Periscoping Young Innovators

I'm on a mission to listen to kids tell me what they know.  After Periscoping NCTIES17 I had a thought-provoking Voxer conversation with Kyle Hamstra about the value of giving students this type of platform and what comes next.

Mountain View Young Innovators
Student Interviews & Teacher Resources

Next. 

That brings me to Mountain View Elementary, one of the schools that I serve as an Instructional
Technology Facilitator and one of the busiest schools in our district. There are amazing things going on in every nook and cranny of that building.

For the past few weeks I've been working with the students in Teresa Costner's class. Teresa is a dedicated, talented math teacher who is a magician when it comes to empowering her students to take the lead in their learning.  The project that was appearing before my eyes was the 6th grade's Young Innovators and Inventors Impacting the Future project.  Students took a closer look at their own world to discover an area that they could improve or change. They researched to discover more about the problem and to find ways to enhance an existing concept or to design a creation of their own. Students created a marketing plan that included an advertising poster and an infomercial. I got to help them use Aurasma to create augmented reality with their marketing poster and infomercial. They presented their plans to their classmates and to school officials and community members in a Shark Tank-like competition.

Periscoping the Semi-Finals

Sometimes the best ideas come to you in the shower. Well, for me the best ideas come to me when I'm lugging a huge Google Expeditions case out of my car and down the hallway.  What if I Periscoped the semi-finalists after their first round of Shark Tank presentations?  They would be prepared. They would be excited after surviving the presentation in front of the judges and a Periscope interview would capture their invention and a little bit about the story behind how they came up with the idea.

The kids knocked it out of the park. They were excited to be broadcasting LIVE on Periscope (or, as I explained it - Facebook Live for Twitter). They were articulate and every one of them told an amazing story about a problem that concerned them in their own life that they solved by inventing and creating something new. The results of the interviews are on this Young Innovators project website.