San Jose Innovation Tour

            *New Apple Park in Construction

Last week I had the opportunity of going to Silicon Valley, during that time we spent two days at Apple HQ and talked a lot about strategic planning as well as how to have meaningful discussions and meetings to solve a diversity of issues in our schools. One thing that was clear was what makes the Apple Culture different and that has to start with a new mindset.


One TED talk everyone should watch to better understand this new mindset is by Simon Sinek.
















He also has some good thoughts on millennials, which can also relate to our students.

We also visited the Standord D School, which specializes in the Design Thinking approach.

http://dschool.stanford.edu

You can take a crash course in design thinking on their website.

By pure luck, our admissions officer at Selwyn House put me in contact with her sister Audrey Warmuth who works at Saratoga High School. They have a great Makerspace, which combines a wood workshop, robotics, laser cutter, 3d printers....

I also got to play with devices known as iBeacons(Apple) or Eddystones(Google), I will have a bigger post on these at a later date but essentially wireless QR codes, interesting ideas like school tours, treasure hunts, Front desk applications...


We did a quick outdoor tour of the Googleplex,

I also ended up going to the Computer History Museum, a collection of some of the highlights of the last 2000 years of computing. From the first Apple Computer to original Supercomputers to today. A German enigma machine and a Google Self driving car.