Who am I and what am I doing?

My name is Kate Klingensmith, I am 29 years old, living in Oakland, and enjoying some time off of work.  Until December, I was working for an exciting education startup out of Berkeley called Inigral, Inc, which has developed an outstanding Facebook application for colleges and universities, as well as a website for K-12 teachers to share content.

In 2008, I resigned from teaching after 4 years, thinking that I can possibly make more of a change from the innovation side of education, rather than in the classroom.  I taught Biology, Physics and Anatomy at an incredible charter school called YES and, though I loved my students dearly, grading quizzes and doing lunch duty were just not how I wanted to spend my time.  I have a degree in Brain and Cognitive Science from MIT (’02), with a strong interest in learning theory and cognitive architecture, and I’m hoping to apply what I’ve learned over the past 10 years to figuring some things out.

My friend Michael Staton got me very interested in looking at education as a new beast – one where students are out-growing traditional classroom styles faster than most teachers can adapt, one where the overwhelming amount of data available can be harnessed as an invaluable tool for shaping instruction, one where there is a definite need for innovation in order to realize every school and every student’s potential.  Social networking plays a huge role in this by allowing you to build your own Personal Learning Network, whether you’re a teacher or a student.  Enter: Web 2.0.  There should probably be an army of people dedicated to taming this beast and putting it to work for us…..are you out there?

I started this blog as a way to share what I find, to try to make teachers lives’ richer and easier.  I also want to make this offer – if you’re a high school science teacher, I have a ton of material that I created over the past couple of years and would love to share it with you!

Kate