to Empower Women
There is a common stereotype that students have no motivation for school. BIG student McKinzie Farmer, a Junior at Prairie High School, puts that stigma to shame. While her parents were out of town for a weekend, Kinzie self-enrolled into BIG. “I was enrolled by the time they came back. I called everyone and said […]
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Grant Wood AEA’s New Program to Keep New Teachers in the Profession
Iowa code 284.5: “1A beginning teacher mentoring and induction program is created to promote excellence in teaching, enhance student achievement, build a supportive environment within school districts and area education agencies, increase the retention of promising beginning teachers, and promote the personal and professional well-being of teachers.2The state board shall adopt rules to administer this […]
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Student Solution for Gulf Dead Zone
BIG student McKenna Cole, a senior at Solon High School, has become a regular at the Solon wastewater treatment plant collecting data and maintaining the trees she planted for her project. McKenna’s project is based on phytoremediation. The idea came from an offhanded comment made by a tour guide on an unrelated trip to Argonne […]
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If 7th Graders Were Mayor…
Students at Roosevelt Middle School participated in an essay competition that took them into their community and ended with a visit from the mayor. Led by teacher Michelle Barker, a group of fourteen 7th grade girls wrote an essay answering the prompt: What would you do if you were mayor? “This assignment first asks the […]
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#schoolsocialmedia
With Twitter and Facebook having been around for the better part of a decade, social media is no longer a foreign concept. In fact, 200 million people have Twitter accounts. As a means of communication, social media is all but groundbreaking for most of us, but what about as a means of education? While most […]
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Toyi Story
Toyi Gidioni (Toy Gi-de-uhn), BIG Student and Jefferson High School Senior, took his passion for music and became the producer of his own songs. In 2008, Toyi, then 13, was uprooted from his home in Tanzania, Africa to Texas. It was here in Texas that his passion for creating music developed. As a member of […]
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Metro High School And The Chocolate Factory
What started last year as a fundraising venture for the Metro High School robotics team has now become a full-blown candy business. With over 50 students and 5 faculty members involved, the group now runs a complete chocolate bar company that produces thousands of bars. Their business model encompasses three separate industries that students manage: […]
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#IAEdchat takes on the topic of sports in schools and communities
Last night’s (Sunday, June 9, 2013) Iowa EdChat #iaedchat focused on “Athletics, Do They Serve An Educational Purpose?” An interesting dialogue, as usual. To find out each week’s topic, follow Jimmy Casas on Twitter @casas_jimmy and Aaron Becker @aaron_becker32 All past IAEdchats are available at Aaron Becker’s Storify site. Be an active member of Iowa’s […]
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2013 Iowa Education Reform Bill, Reform or Transform?
Semantics? Maybe, but the team at Iowa TransformED doesn’t think so. In an almost frighteningly comprehensive article over at Salon.com, David Sirota shows that the idea of reform is misguided at best, and corrupt at its worst. Misguided in the sense that what we need is a war on poverty, not a war on teachers. […]
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5 Culture Killers
There is a growing belief and understanding about culture embodied in the saying, “culture eats strategy for lunch.” The culture of a community, a school, and a classroom is a major factor in learning and student success. Here are 5 “Culture Killers” – are they present in your school? Silence. Cultures that actively or implicitly […]
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Big Ideas Group Taking Summer Applications
IowaTransformED is proud to announce the Big Ideas Group! The Big Ideas Group is designed to demonstrate what a transformed, community-facing, competency-based, passion-driven educational experience can look like. Our mission: The Big Ideas Group believes public schools do a fantastic job for most students, but more educational options are necessary. The Big Ideas Group exists to […]
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Dangerously Irrelevant Posts Humorous, Serious Video
Dr. Scott McLeod, curator and author of the blog post “Dangerously Irrelevant” posted an Xtra-Normal video last week depicting a politician/bureaucrat talking with a teacher about accountability. It’s worth six minutes of your time. Watch it here: [HTML1]
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Providing Students with *Hirable* Experiences
If you asked one of my students why they’re in school, they’d most likely respond with, “To learn stuff.” Obviously, people learn things in school. We learn that commas are powerful, if not complicated. We learn that power corrupts. We learn that math believes two negatives produce a positive. But, do we learn when […]
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Des Moines Area Joins “Back-to-School” Project!
The “Back-to-School Project” (formerly known as the Billy Madison Project) has reached Des Moines! After the initial success and popularity of the project here in the Creative Corridor we got a call from Andrew Rasmussen, President of the Des Moines Education Association, and visited briefly with Mike Draper, entrepreneur owner of Raygun, who were both […]
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AIW and Teaching as a Profession
I recently had the opportunity to sit in on an Authentic Intellectual Work (AIW) session held in the College Community School District. AIW is a protocol designed to help teachers refine their lessons in the presence of other educators. It puts a premium on what it calls “disciplined inquiry”–student-led, teacher-assisted learning–and on “value outside the […]
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Hack to School Coming to Des Moines!
Our friends at Dwolla and StartupCity have announced a cool initiative to pair student and teachers with programmers to create cool things that help transform the learning experience for kids! Working together hand-in-hand for 36 hours, teams are challenged to create a minimum viable product that solves or improves a basic function of education. June […]
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Transforming School is About Options, Not “Getting it Right”
Meeting with any of the hundreds of corridor-ites who are interested in starting independent schools reveals one really important thread: people want options for education. The core issue appears to be the assumption that public schools are magically one size fits all. Everyone at these meetings seems to agree that teachers are doing the best they can, […]
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Building Iowa’s Education Ecosystem Together
Introduction: Last October the ThincIowa event, hosted by Silicon Prairie News, had entrepreneur and ecosystem creator Brad Feld as a speaker. Feld shared his “Boulder Thesis” and how a few powerful ideas created a powerful ecosystem of entrepreneurs that changed the landscape of Boulder, Colorado. Since that time, a group of Iowa educators have been working to […]
