About Carl Hooker
Carl Hooker is an educational consultant and speaker from Austin, TX. He spent the past 23 years as a teacher and administrator building successful mobile learning programs for schools. He also serves as an advisor for multiple ed tech companies and is the co-founder of the social media platform K12Leaders.com.
He has written 6 books on mobile learning as well as being a named a National Faculty Member Emeritus for Future Ready Schools out of Washington, D.C. He hosts two podcasts (ISTE’s Learning UnLeashed and The UnDisruptED podcast) and his latest book Ready, Set, FAIL! is intended for teachers and school leaders looking to unlock creativity and innovation in their schools and classrooms. For full bio go to https://CarlHooker.com
Connect with Carl online at Twitter / Website / K-12 Leaders
Episode Transcript:
PODCAST INTRO: Hello, and welcome to the “Game On” podcast. My name is Adam Bellow. I am the CEO and co-founder of Breakout EDU. But I'm also a father, a serial edtech entrepreneur, and an advocate for positive change in the classroom. Each episode of the “Game On” podcast is going to feature a new voice from someone who's making an amazing impact and helping to pave the way for the future of education. We're gonna get to explore their ideas and opinions, as well as learn from those successes and failures from these amazing educational gurus. Alright, let's get started.
Adam Bellow All right. Welcome to Game On. I am your host Adam Bellow, and I'm so excited to be joined today with an incredible, amazing friend, educator, edupreneur, and just ed-tech advocate all around amazing guy super proud to call him a friend Carl Hooker. Welcome, Carl.
Carl Hooker (0:46): Adam, thank you so much for having me on the podcast. I'm excited to be one of your first guests on your brand-new podcast, I know that you are dedicated to this craft, and this will be an amazing experience for me. No pressure.
Adam Bellow (00:56): Well, you know, yeah, okay. Well, hey, I mean, as a person who's had multiple podcasts, we were talking before we got started, and it's like, this is something I'm very new at, but really, really excited you decided to join us. So Carl for the five people in the world that don't know who you are, why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?
Carl Hooker (01:11): Well, I'm a former administrator, and former educator here I'm still an educator I call myself but I'm a former classroom teacher here in Austin, Texas. Been in the game for 23 years. I have a social media platform that I launched just in January, called K12Leaders.com. I've written seven books, most about instructional technology, the latest one about failure called Ready, Set, Fail. I own two bars, one in Austin, one in Houston. What else? I have three podcasts now, three children, one wife, my first wife, I still call her that, and she doesn't like that. I don't know why, but she doesn't. Yeah, and I do a lot of mostly, my main job, though, day to day is speaking and consulting school districts across the country and speaking at events where you and I have run into each other quite a few times.
Adam Bellow (01:50): Yeah, and for those that haven't heard Carl give a speech. It's truly one of the greats. I mean, I love listening to you and hearing your take on what's right in education, and how to kind of make further improvements using technology implementation. So really, really stoked to have you on and chat about all that stuff. And as I listen to you, oh, I do this and that. And this, I'm like, Oh, my gosh, Carl, you know, when do have time to sleep?
Carl Hooker (02:11): Well, I have three kids that I mentioned that they're all still fairly young. So I don't ever sleep. It doesn't really matter. Because I'm also volunteering for swim team, but doing all this stuff. I am a substitute teacher at my daughter's school, whenever I can, I call it guest teaching because I'm not officially a sub in the system. So legally, there could be some trouble there. Sorry, if you're listening to this, Austin ISD but I do come in and give the teachers a break, like, "Hey, give me a couple hours, I want to do some stuff with my own kids", and it just because it keeps my feet on the ground. Because I think you know, you and I have been in the classroom, but it's been a while, and so for me my biggest regret of leaving, or biggest worry was that I wouldn't be grounded in the classroom anymore. And so I find ways as much as I can to still be in front of kids. By the way, that's also a great gift for Teacher Appreciation Week is just to say, here's the gift of time to take two hours off and go have an adult lunch, you know.
