Well, I'm in Austin! Have been for a couple days actually. It was great having a day before SXSWEDU to just explore the city, and get a feel for it. We checked out the Hope farmers market and a pop up market. More importantly, we have had a some tasty food, including like 5 pounds of crawfish. It was a whole experience, relaxing outside munching on some lil mudbugs. Even with it being a little rainy and overcast, the weather has been super pleasant for us Minnesotans.
Monday was the first day of SXSWEDU and we were excited to see the range of topics covered and meet others passionate about education. I think both of us were particularly struck by how prevalent tech, design thinking, and makers spaces are. Maybe this is something others who are more wholly working in the education field are already aware of, but it was interesting to see how people are innovating to use tech processes and products in education. I'd like to learn more about how tech could help with addressing some of the structural, institutionalized problems in the education system.
In the spirit of trying to stretch ourselves and learn new things, we attended a workshop on how to build an education app. It was super engaging going through the process of creating a persona and putting together an app that, if I do say so myself, might really be a stellar way for young people to access sexuality information and local resources. It's only four sticky notes right now, but I'm going to put Mathias on it (since he's actually capable of doing something with it).
We also.....
- learned about is how educators can design and use escape rooms, which we are totally going to experiment with.
- attended a panel on using tech to increase parent engagement. There are some people out there who are really leveraging data and tech, but I think we'd need to think a little more about what this means for our work.
- a discussion about race in higher education, and why we need to talk about it with students, administrators, and policy makers
We're excited about all that's to come! Especially the part when we get to present....