Practical classroom innovation from working educators.
Get Inspired and Innovate follows educators as they trade concrete classroom practices, coaching habits, and technology workflows. The tone is conversational and candid, with frequent detours into burnout, meetings, student ownership, podcasting, and the messy reality of school support work.
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Get Inspired and Innovate is a conversational professional-learning show for educators working at the intersection of classroom practice, technology, and instructional coaching. It is less about shiny tools than about what happens when real teachers try to make change stick. Episodes move through familiar school tensions: meetings that drift, coaching that turns into help desk work, students who need more than test preparation, and educators who carry too much work into spare hours. The tone is friendly and candid. It often sounds like colleagues thinking aloud after a long day, but the conversations keep circling back to usable practice. One episode frames whole-child support through the need to hear what a student is communicating beneath the behavior. Another looks at meetings as structures for shared voice, decisions, owners, and action steps. A back-to-school conversation focuses on executive functioning, student ownership, and the value of introducing change in smaller pieces. The show returns often to instructional coaching. It asks where coaching ends and tech support begins, especially when teachers cannot transform practice until the device, website, or platform actually works. Classroom podcasting gets similar practical treatment. Students can listen to unfamiliar narrators, replay material, take notes, and connect new information to what they heard in class. The show also makes room for educator confidence. Presenting, building a personal learning network, and stepping into public sharing are treated as skills that can grow over time. Burnout is handled directly. Discussions about boundaries, planning blocks, focused work, and rest acknowledge that effectiveness cannot depend on endless availability. The pacing is loose, with jokes and side comments, but the subject matter stays rooted in school life. Listeners hear educators wrestling with implementation, not simply celebrating innovation as an abstract virtue. That makes the show useful for teachers, coaches, and school technology leaders who want practical ideas with the texture of lived experience. It favors bite-sized change over sweeping reinvention. Its best fit is an educator who wants encouragement, but also wants the calendar, the classroom, the help desk ticket, and the tired teacher taken seriously.
Made for: Designed for teachers, instructional coaches, and school technology leaders who want usable ideas for classroom engagement, coaching, meetings, student ownership, and educator sustainability.
What sets it apart: The show blends education technology with the human logistics around it: teacher workload, student behavior, coaching boundaries, meeting culture, and implementation pace. It treats innovation as daily practice, not a showcase.
Get inspired and Innovate is a podcast that will inspire educators to be innovative in the classroom. We will be interviewing Googlers (Google Certified Educator Level 1, Google Certified Educator Level 2, Google Certified Trainers, Google Certified Innovators) to get their tips, tools, and tricks to engage students in the classroom. We will also be discussing with our Googlers their certification process and the opportunities that it has provided them for growth.
The meeting gets an action owner; your classroom podcast gets a reason beyond filling time.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A grounded conversation about hearing children through pressure, competition, and personality.
Meeting the Needs of the Whole Child brings the whole-child lens into school support and coaching, where family background, environment, personality, and testing all shape how adults understand a student.
A practical look at meetings that record decisions, widen participation, and give someone the next move.
This PlayNext episode frames meeting frustration as less a personality problem than a habits problem: decisions drift, follow-up disappears, and groups lose track of when to move on.
A grounded conversation about how virtual learning networks helped one educator move from hesitation to broader professional reach.
This episode tracks how the pandemic reshaped one educator's professional world, as Stephanie describes building a much larger personal learning network through video conferencing and virtual conferences.
A grounded case for pacing innovation through student ownership, executive functioning, and manageable coaching steps.
Returning to school becomes a question of pace, not just possibility, as Stephanie and Lance tie student ownership, executive functioning, and innovation to the systems that make change workable.
A practical teacher-facing case for using podcasts as classroom entry points and student-made work.
Podcasting moves into the classroom as both a listening habit and a way for students to produce work. The episode tracks practical uses, from short audio as bell work to an ELA sequence built around Mars Patel, where students kept wanting the next season because the story had…
Campus-made, hands-on media advice for better course content.
Héctor and Beto dissect Mexican grammar, slang, and news in native-speed Spanish conversations.
Small habit changes meet hands-on AI experiments.
Carlita Hurt, a school counselor from Washington, DC by way of Georgia, builds the episode around "why, hearing/listening, learning, and embrace an engagement." She says adults should use fist bumps, eye contact, and genuine conversation to reach students before addressing academics or behavior.
Nine hours with 14 supervisors produced “not one decision made” in the first three meetings.
Joy Blake says the pandemic revealed skills she already had: Google Classroom, Google Level 1 and 2, and a new role in CPS.
Jeff turns “what was your summer like?” into a Google Docs lesson, a podcast, and a digital-learning sequence.
Get Inspired and Innovate Episode 111 focuses on why podcasts in the classroom can work as bell work, content review, and student creation.
Dale describes schools in Uganda with smart boards and 360 cameras alongside schools without a single smartphone.
Get Inspired and Innovate episode 109 asks why podcasts belong in classrooms and features English teacher David Pinya.
Get Inspired and Innovate examines effective teaching and work-life boundaries through Dan Jackson’s schedule, which begins at 4:30 and ends school work at 4:15.
Educators discuss celebrating small wins and maintaining fun in the classroom during COVID exhaustion.
This episode explores the blurred line between instructional coaching and tech support, with guests sharing how they balance both roles to help teachers transform their practice.
Hosts discuss creative uses of Google tools (Slides, Sheets, Drawings) to engage students and think outside the box in the classroom.
Hosts discuss how to combine multiple apps (app smashing) to create engaging learning experiences for students.