Bloggers Cafe

About a year ago, our Instructional Technologist Melanie Holtsman, attended Google Teacher Academy in NYC to become a Google Certified Teacher. She brought back lots and lots of ideas from her adventure. One of those ideas was to establish a Bloggers Cafe as a professional learning area in the midst of our office space. We added comfortable seating and wireless availability. Today lots of formal and informal learning takes place in this new space.

Another idea that Melanie saw and loved was the way Google geeks jump on scooters to maneuver around the building, although she hasn't quite figured out a way to embrace that idea! However still another idea she was able to adapt was the use of white boards for doodling. Melanie had white boards added around a column in our blogging space and now there's room for all sorts of fun and inspiration. This week someone suggested that we add funny tidbits from the first month of school that we've overheard children say! My personal favorites are, "dry erase markers taste wet, not dry!" and "Everything evil is a constipated teletubbie!" We've also doodled about our guesses for the new theme this year (by the way, nobody guessed it!), our favorite movies of all time, our favorite opening day moment, fun things we did over the summer break... No telling what we will be doodling about new week!