Adam Bellow (02:54): Yeah, I mean, I think, especially these years have been so trying on all those folks, that's really great. All right, well, let's get started our level one question. Our icebreaker is, you know, play is really important for everyone. Here at Breakout, we take it very seriously.
Carl Hooker (03:09): Serious Play.
Adam Bellow (03:10): Serious play. Hey, it's exactly what it is. So, I want to talk about games. I want to know what was your favourite game as a kid? And then I want to know about now what you've been playing. What are you enjoying too playing recently?
Carl Hooker (03:20): Oh my gosh, well, my favourite game as a kid, I mean, I immediately go to my Commodore 64 and I think about Paperboy but the truth is I became a huge gamer when I used to go to these things, they don't have anymore. I think they still have arcades right, they are retro.
Adam Bellow (03:33): I was going to say and like Austin in New York City, they pop up as like the retro place.
Carl Hooker (03:37): They do where you get like free drinks and free games or whatever for free. The game I used to play at the time that I loved was this game called Gauntlet, which was like four, you remember, it was like four or.
Adam Bellow (03:44): Oh yeah.
Carl Hooker (03:45): Four players, which is crazy, because I love collaborative games. So if you get four players together, and then like you're the Valkyrie, or you're the elf – “Elf needs food badly”. So that was my game of choice when I was a kid whenever I could find it at any arcade. That's what I would play. And then today, my kids and I, we get a Nintendo Switch, I say for the kids, but it's kind of for me too. So we've been kicking around Zelda Breath of the Wild and just all of us right now that's a single player. So a little tricky, but it's funny because we all my girls do different parts of it, and so like Dad, you should go around here and talk to this guy, because they'll get you this and so we kind of collaboratively work on it when each of us play and my daughter was in a race to beat me to beat the game, and she did, she accomplished it so she was very proud of beating her dad at the game and so I still haven't finished it. I need to come back and do that. When I have the time yeah.
Adam Bellow (04:25): Well, I know my kids do the same thing. We were playing Spider-Man, the new Miles Morales game.
Carl Hooker (04:30): Ooh.
Adam Bellow (04:31): PS5, which is amazing.
Carl Hooker (04:33): I want a PS5. Yes.
Adam Bellow (04:34): Well, the PS5 is amazing but the game is just incredible and so I played maybe the first I don't know I want to say a quarter. That's probably an overestimation and then my son beat it like 12 times and he's like, "Dad, did you finish it? Did you finish it? And I'm like, "No."
Carl Hooker (04:48): I'm such a failure.
Adam Bellow (04:49): It's on my list.
Carl Hooker (04:52): It's like binge-watching is the same thing. I can't anyway, I have a really hard time binge-watching any series because like, I get about halfway through and like okay, this is interesting and then like I forget and then if I haven't finished 'Ozark' or 'Breaking Bad' or any of these shows that people keep telling me to watch 'Stranger Things' I did though, 'Stranger Things' yes.
Adam Bellow (05:06): Yeah well, new season starts in a couple of weeks.
Carl Hooker (05:08): I'm excited about that.
Adam Bellow (05:09): Yeah, well cool well yeah I mean those games bring me back I totally remember Gauntlet. I remember all of that stuff. I mean with gauntlet for some reason gauntlet whenever I think of gauntlet I always think of Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins that used to sit next that machine.
Carl Hooker (05:21): Yes, they did. We have one of those retro Nintendo. Have you seen how they're making these now? I have the Atari, two.
Adam Bellow (05:25): Yep.
Carl Hooker (05:25): But it has like the 400 games in it.
Adam Bellow (05:27): All three of a 100 yeah.
Carl Hooker (05:29): For those of you that are listening to this podcast is you can't view it there isn’t Nintendo mock-up like the beautiful machines standing right behind Adam. I love that game. I could never make it past Level Two that I tried to just recently I was like, This is terrible. I can't ever to give as level two.
Adam Bellow (05:41): Yeah, that was fun altered beasts. Now my brain is just circling around old games, but no, very, very cool. Well, that's our icebreaker. Now we're going to drop into like a little bit of the deep cuts here, Carl so.
Carl Hooker (05:54): Okay.
