Activate ED Launches Education Rock Star Campaign

Today, Activate ED released the first video in a series of 10 videos to showcase some of the top people working in the education sector in an effort to attract more talented people and provide valuable resources to those already in education. “Activate ED created the video series to further its mission to attract top leaders, managers, and analysts into education, where they can apply their diverse talents and skills in a purpose-driven career to support teachers’ important work with our nation’s students.”

The Campaign launches by featuring our very own, Tom Vander Ark as Education’s Rock Star -in the series aimed to help those aspiring to work in the education field with a toolkit for staying current and discovering what it is that our focus should be on.  Within the toolkit, Tom shares his own “playlist” for in sync with what is happening and needs to happen in the realm of education. Here’s a bit more from him on how he learns:

1. I scan a couple dozen blogs to learn, starting with EdWeek, but diverging from there into technology, finance, and economics (with NPR in the background).

2. I visit schools to learn. Field trips are the only way to get the full picture—and they can be life changing.

3. I blog to learn. Every week someone asks me a question I don’t have a good answer for. I make it a blog assignment and open a doc and start taking notes. It helps articulate my thinking, it prompts research, it focuses my learning.

4. I make a plan to learn. The eight Digital Learning Now SmartSeries papers were partly a result of my interest in outlining the big questions of our time and working through them with a smart team. Every month we take on a new topic and it results in research, writing, and discussion of the formative issues of our time.

5. I launch explorations to learn. I’ve been writing about a different city every week for eight months to learn about innovation diffusion. The Smart Cities series is beginning to yield some lessons.

Building on these steps, Activate Ed provides an extensive toolkit, complete with the resources Tom looks to, the research Tom and his team have accomplished,  and the publications where he shares his learning with others.

The Activate ED campaign is a collaboration of The Broad Center, Education Pioneers, and the Strategic Data Project —all have missions to transform education by supplying top leaders, managers, and analysts to the field.

We are very excited that Tom was included and is the first of the series Activate Ed has created and look forward to joining other great education rockstars to support new, upcoming leaders working to better education.