About
The face and the educator behind Innoverse
Teacher
Michelle Baragar
Owner
Innoverse is owned by me, Michelle Baragar. I grew up on a farm in Alberta, Canada. I spent 22 years as a classroom teacher in rural Alberta and am now employed as the Coordinator of Educational Technology for the Chinook’s Edge School Division. I am also a Doctoral Candidate at the University of Calgary where I am focusing my research on AI in the K-12 environment.
In my role with Chinook’s Edge, I am able to have my hand on all things ed tech. I serve as a support to teachers with their integration and use of technology, I have built and still teach an intensive summer technology program for high school students wherein if they complete 6 high school credits of tech courses with me, they receive a Chromebook to keep for high school and beyond. I have built and taught the adaptive learning program for our grade 1 to 8 students who are seeking flexibility in learning for a variety of reasons. I work with assistive technologies for our students with exceptional needs, I offer professional learning sessions to teachers, and I operate many of our district websites that have been built to serve the needs of our teachers. Additionally, I am the Artificial Intelligence district resident to assist with training, implementation and policy making.
In the early years of my career, I moved frequently to take jobs where they were available, and eventually found that I had taught every grade between K and 12, and had taught almost all subjects as well. Once the educational environment settled down, and longer-term jobs were available (once Ralph Klein had balanced the provincial budget and had ceased the “hack-and-slash” he had done to education), I landed in central Alberta where I became a career junior high teacher (and you can draw whatever conclusions you may about that fact). While my B.Ed officially made me a French teacher, I taught computer technology for seventeen years. My students were engaged in a wide range of technology-related activities from productivity, word processing, presentations and spreadsheets to business planning to web building, coding, animation, photoshopping, video editing and even gaming and game creation.
I worked as a Galileo Lead Teacher with the Golden Hills School Division in the early part of the new millennium and with their assistance worked my way through the then-emerging concept of inquiry based learning. Eventually I spent time in an informal role of instructional coach assisting other teachers with inquiry based learning methods in Social Studies when these methods were embedded into the Alberta Social Studies Curricula. I was also an A.I.S.I. lead teacher from 2002 until the Alberta Government ceased funding of the program in 2012.
In 2015 I returned to the University of Calgary and completed my M.Ed in 2017 with a focus on Educational Technology (now called Learning Sciences).
I am working toward my EdD in Learning Sciences at the University of Calgary. I am passed my candidacy exam in May, 2025 and will commence my research in August 2025.