Teacher Toolkit posted an article on Thursday with 10 tips for promoting creativity. I loved what they had to say because it's essential for teachers to think "outside the box" to meet students where they "are right now." This is one of my current obsessions... I even blogged about it a few weeks ago! Because of my role as the technology specialist, I've been working on taking ideas and making them technologically realistic for my colleagues. That's what I'm going to do with this article as well!
How can you use technology to promote creativity?
- Project-Based Learning and Genius Hour: I think these two go hand-in-hand. Utilizing the Google Suite would be very helpful here whether it's through collaboration and discussion, building a public website or blog, using e-mail to contact teachers or outside sources, storing and sharing information through Drive, designing presentations for data and other information... G Suite can make all the difference!
- Create Opportunities for Creativity: Think about student choice and voice here! Adobe Spark Video is an easy way for students to be creative, but iMovie and Garageband are also great applications! Find a challenge or competition that students can join, whether it's for class or outside of the classroom. Have them share their work on their blog or through your professional Twitter. Have the students make connections outside the school that inspires them.
- Make Cultural Connections: Google Arts & Culture is a great way to bring art into the classroom. ARTE360 is a VR application where you can experience, first-hand, concerts, music, and artworks. Google Maps allows you to build a "tour map" of locations you "visited" to talk about the culture of the people in that location.
- Embrace Failure: Flipgrid is PERFECT for this! The reason why I would use Flipgrid is that it's video-based (instead of writing) and the students can see each others' videos. It's necessary, if your class is to embrace failure, that students can be both vulnerable and honest. The more students see others be exposed and authentic, the more open and candid they are willing to be. I think learning can be powerful when students learn from each other. They might listen to another student's failure and realize where they went wrong. Students can learn from someone else's mistakes! Students can also be the influencer for someone else!
- Whole Brain: This requires you to create a lesson, or unit, that taps into working, declarative, and procedural memory. You want to chunk the information, provide context and connections, and design physical actions to accompany the learning. Explain Everything is useful for using the whole brain because students can explain the links, they are physically drawing and writing while creating a video, and they have to chunk their information into a precise presentation.
- Create Time to Think: An application I would use here is Padlet. The online corkboard is an exceptional way for students to post questions, comments, images, or videos. Also, students can now leave comments on other students' post which is a great way for students to learn from each other. One thing I saw another teacher do was to leave the post layout as "free" so that students can move their post onto another post if there's a connection between them. It's an excellent way for students to see and design associations!
- Teach Creativity: Start class every day with mindfulness (there are apps available on the internet) to set the creativity tone. Use Sketches for drawing and sketchnoting. Brainstorm (or do a project) as a class over Google Docs or Padlet.
- Celebrate with Pomp and Circumstance: Use social media platforms (Blogger, Instagram, Twitter, even Snapchat) to share what the kids are doing and what they are doing well. I use Instagram for my class to just post what the kids are doing. Recently a number of students have been asking about signing up for broadcasting next year. They're excited because they get to see the behind the scenes action, because they see the broadcast in class, and can catch up on missed broadcasts on YouTube. It makes my current students PROUD to be in broadcasting and proud of their accomplishments!
I hope some of these ideas are useful and inspiring! Thanks for reading. I'll see you next week :)
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