Adam Bellow (05:54): As you mentioned, you've been doing so many things in tech people know you from speaking, from writing, different podcasts, you've had all these different things. But what's your origin story? What is it was the thing that put you on the path to become who you are and doing the stuff in the space right now?
Carl Hooker (06:07): Well, I think like a lot of people, I have a lot of educators in my family. And so for me, my mom actually taught me in high school, she was a substitute teacher and I was honestly a great student, except for what my mom taught me, I was like the worst kid in the class because it was yes my mom, I'm going to give her a hard time. So I went into actually engineering, I was going to be an architectural engineer, and just was big in math and all the science and physics and stuff of that, and just about halfway through my educational career in college, I was like, this is just not it for me. So I didn't like the outcomes. I didn't like the path I was going and it just was very black and white and not very creative. So I switched to the most opposite thing I could think of at the time, which was drama. So I took a year and just did drama as my major, which was my dad always says, "You wasted a year of college." I was like, actually, I still use to this day, a lot of the tenants of drama obviously I got to get a face made for radio, so my voice works there. So I did drama for a little bit and then just kind of fell into education and I was like, oh, I just fell in love with it right away. Elementary Education was my passion. That's where I started and just kind of from there, right when I started, it was around ‘98 - turn of the century - so it tells you how long back this goes. But at the time, the computers were the big thing. I had these little Compaq computers in the back of my class, we played Oregon Trail, we played Where in the World is Carmen San Diego? Reader Rabbit was big in the first-grade classroom at the time and Zoombinis. Do you remember those things?
Adam Bellow (07:21): Yes.
Carl Hooker (07:22): Anyway. So I was like really starting to fall in love with kind of the technology aspect of it and I was using it a lot in my classroom. Administrators were kind of hot and cold on it some were like "That's too much for six-year-olds. They can't be doing this stuff on the computer." And I was like, "No, no, they can trust me, trust me." And eventually, I kind of worked my way up. I got an opportunity to work in a school district in a low income part of town here in Austin, and the principal says like we're going to go over and we're going to reinvigorate the school. We're going to kind of take it over and, and kind of shed new light into it. And she said, "What do you want to do? Do you want to use first grade" I was like, "Actually, I want to try something different. Can I be a computer lab teacher for pre-K through fifth grade, and I'll teach after-school classes to the parent community too? And she said, "Absolutely, we'll do it. So she took a classroom set it up. We had these eMacs. Remember those white, big giant eMac machines?
Adam Bellow (08:03): The triangle ones?
Carl Hooker (08:03): Yes.
Adam Bellow (08:04): Yeah, yeah.
Carl Hooker (08:05): They're massive and we had big giants of those everywhere and then just kind of from there just kept kind of going. Eventually, what happens with those positions, unfortunately, as we know, in education, they're the first to go. And so when it was cut time, I jumped to another district, which was Eanes, which is where I was for the last 13 years, trying to work my way up the food chain to Director of innovation and digital learning, which is the title I made up on my business card and my email signature and got in trouble for because I didn't want technology in my title anymore. I was tired of having that word in the title. So I just got rid of it. And then superintendent called me into our office was like, "That takes board action to change your title." And I was like, "Oh, I didn't know. I just was changing it." But I already made these business cards so surely we can keep it right? and she's like, "I guess so." Yeah, that was it. Then I retired at 44 and decided to quit my job to be a full time speaker - six months before the pandemic hit, and so you know how that turned out?
Adam Bellow (08:54): Perfect Timing.
Carl Hooker (08:54): Perfect timing, invested in a bar right before the pandemic hit. Yeah, somehow I'm still alive. But yeah, that's the long and short of the origin story.
Adam Bellow (09:02): It's so funny, because I feel like a lot of the journey that I had early on was very similar in some ways. I was a teacher on special assignments and doing Technology Training Specialist and that job just got phased out. So I kind of failed upwards and the director of technology stuff. So really interesting to kind of hear the overlap there and obviously.
