Kevin Brookhouser

This morning I launched the 20Time Kickstarter project. Please help back this project here.  http://kck.st/1m5iPii

Later this month I plan to launch a Kickstarter campaign for a book I will finish this summer. The working title is The 20 Time Project: How educators and parents can follow Google's formula for supercharged innovation . Before I actually launch the campaign, I'm looking for pre-backers so when I do go live, the Kickstarter page isn't sad and lonely. For a $15 pledge, you will get a copy of the book (signed or unsigned depending on whether you want my ink on it). For more, you will get more. Here are my commitments: May 1 launch Kickstarter Campaign June 1 close Kickstarter Campaign with at least $3,000 raised July 1  draft finished September 1 send book to publisher (I plan to distribute the book on my own, through the Kindle store, and through Amazon) October 1 ship books and rewards to backers  Some of you can expect to hear from me directly, so beware. If you're willing to be a pre-backer, please let me know in the comments, through email (brookhous...

One of the elements of my mid-year exam this month is going to be the 20% Project Elevator Pitch. The term comes from the notion that an innovator with a great idea might find herself in an elevator with a powerful investor. She has a very short period of time to convince this investor to buy into her idea. She needs to deliver an elevator pitch. For this assignment, I am asking my students to prepare a pitch about their 20% Project in 30 seconds. Throughout the exam, I will pull students outside and ask them to deliver their pitch to me. I’m following the model established by a cheesy video I found on YouTube explaining an elevator pitch. Sean Wise is a business journalist for The Globe and Mail in Toronto and the host of Canada's version of Shark Tank. According to Wise, good elevator pitches have two parts: the pain statement and value proposition. First the individual lays out a problem that needs to be solved. Then she establishes how her idea is going to solve it. ...

Now that the Google black bar is gone (or going away), many of us are upset because it now takes two clicks to go from Gmail to Google Calendar, when it used to take only one. There are Chrome extensions that allow users to modify the app launcher, but they're still not as fast as using the old black bar. My solution is to use the "Startup on" settings in Chrome. First I open up all the tabs I want to access quickly every day. Then I click the settings hamburger in Chrome > Settings. In the "On startup" menu, I select, "Open a specific set of pages" > "Set pages" > "Use current pages." Then I pin those tabs so they're permanent and out of the way. This works great for me. No more crying. Here's a video.

On Tuesday Apple had a little product announcement that made the bloggosphere ‘ splode with excitement. The most interesting part for me as fully committed Google Drive fan-middle-aged-man is the iWork for iCloud beta announcement. Like Google Drive, the iWork suite is now free, and like Google Drive, it offers real-time collaboration. Sorry Microsoft SkyDrive 365 Office Sharepoint. If you don’t give your software away now, you’re in even bigger trouble. Last night on The Google Educast , Sean, Fred, and I put iWork collaboration to the test, and it actually kind of works. Here Sean is trying to get a rise out of me. Here are five reasons I think iWork for iCloud is not a Google Drive iKiller . 1. No collaborator cursor. I can't tell who is typing what. Without the cursor, words appear out of nowhere and I can't tell where my colleagues are working. Confusing. 2. No authentication. All of these docs are shared essentially as "anyone with the link can...

Last year I used Google Reader to keep track of all of my students' #20time blogs. I created folders sorted by section number and last name. Now Google Reader is gone, and I couldn't be happier. Let's back up to CUE Rockstar Tahoe where my love affair with a post Google Reader began. One of the greatest parts of CUE Rockstar is the two-hour lunch. These lunches that allow for extreme collaboration may be the single most valuable parts of Rockstar events. One day I got to spend almost two hours brainstorming with Alice Chen about 20% Time. We talked about how we manage the blogs we assign with our projects. I told her that I was sad about Google Reader going away, and I thought I would create a form for students to fill out that would link to their most current posts. Chen, in her usual brilliance suggested that I include a paragraph textbox so students would paste the written content of the blog into the form itself. The result: all of my students' blog posts for...

If new technology doesn't simplify your life, change it or dump it. A little over a year ago our school switched from Moodle to Haiku for our LMS program. I'm really happy with Haiku, and I think many of our teachers are seeing the benefits. The assessments and gradebooks  have saved me a lot of time, and I love how well they're all integrated. However, Haiku has one fatal flaw. It's slow. I. Mean. Slow. When I am building an assessment or managing my grades, I don't mind the time it takes for Haiku to authenticate me. That time is saved later. It's worth it. But 80% of my LMS work is simply sharing links of docs, forms, quizlet  decks, announcements, tasks, and questions. I hate spending time signing in to Haiku to make a simple announcement. Last year at Fall CUE, I attended Lisa Highfill's workshop on flipping the classroom. I'm a flipper myself, but I knew I would be able to learn something new and awesome from Lisa because every time I see he...