Navigation North

03/25/2020

Please join us in helping teachers get resources to kids learning from home - and the Gatesfoundation will match your contributions March 25th and 26th

DonorsChoose connects teachers in high-need communities with donors who want to help.

01/08/2020

CA History Educators have long known that the traditional history materials and content provided to classrooms via adopted textbooks don't adequately address the contributions of all communities that make up the Golden State's diverse history. Navigation North created a scalable OER assembly and distribution platform to help the CA Historical Society and the CA UC History-Social Science Project develop and disseminate Inquiry Sets that utilize rich primary sources and instructional strategies to bring a more honest and inclusive history to students from all communities. https://www.teachingcalifornia.org/

11/01/2019

Navigation North attended the national 1619 Project seminar series and reception at the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). As an effort to document and reflect on the impact of the 400th anniversary of the first slave ship arriving to the English Colony of Virginia, the NY Times and Smithsonian's NMAAHC commemorated the collective research of this somber historical event and have released a body of curriculum for classrooms through a partnership with the Pulitzer Center Education team. It is exceptional work, give it a look!
https://pulitzercenter.org/lesson-plan-grouping/1619-project-curriculum

10/26/2019

We wrote this post while packing up our offices a few months ago...and are just now finding time from our new locations, to post a heart-felt goodbye and thank you to our friends and colleagues in NorCal!

While Navigation North is NOT going away, we are regretfully transitioning from our long-time Northern California home-base in Chico where it all began for our company. For our founders, and a number of our staff, Chico is the hometown where we went to college while working in coffee shops and recor...

10/24/2019

Enjoyed a day of researching more authentic ways to assess and document student completion of competencies as digital artifacts with teams of forward thinking educators and industry leads at Balboa HS in San Francisco CA.

10/18/2019

NavNorth will be busy in DC working over the next month...

09/11/2019

Thank you Smithsonian for citing us as your Technical Partner and principal Site Development Team for the prestigious Webby Award for Best Education Site 2019! An additional shout out to our excellent design team @ Codename Design. Congrats to All!

Best in Education 2019

08/28/2019

While we are excited to celebrate with the California Historical Society as they near the official launch of their new Teaching California digital history site, we thought we might look beyond the site and digital learning resource design work we are known for, and focus on the less observable backend research and discovery efforts that help us to assist our clients in truly understanding the needs of the users they propose to support. Here is a glimpse of one piece of that "unseen" work that directly guided the product development approach for this incredible new digital learning resource.

Related PostsWhat Not to Miss: Coming Up at CHSTeaching the Important, Honest, and Troubling…Uncovering remarkable documents through Teaching California With a summer 2019 launch on the horizon, the California Historical Society (CHS) is continuing work on the Teaching California website

06/20/2019

Go read our latest post to find out why Navigation North is ramping up as schools are winding down!

Summertime means testing time for those teams wanting to grab input from educators. Thinking, planning, and designing systems to increase the use of digital learning resources and enabling educators in sharing how they create richer, more equitable, and differentiated classrooms for students is our....

06/20/2019

With three big, very diverse projects pending launch in the next few months, we have little time to pull our heads up from the work and post. But, here's a little sneak peek anyways...Check out these snapshots from each new project, and consider the types of great digital education tools and platforms we have been dreaming about with our clients and get ready to be amazed!

05/23/2019

NavNorth Team @ Webby's with Darren Milligan from Smithsonian Education to accept award for Education Website of the Year. One of us has an actual Digital Learning Lab shirt on too!

04/30/2019

Navigation North is proud to announce that one of our favorite projects over the last few years, the Smithsonian Learning Lab, was nominated and has now won the 2019 Webby Award for Best Educational Website! This is an amazing testament to the wonderful teams we were able to work with ranging from the Smithsonian staff who we've grown to call our friends, to the teachers and students who opened their classrooms to us for prototype testing, to the museum specialists that gave us access to all of their expertise and knowledge and our design partners @ CodeName Design. And we want to express a big "HOORAY!" to our team here at Navigation North who envisioned and wrote the initial proposal, developed the prototypes, conducted hundreds of hours of testing, analysis, design iterations, built the entire system from the ground up, and have continued to manage the ongoing support and development updates of this robust learning resource since 2014! Yay everyone involved!