Carl Hooker (09:20): We've crossed paths a few times. I mean, I saw you at ISTE. Listeners, the first time I saw Adam Bellow, I think it was in Philadelphia, it might have been it might have been before that even. I walked into this room and every single person has handed me a crisp dollar bill like as I walk in, like, why are these people, and he has every single person walk in they get $1 Bill and I'm like, "Okay, this is weird." And at the end, he does a pitch to basically, it was for Donors Choose or no?
Adam Bellow (09:40): No, it was a charity that I made up which was called Change The World.
Carl Hooker (09:43): Yeah.
Adam Bellow (09:44): I was going to match whatever was collected and so I basically was giving the money to fund it and the story was, that was actually ISTE in San Diego, I think, and the pitch at the end was you can keep the dollar and start your own charity or you can turn it back and give more whatever.
Carl Hooker (9:57): Throw a $1 on top of it. Yeah.
Adam Bellow (09:59): It was crazy. Obviously, it was a strange idea that I came up with.
Carl Hooker (10:04): Fail forward.
Adam Bellow (10:05): It resonated. I remember seeing tweets like over the next year where people took pictures of the dollar hung up in their classroom and they started little charities like in their class.
Carl Hooker (10:14): See.
Adam Bellow (10:14): I thought that was really cool. Yeah.
Carl Hooker (10:15): I love that idea, that concept. Yeah, now we have to do with crypto or something but yeah, it would still be cool.
Adam Bellow (10:21): That's right.
Carl Hooker (10:21): Maybe not crypto.
Adam Bellow (10:24): These days probably not.
Carl Hooker (10:25): Yeah.
Adam Bellow (10:25): Yeah, awesome, yeah, and I know, I mean, we've been fortunate enough to just cross paths so many times and it's been fun. I feel like that's what really makes this space unique is that I feel like the crop of folks that we came up with in our group of colleagues and friends, you can always lean on each other for information and inspiration, and that's really fun.
Carl Hooker (10:42): Yeah, you have that man. These are isolating jobs in their own ways, and we were both working out of our house, which sounds great but I mean your work, going to conferences and connecting and networking, it took a while even in this household for my wife to understand when I said networking that wasn't just going out and having drinks with some friends, it was actually networking. I mean, you make connections and following up and we had we've known each other for a long time we connected online on Twitter, I mean, you met a Hooker online, which is always a fun story to tell, but that was me, by the way, listeners. But keeping those connections and then seeing you face to face, it's almost like we don't spend a lot of time catching up, we get straight into it. That's the great thing with social media is that we can kind of stay connected and jump right into the conversation like now. What are we working on today? That kind of thing.
Adam Bellow (11:21): Yeah. Well, that's a great segue to our level three question, which is about challenges. Yeah, we're levelling up to level three, what has been the biggest challenge or obstacle that you had to overcome to get where you are right now?
Carl Hooker (11:34): I would say probably the biggest is some people say that leadership, you can be inspired by great leaders, I have been inspired by great leaders but I've also been inspired to do the opposite of what poor leaders do, and so I've had a couple of leaders over the course of my career, really, that were set out to make sure that for one reason or another, I just didn't go along with their idea, their ideology, their vision, their ethos, whatever, and so I decided to kind of go against it. A lot of times, of course, when you're doing that, and they're a higher ranking person, they may tend to squash you down, or say, like, "No, we're not going to do this, you're not going to do this, we're going to put you in this other position. And so for me, I had to learn really early on to be a little more political, as much as I hate to use that term, but I definitely learned the politics of things and, and be more empathetic, honestly, to these leaders that came before me, because a lot of times, they're like, why are you not changing? No, this is a great idea. Why are you not agreeing with and I realized quickly that when they push back, sometimes that's not always a bad thing. Sometimes it makes me a little stronger in terms of what my convictions are, and what my point is that I'm trying to get across, and so I would say in terms of a challenge for me early on, it was like understanding that and not taking it personally, because honestly, I took a lot of it personally. And the other thing I tried to do was I tried to be friends with everybody, and when you get into these upper management type positions, sometimes you have to be the person that says no, sometimes but I think there's a way to do it with cordiality and kind of bedside manner, so to speak, to say, like, "You know what, you can't do this in the classroom because of these reasons but here are some ideas that we could try." So, I think that's kind of the thing because IT departments always get that bad rap, right? We're always the “Department of No”. So I tried to change that mindset and that ideology. And so again, not saying yes to everybody's tricky, I love to say yes to people, but I've learned over the years saying no is also good for my own self-care and mental health.
