|Originally posted on Dreams of Education on October 26, 2015| The first question that I get asked when people find out that I’ve started a school: what makes Anastasis Academy different? And this is a tricky one to answer, because the truth is EVERYTHING makes us different. It’s hard to describe something that no one has seen before, so you begin to relate it with ideas and concepts that people are familiar with. The more I’ve talked about Anastasis, the more I’ve begun to r

|Originally posted on Dreams of Education on October 6, 2015| In 2009, I left teaching. I didn’t do it because I was fed up with the system, or because I didn’t like my job. Quite the opposite. I really loved being a computer teacher. I loved the freedom of writing my own curriculum every day, and getting to know my students. I had a great time helping other teachers learn how to use technology, and coming up with ideas for how they could integrate it into their classrooms. I

|Posted originally on Dreams of Education on October 29, 2012| I come from a family of entrepreneurs. If it doesn’t exist or it can be done better, that is what you do. This mind-set can be a bit of a curse…once I get an idea in my head, it is like a broken record that plays over and over until I do something about it. My dad is prime example of this, he started Koostik with a styrofoam cup and an iPhone. Once the idea was there, it stayed until he saw it realized…in this

|Posted originally on Dreams of Education on September 20, 2012| Last year I had a “hunch” about learning…specifically about curriculum. That hunch turned into a full-fledged idea and a mission to do better for kids. Everywhere. Along the line I met some truly incredible people who taught me things I didn’t know how to do before. Like wire framing (thanks @ianchia), and pitching ideas (thanks @houseofgenius), and how to go about picking up programmers (thanks @toma_bedoll

|Posted originally on Dreams of Education on February 19, 2011| “We have organized schools not by how kids learn, they have been organized by an easy way to teach.” -Daggett In September I mentioned a “hunch” I was having about education and learning. Since September I have fleshed out that hunch into a business model, prototype, and wireframe and am currently working with a team of programmers to make it a reality. Last night I presented this idea at the House of Genius an

|Originally Posted on Dreams of Education on October 19, 2010| This video caused one of those hunches I was talking about in my post When Hunches Collide. I saw this video last Thursday and immediately typed out a blog post but didn’t publish it because it somehow felt incomplete. I thought I would give myself a day to let my ideas percolate a little more, but each time I came back to it I was left with the same incomplete feeling. (I may very well need therapy to undo the

|Originally Posted on Dreams of Education October 7, 2010| In my Post “When Hunches Collide” I talked about Pandora, the free Internet radio station. I posed the question, what if learning happened more like Pandora, more customized, individualized? I started digging deeper into Pandora which is based on the Music Genome project. The Music Genome Project is an effort to “capture the essence of music at the fundamental level”. It uses almost 400 attributes to describe song

|Posted originally on Dreams of Education September 28, 2010| Lately I have had the overwhelming feeling that education is on the brink of something big. Something that will so dramatically change the way that we think about school and learning that we may hardly recognize it as being such. I feel like I am on the brink of something big within my own thinking, but it is like I can’t quite grasp it. It is elusive like the word that is just on the tip of your tongue. More a