Where's Your Creative Space #savmp

I'm three weeks in to my eleventh year in public education and my fifth as a school administrator. It wouldn't be totally accurate to say that I became a teacher/administrator by chance. My father was a public school teacher for 35+ years which had a huge influence on my current career path. I've also almost left public education many times over the years, thinking I wanted to pursue a different challenge. 

Those thoughts have come to a head very recently in an excellent book I just finished. Biz Stone who is one of the co-founders of Twitter wrote a great memoir of sorts, following his path from being in debt with no job, working for Google, Odeo, and then helping to create Twitter! 

I really enjoy being an Elementary School Principal, being around kids all day is really awesome! I really enjoy working with teachers to push their academic program, implement new innovative lessons and ideas that are relevant to our students in 2014. I really enjoy getting to know our parent community, while working together on Team Kid to create an awesome learning space for their children. 

But, I'm jealous. Biz and people who work in tech companies or startups are given amazing creative space to 'hack' away at new ideas, break current systems to improve them and then make them better, work/talk/strategize with other really smart and creative people to become even more creative. I was honestly reading Biz's book and creative ideas around education are developing in my head and I wasn't even around another Principal. 

How can educators find a creative space in their immediate lives? (not via Twitter, Voxer, etc) How can we then implement those ideas given the parameters we have? My school has 520 students, with 400+ mobile devices for students, with another 50+ student computers. Yet, we still receive thousands of pounds worth of text/workbooks each year. We still have Back To School Night and Open House even though my ENTIRE staff is on Twitter and shares their classroom on a daily basis. This is not a Jerry McGuire type rant, just wishing we could change education. #faster #better #rightaway 

Just because we've always done something, does NOT mean we need to continue doing it that way.

Thank you for the inspirational creativity Biz, check out his book, it's WELL worth the read!