The first thing I have to say is that if you haven’t read or listened to my colleagues reflections from Day 1, do it…now!  What an amazing group of educators, and the level of thinkers that have joined us on this adventure at Academia Cotopaxi is down right phenomenal!   

Today I went to the preconference led by the amazing team behind the Roosevelt Innovation Academy.  Again, wow, what an inspiring group of educators.  This group has reimagined what education can look like, they’ve inspired kids and the results are out of this world.  We were lucky enough to speak directly with a handful of students from the IA and it was rewarding to say the least.  We spent the morning learning about the program and sharing in some of the results…the CrepeZ cart was absolutely yum-tastic!!  

Charged with reflection for our collaborative learning blog I decided to try something different this week.  Visiting FDR is exciting for me for many reasons, one of which is that my good friend Michelle Juhasz works here as an Associate Principal.   A few years ago I sat with her at an EARCOS conference in Thailand, she took notes in a mind-mapping style.  I was intrigued but haven’t been motivated to try until now.  So, here is my mind map for today.  I actually did two, which I’ll explain further…

This is the second “mind-map” that I made.  The first was what we were “taught” about the IA.  This one comes from a discussion we had as a group of AC colleagues at the end of the day.  We talked about how this (the IA) could work in our context.  With people from every corner of AC involved in the conversation you can see it went in a lot of directions.  The IA is in the center, a rocket ship blasting off into the future.  My drawings are lame attempts at art but they help me visualize the ideas.

Have a look…what do you take away from my mind-map?