Adam Bellow (11:34): Yeah, no, I mean, it's super important I think because you can't do everything and everything well. I find like that's kind of the cut-off in my head. Our team is amazing but we're really small, and there are times when it's like, I want to help but it's like I can't help on every single thing and the same is true for all of the people on the team. It's like everyone could pitch in, but it's like we have to choose where we can actually make the most impact and then figure out how we can solve those other problems.
Carl Hooker (13:30): Yeah, I used to run iPadpalooza, you came and keynoted there.
Adam Bellow (13:30): Yeah, for sure.
Carl Hooker (13:31): Back in those years - there's a t-shirt behind me on the wall here, but when I used to run that event early on, I was such a control freak about it, and I was like, Okay, I wanted the experience to be perfect. I wanted lightsabres down the hall, everything needed to look right, and what I discovered, later on, is that the more I kind of released and let other people take ownership of certain parts of it, the better the event and experience got. I still was there to kind of oversee like a division and what we wanted people to really kind of experience when they were there but for one, it made my life a lot easier. I wasn't feeling like I had to do everything, and again, learn that later in my career. I wish I would have learned that earlier, and it would have been a lot better but yeah, learn to lean on those people, and like I did, I hired people smarter than me which isn't very hard, and then trust them when you hire them, right and train them, support them give them opportunities to grow.
Adam Bellow (14:13): I mean, it's true in any environment. All right, awesome, Carl. So, level four is all about passion. So I want to know right now, what are you really passionate about in education, and it can be something that you're wanting to teach and share or it can be something that you're just most looking forward to learning more about yourself.
Carl Hooker (14:30): My big thing right now is risk-taking and failure, and it's not just because I wrote a book on it, but I've spent the better part of probably 10 years doing some sort of training that invokes some sort of risk and some sort of like embracement of failure, and so I look at my own kids, and you and I have shared stories about our kids and kind of the experiences they're having in public education or whatever education they're having, and the worksheet experience is just not what I'm looking for here. So how do we get a little bit of risk-taking to happen in the classroom and then when a failure happens, how do we celebrate it and say, "Okay, let's learn from it." The big thing that I see is it too oftentimes, especially as kids get older and aged out of our system is that they're always looking over their shoulder to see like, “Am I getting this right teacher? Is this the right thing parent? Is this the right answer? They get hesitant to actually try something different or think outside the box, and at some point, the institution actually squashes that out of them. If you're not in the right environment, that does happen. So for me, it's how much I can get schools to kind of change their ideology around it, and even in an environment that maybe doesn't really encourage risk-taking and failure, maybe it's just like changing some of the questions the way you ask things instead of telling kids do this, this and this, "Oh, we're going to use Breakout EDU today, which by the way, you guys Breakout EDU is in the book because it's the perfect example of the "Here it is good luck. Figure it out," and that's what I want more of in classrooms. And then what I love about Breakout, and this isn't a pitch just for Breakout but I mean, I put this in the book, too, is that the conversation that happens after failure is so important but unfortunately, a lot of times in education, we don't have time to actually do that but whenever I've used Breakout or any type of activity similar to that where kids have failed and fallen down, there's tears in their eyes, these are middle school kids who cry, and just didn't get the locks, right? That important conversation needs to happen, right then, don't just leave the classroom and walk out the door instead say, "Now why did it not work? Was there a communication issue? Were you guys not working well together? Was there something that was just inhibiting you with somebody kind of taking over too much? And so it's great to have those conversations because those are teachable moments for the rest of their life and so modelling it in classrooms, I think, is the number one thing that teachers can do, and that's kind of what I'm doing now. Every day I fail, by the way, anybody could write a book on failure, because we all have books worth of failure, if not more, it's just a matter of now taking those things and turning it into something that's a learning opportunity. So that is what I'm passionate about.
