The Team

Rushton Hurley

Rushton's favorite video is "The Atomic Model."

Rushton Hurley is the founder, executive director, and lead janitor of Next Vista for Learning, which he describes as "the baby he birthed." Working with Next Vista has led to many opportunities to speak to and train teachers all over the United States and beyond. Given his love for seeing new places, connecting with students and teachers across the globe has helped broaden the offerings of the NextVista.org library in many ways. Rushton likes cats, juggling, music, basketball, good sandwiches, traveling, and lectures about history and philosophy. All of those, however, take a back seat to spending time with his wife Tabitha, who in 1994 at a moment of seriously questionable logic, agreed to spend her life with him. Rushton did his college work at Trinity University in Texas, his graduate work at Stanford in California, and several really fun semesters at universities in Japan and Australia. Working to help teachers reconnect with the hope and energy that brought them to the classroom in the first place is his professional passion, along with seeing the creative insights of students and teachers through clever digital media.

Gene Tognetti

Gene's favorite video is "Peninsula Humane Society."

Gene Tognetti is an experienced technologist, administrator, teacher, and consultant. Currently the Director of Professional Development and Edtech Integration Coach at Presentation High School in San Jose, he provides a wide variety of educational technology training for organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond. He is a board member of Balefire Labs, a startup specializing in free, research-based app reviews. Gene co-authors the Communicate..Create..Edtech blog, writing about creative, effective and practical ways to use technology in the classroom. Gene will achieve his Master of Educational Technology degree with Boise State University in May 2016. In his spare time, Gene enjoys watching sports such as baseball, basketball and road racing, and likes to work in his garden whenever he can.

Todd Seal

Todd's favorite video is "Semantic Change." His previous favorite was "Finding the Philosophy in Everyday Life: Existentialism," but something changed his mind.

Todd Seal is technology coordinator and chief groundskeeper of Next Vista for Learning. He happily teaches English at a high school in San Jose. A graduate of San Jose State University, Todd is involved with and believes strongly in the work of the San Jose Area Writing Project. By briefly working for a dot com in the midst of his teaching career, Todd became familiar with web programming and design, an experience that lead to him becoming the technology coordinator for his campus and a technology advisor for several other projects. Finding occasion to create web sites for a variety of uses, Todd is continually learning as much design and programming as he can. He finds beauty in both carefully crafted code and precisely pushed pixels, something he never thought would be the case when reading Yeats and Williams in college. On top of all that, Todd is a runner, home brewer, reader, writer, musician, and husband to an amazing woman who calmly supports all of those distractions. There is never enough free time in Todd's life. And there's always a new restaurant to visit.

Corinne Takara

Corinne Okada Takara is head doodler for Next Vista for Learning. Corinne is also an arts educator who enjoys engaging youth in public art projects which connect them to their communities and to the broader world. The daughter of a toy designer, she is excited to be a part of an organization celebrating youth perspectives and creativity. Takara has designed youth workshops for many Bay Area art museums and, through grant funding, has conducted technology-integrated art workshops for K-12 classrooms. At the university level, Takara has been an instructor at her alma mater, teaching ME 115C Visual Thinking and guest lecturing in the History and Product Design Departments of Stanford University. Corinne is a mother of two and has a patient husband who luckily shares a thrifty Hawaii plantation mentality of saving pretty much everything for use in her art projects.