I''m changing the format up once again. Now on Friday's I'll share a sketch note - something I did that week while reading or participating in a workshop or speaker session, or just something that's on my mind. I'll usually try to provide some context around the sketch,

I loved Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves when I saw it as a 7th grader mostly because Alan Rickman was such a terrifying (yet goofy) Sheriff of Nottingham. What a great actor.

This is an edited version of two sentences in our chapter about thought leadership and engagement.

We're still busy preparing idea-inspiring (hopefully) projects. Today I made a project using a  violin created by Openclipart.org user dstulle. I then recorded four separate tracks in Garageband for iOS and exported them as .m4a files to Dropbox. Finally I imported the image and four audio files, and created some text boxes for labels. I pressed record and the result is below.

The current Powerball jackpot is ridiculous! It is now 1.4 billion dollars (USD) and almost certainly will go above that by the time of the next drawing this week. I was thinking about how many individual tickets can be purchased and had to remind myself of some probability rules. With Powerball today, there are 69 white balls from which 5 are selected with no replacement. Then there are 26 red balls from where 1 is selected. The number of combinations of the white balls is (69 * 68 * 67 * 66* 65) divided by 5! because the order of the numbers does not matter (they get listed least to greatest in the end). Then that total is multiplied by 26 to give you 292,201,338 combinations. If someone who had $584,402,676 of disposable income went up to a lottery store and purchased every combination (printed 5 per sheet since you can play in groups of 5 on a single ticket) and a ticket was printed every second, it would take around 677 days to print out all of the combinations. Or I guess if you had 677 machines printing at that rate it could take one day. So I guess this is unlikely. 

When I used to do a lot more outdoor activities and trip-leading out of a summer camp, there were some basic survival rules and techniques that are important to understand when heading out into the wilderness. I think it's helpful to think about these things and what we do (our are able to do) when these four basic needs are satisfied on an ongoing basis: air, shelter, water, and food.

The rule of threes: Human beings, in general, can survive for three minutes without air (oxygen), 3 hours without shelter (when having access to air but exposed to the elements), three days without water (when sheltered), and three weeks without food (with water, air and shelter). By the way, I am not basing of this off of any direct empirical evidence though I am something exists that from which this is justified. These are also probably conservative estimates (well maybe except the one about air). 

From a biological (or physiological) perspective, these four elements are what human beings need in order to physically exist.

Just some guitars, bass, and drums.

This comes from the opening paragraph of our introduction where we reference Max De Pree's idea of leaders' defining reality.

My kids only like their pizza without the cheese, but you cannot give then 'cheese-less'' pizza. Instead, you must buy a cheese pizza and then manually remove the cheese from the slice before providing it to them. My daughter started this and then my son followed suit. The problem with this is when reheating refrigerated or frozen pizza. The cheese does not separate from the crust and tomato sauce very well. I looked into a few articles about the best methods for reheating pizza. For me, "best" was defined as being as close to the original state of the pizza as it left the oven for the first time. Two articles suggested that reheating the pizza slice on a non-stick pan on the stovetop was the best - and they were right!

I've had a few brief chances to interact with an educator, author, and leader named George Couros over the past couple of months through appearances at various ed tech events across the country. He has written a book called "The Innovator's Mindset" (it's on my reading list - I'll write more about it once I have had a chance to give it a proper read).

Last week George wrote a blog post titled "How Far One Can Go" which resonated with me. About ten years ago, after I had finished my Master's degree and returning to working full time at a school in New York City, my boss and mentor, Bill Walsh, asked me to come up with three goals for the year. One of those goals was to become a more active sharer and participant in educational technology conversations (at the time it was mostly the New York City Independent School Technologists - NYCIST). Bill gave me all of the support necessary to practice this engagement - leave work early to attend NYCIST meetings, travel to conferences, and eventually to propose sessions for ed tech conferences. When I think to when I first attended conferences I used to be in awe of those who were sharing - who had the fancy 'presenter badge' - and even more so of those who got to give keynote addresses. While I am certainly proud of and satisfied with my experiences thus far - which I believe are the result of putting myself out there AND getting the support from school leaders - George's post has inspired me to do what I hope will be better work in 2016 by reminding me to hang on to that 'awe.'