Adam Bellow (16:29): I love it, and obviously, it does very much relate to what we do here, and thinking about the post-game experience, I remember literally one of the first things we did when we all met together for the first time as a team way back when, was come up with these reflection cards, which is what facilitates the discussion afterwards. So we've actually since done 4C cards and really trying to make that more cogent because I think that those soft skills, the 4C's and SEL skills right now are just paramount coming out of the pandemic and stuff. It really is really important, as you said, it's something that just gets put aside or there's not enough time for when it truly is the thing that actually I think drives forward the most learning after the fact.
Carl Hooker (17:03): I just had a great idea when you said post-game, and I don't know if you're intending it. But in my mind, I just started thinking like would it be great to have a post-game press conference? You know, you see like the athletes. So you put the kids up on the table, like what happened? "Well, I just didn't get my best effort today. You know, that kid over there was just like, insisting that the combination was this and I couldn't get" or it's the team that wins. You know, you're like, "Well, yeah, we just work together and..." I would love to have like a little mock-up of that, where you have the kids on stage during the post-game presser that would just be fun.
Adam Bellow (17:27): That's super fun. That wasn't one but yeah. Now we can put that in there, too. That's super fun. I love it. All right, cool. So next, we are going on to level five. So level five, I mean, this is actually I think it's my favorite question besides the game question, which is, I just love listening to what people say is their favourite games but this question is, I think the most useful for listeners thinking about how your work can relate to them, and that is, what is the best piece of advice you've gotten in your educational journey?
Carl Hooker (17:54): I think I already said part of this. So I mean, it's going to take me a minute to get to the answer on this but the first part of this would be that saying no, sometimes is the right thing to do, even though you don't feel like it is. That to me was a big one for early in my career, like I mentioned, because I felt like I was saying yes to everything, and that it occupies all your time, and as much as you want to be supportive and receptive, saying yes to everything that means you're saying no to other people, and that was what someone said. You say yes to one person, you're saying no to 50 others because now you've occupied your time with that. So for me, the best piece of advice I would give is somewhat tied to that but it's also tied to something that I've learned from Tim Ferris who's, he's got an interesting podcast himself, and he does the "Four Day Work Week" and all that other stuff and a big entrepreneur guy, and he uses a phrase which I can't share on the air because I'm sure this is a non-explicit podcast but essentially what he says is when someone comes to you with an idea or strategy or something, if you feel like it is amazing, and it is great or what he calls F-Yes basically is what he says. You're like "Yes, I want to do this!” like you're screaming from the rooftops yes, and that's something you should definitely pursue.
However, if someone comes to you with an idea or something, and you're like, hmm, it's kind of a kind of a lukewarm on that, don't just say yes to it to put energy toward because what you're doing is when you do that you're actually cutting off other future opportunities. So if something comes up, you're like, Yeah, that sounds amazing. Great, good for you. I don't think I'm interested. I'm going to move on. But I have some other people that might be interested, that kind of thing. When you talk about educators, it goes along the same line, if there's something that you're passionate about or something you're interested in the classroom, and someone pitches it to and you're like, "Yeah, that's not really there yet", don't spend a lot of time on it unless it's something you're definitely passionate about driving. I will say in our field, sometimes you have to see it to believe it. I think Guy Kawasaki says sometimes you have to believe it to see it but I'd say the other and to see it to believe it is going into other teachers classrooms and seeing these things because it's scary to put all your kids out there and just say "Good luck guys" for 45 minutes trying to figure out how to get these locks off this box or here's this Nearpod lesson I'm going to give or here's this Kahoot or whatever and if you've never seen it before I think going out there and actually seeing it helps too so I get a lot of inspiration from seeing other speakers, other consultants and other views. I get a lot of inspiration from you. Whenever I watch you, I try to sketch note you. It's damn near impossible because you have 768 slides in 45 minutes session. So learning and watching from others I think is a huge part of it too. So again, early in my career, everything was done kind of in isolation. I said yes to everything which occupied a lot of my time. Later in my career, learning more to bounce ideas off of each other, seeing other things, seeing what other people are doing, and then also learning to when that opportunity comes, you're like, not too sure about and you feel like you're kind of lukewarm on, you pass on it, because there might be something else right after that comes down the road.
