The Innovation Office of the Classroom of the Future Foundation welcomes you to a blog about innovation in education in San Diego County.

The CFF mission promotes inspiring business leaders and educators to embrace new learning technologies and innovative practices to improve our children's academic achievement.

The concept of an Innovation Wizard seeks to unlock the wizardry in all of us.

By working with teachers and administrators in our school districts, they can bring innovations to the classrooms and their students.  By exciting our children about learning in the twenty-first century, they can explore and understand important concepts at a deeper level.  By demonstrating results for our business partners, they can unleash extra resources to feed the engine of innovation.

A Bit of Wizard History

Once upon a time, long ago, CFF created a big, hairy, audacious goal, a BHAG, called the TIME Initiative: Teacher Innovations Maximizing Education.  A team of TIME teachers created the requirements for an innovative learning environment captured in the blue diagram below.


CFF used systems thinking to develop the TIME Initiative in phases:
I.    Requirements from the teachers
II.    Design specifications for a reference implementation
III.    Implementation of a pilot system
IV.    Rollout to all districts in San Diego County

The team of 50 TIME teachers created and published the requirements study with 287 items in five major categories.  Unfortunately, the budget crisis of 2002-2003 in California stalled our progress during phase II.  We possessed a great idea but no means to build it ourselves.

We knew of several innovative projects underway in a few school districts and classrooms.  So, we shifted from building it ourselves to a viral model of innovation, infecting projects with our innovative ideas.  An innovation wizard could do that.

The Lemon Grove LemonLINK project determined that they fulfilled about 70% of the TIME requirements.  The National Elementary District use of student achievement data excelled at that portion of the TIME requirements.  The Poway District data warehouse initiative demonstrated excellent capabilities.  Capitalizing on these innovative projects, we had the gene pool to expand innovation in San Diego region.

Recognizing innovation became a significant way to create awareness of successful projects in classrooms, schools and districts.  The Innovation in Education Awards Program at the annual CFF event highlights teachers, administrators, organizations that demonstrate results in four categories: inspire, innovate, achieve and impact.

This Innovation Wizard Blog furthers that outreach by sharing stories of the innovations that CFF nurtures among our collaborations.  Stay tuned for more . . .