Adam Bellow (20:21): I love that advice and I think it's this advice that's not only it's earned and validated. If you're hearing this, I think you understand where Carl's coming from. This is through experience. If someone had told you this 10 years ago.
Carl Hooker (20:33): Yeah.
Adam Bellow (20:33): When you're just starting, you would have been like, "Ah, Nah, I can handle it.
Carl Hooker (20:37): Whatever, I know what I'm doing.
Adam Bellow (20:39): But a lot of that resonates with me as well in terms of like, just putting so much on the plate where it's like, "Alright, I'm just going to take it on” - but you learn. I mean it's such a nice, like, almost retrospective hindsight of like validation of like, oh, yeah, that was really good advice.
Carl Hooker (20:50): Then the pandemic also, I mean didn't it slow you down? I mean, you're like me, you're rapid-paced all the time. I felt like as much as you never want to say there are great things to come out of the pandemic, but I mean, a silver lining for me was that I took a breath, I slowed down. I was more with my family. I mean, 587 days, I had the kids in my school, I called it my house, and I value that so much. I'd love to fast-forward in like 10 years and see, "Like, Dad, remember that time we'd like for two years, we just stayed at the house”. That's what that experience was. But for me, I've learned that don't take anything for granted, continue to kind of lean into people, lean into ideas, lead into connections and friendships. I feel like those have strengthened over the pandemic. I know a lot of people feel isolated. But for me, I just I texted people, I was calling people as much. These podcasts are great for that. I mean, again, that gets a connection for me is what drives me.
Adam Bellow (21:32): Yeah, and I love that. I mean, I definitely think it gave opportunity. I think being with the family was great, obviously stressful for so many different reasons. So many different times but I mean, all in all, as we're all pulling through the end of it, I certainly not would, and I think it's one of those things that from a technology standpoint, I know, this is kind of a bonus round over here, as you gave a lot of thought, and I know you and I have had conversations about this about what should have changed, or what we hoped would change what has changed in education, and it's kind of funny, like what I described it as like the elastic band is too strong, like a two-year hiatus or really felt like that. But one year when kids started to go back, it's like the rubber bands too strong.
Carl Hooker (22:08): Yeah. That's a great way of putting it.
Adam Bellow (22:08): Let's put it back to the way it used to be.
Carl Hooker (22:08): Back to normal phrase.
Adam Bellow (22:12): Yeah, we're overall like, blow up the system start again, and we're like, whoa, whoa wait, wait, we've missed the opportunity here.
Carl Hooker (22:18): Yeah, and the new podcast I'm doing called Forward To Different is actually called forward to different because we don't need to go back to normal, and I think what's happening right now in education, the after-effects of this or the aftershocks of this with the educational burnout and the teachers leaving the classroom in record numbers and the lack of teachers coming into our system through higher ed because no Gen-Z kid wants to be a teacher right now. And again, we're educators, I mean, are we advising our kids to become teachers? Even I'm like, hesitant to do that at the moment. So I'm like, how do we change that system? And part of it is I think, some things we just learned from the pandemic and apply it to this new whatever it's going to become, and it may mean that there's a little virtual, maybe there's a long line, maybe there's a little hybrid, maybe there's some asynchronous, what other buzzwords can we fill out before the end of the episode, but that's what I'm thinking is it may have to happen because we're not going to have any choice. Because if you have a school with 50% of the teachers that they normally have, you're going to have to start thinking a little differently, Steve Jobs would be so proud.
Adam Bellow (23:11): He would. I do feel like and I can only say this with a limited insight of both friends and family, but also my own kids and their teachers like they were incredible through the entire thing so I'm very hopeful that we will learn lessons from it and take things in, but it's exhausting, and I don't blame us teachers for where they're at right now. It's palpable to feel the frustration and the just exhaustion.
Carl Hooker (23:11): Absolutely.
Adam Bellow (23:28): It's tough. Carl, I know you mentioned your book a couple times, which is awesome. You want to talk about the social network that you just launched? What else would you like to share?
Carl Hooker (23:41): Yeah, I'm really excited about this, too. So about six, seven months ago, a group of us educators got together mostly in the Northeast, I'm the one lone member of South of the Mason Dixon Line, and we basically said, let's figure out a way that we can build a collaborative space. It's not LinkedIn, it's not a Facebook group, it's not a Twitter chat, but taking some of the better components of those things, and then applying it to kind of a social media platform. So K12Leaders.com was born out of that. We just launched our mobile app three weeks ago, four weeks ago, and we got about 530 something members in the beta right now. But essentially, it's a platform where you can have group discussions, I've done two book chats there with my own book. I can embed zoom into the platform so we can have discussion threads, and there are a bunch of other features that of course, we're thinking about, but we don't want to overload it because you can become too feature-rich, too. So our idea is a space for educators can get together to talk about just the things we love, learning, sharing and connection, and possibly, as we mentioned, people are leaving or changing fields. There's opportunity there to share resumes, and also share ideas like, "Hey, I'm looking to land something in this space, or I'm looking for somebody that can do this." So we're hoping to kind of have that business element of it. But the big driving force behind it is what happens when you go to a conference, and when you go to a conference, you download the conference app, and in the app, there's a little thing where you can connect with people at the conference and then two weeks go by and the conference is over and you're like why do I still have this app? I'm going to delete it, and then the next conference comes and what do you do- you re-download the app, so our hoping was let's keep the conversation going and that's kind of the tagline of the platform, keep the conversation going. So everybody's in this platform, maybe there's a group called TCEA, or ISTE or NYSCATE, or COSN, and as you join that group, those are people that are exclusive to that group but you can also see the broader audience at whole, and you don't have to keep downloading different apps to keep the conversation going, so that's our hope. We're not building crazy algorithms, we're not Facebook or anything so, it's literally five people right now running it and building it, and we're trying to expand it a little bit. It'll always be free, of course, that's kind of the thing. It's not about making money, it's about making the connections. So that's our driving force behind it and so I'm excited about it and so far, again, it's one of those projects that I said, “fudge yes” to when I heard it because I was so excited about it to bleep out a word there because I was this is what we need, and I'm so tired of going to places and not being able to connect with people afterwards, or having to find them on Facebook, or Twitter, or LinkedIn, or email, or whatever. So if we all have the same profile, then we can all jump into that same platform and use it and share it so that's the hope but hopefully, by ISTE we'll be up to about 1000 members, and then really see what happens.
Adam Bellow (25:55): That's awesome. That's really, really cool as having worked on networks before and having that same like educator hat looking to build these things. You build from purpose, you build for need, and having seen the platform and used it, it's awesome. So definitely, if you're listening, you should definitely check it out, and thank you for that. It's such a cool idea.
Carl Hooker (26:12): So LinkedIn is for business, Facebook is for friends, Nextdoor is for all that crazy neighbor, that is way too nosy, and then there are K12Leaders, which is for educators so it's our own space.
Adam Bellow (26:22): I love it, man. Well, you've been doing such great work for such a long time, and I feel like the best is yet ahead for you. Thank you so much for spending some time and sharing your story with us. It's always great to sit down and chat and certainly look forward to chatting with you. I'm sure we'll be connecting shortly. You mentioned the book, you want to tell us where they can find you online?
Carl Hooker (26:39): Sure you can find me on Twitter @mrhooker. You can find me on Instagram, @hookertech at Tik Tok, I just started a Tik Tok account about a month ago.
Adam Bellow (26:46): Oh sweet.
Carl Hooker (26:47): Online, my blog hookedoninnovation.com and my website carlhooker.com, K12Leaders.com I mentioned, the book you can find on Amazon. Yeah, podcasts, basically everything's on my site. So go there, you can find everything, reach out to me. It's all out there. So, my life is an open book that no one wants to read. That's what I used to say but now people are reading it, so excited. Thank you again, Adam for having me on the podcast.
Adam Bellow (27:12): Thank you Carl. It was great to chat. Alright, until the next time, Game On!