Tag Archive for 'Learning'

I just got this video via Twitter (a microblogging site) from a dear friend, Ana Maria Menezes, a mineirinha, who has a bag full of tricks to share.

The story is simple, but then, I just realized that it is a wonderful springboard to explore language. Imagine a group activity, or even a collaborative project with sister classes in which they have the same claymation and learners are responsible for creating the stories to go with the animation. They could even record the stories.
How motivating would that be? Is it the kind of experiential learning we could add more frequently to our lesson plans? Do you have any other ideas to go with this video? Or do you have any other video that could be used for the same idea?
Originally posted at http://webtools4educators.blogspot.com/2008/10/telling-story.html

I’ve been giving some thought on creativity these days. I read a simple and enlightening article on Scientific American mind on the topic, How to Unleash your Creativity. Three professionals of different backgrounds discuss the creative process. Julia Cameron mentions that she has found

the creative process to be teachable and trackable.

The professionals talk about the techniques that can be used to awaken this creativity in each one of us. YES! Everybody is creative, but there needs to be an effort to unleash our creative potential. Creativity doesn’t come naturally to all. There are ways to enhance it. Robert Epstein mentions the four competencies to develop our creative minds:

There are four different skill sets, or competencies, that I’ve found are essential for creative expression. The first and most important competency is “capturing”—preserving new ideas as they occur to you and doing so without judging them.
… The second competency is called “challenging”—giving ourselves tough problems to solve. In tough situations, multiple behaviors compete with one another, and their interconnections create new behaviors and ideas. The third area is “broadening.” The more diverse your knowledge, the more interesting the interconnections—so you can boost your creativity simply by learning interesting new things. And the last competency is “surrounding,” which has to do with how you manage your physical and social environments. The more interesting and diverse the things and the people around you, the more interesting your own ideas become.

John Houtz argues that failure is also an important part of the process:

The creative individual thinks of failure as a new opportunity: “Okay, why did I fail? What was wrong? Let me try to do something else. Let me go forward with it.

This brings me to what happened the day before yesterday at my house. I turned off the TV when the kids were having some snacks. Afterward, they just kept the big screen off and started playing around, inventing a game, creating characters for themselves, imagining some of my decorative beads were, in fact, diamonds. They also made up a character for me. I was supposed to be the bad girl (does it mean something here?!), and they were the good guys trying to defeat evil! I asked them how the game would go and also questioned some strategies. They saw that some of the plans they had would not work, so they sorted things out. We had fun. However, what called my attention was the way the creative process happens, in the middle of total mess. You can see the room in the picture here. They had to scatter their costumes all over to find the perfect outfit, they had to negotiate the moves and strategy. The creative process was not linear. There were lots of decisions and steps happening at the same time. As a mother, my tendency would be to say, “oh, my! What a mess! Clean it up now!”. However, I felt this was a wonderful moment to boost my kids’ creative thinking and see how things would unfold.

This little anecdote should be a starting point for our own reflection as parents, educators and human beings. It was a fantastic reminder of the best of our childhood that we tend to kill at school, creativity, imagination, dream. I read this wonderful post by Ewan McIntosh about his talk with Mitsch Resnick about the spiral of imagine, create, play, share, reflect, imagine that kids have. By 1st grade, we start to interrupt it by our test-driven grade-oriented ecosystem.

So, here comes my 8-year old son with some papers he filled in the first week of school with activities related to “getting to know you”. I couldn’t believe that he wrote:

We all have our moments of boredom, and I think we need them as a do-nothing time that will give us energy for the activities to come in our lives.
As an educator, I can understand that we have a syllabus to follow, subjects to cover, time constraints, but my question has always been:

How can we create an anti-boredom atmosphere in the classroom that leads to engagement, motivation, willingness to be in class and not doing something else?

I guess there’s no easy answer, but nowadays, with the Internet and with this exciting NetGen little ones, there’s so much that can be done to grab their little attention span and have them there with you.
Just thinking out loud, but here are some ideas:

• Though we have a lesson plan, be it written or in our minds, with a clear sequence of steps, tasks, etc, let us give every class we teach “Creative Booster” moments that we let our kids` imagination fly and we just embark on it with them.
• The surprise element: let us rethink our teaching practices. How often do we change the way we present new content? Start in a totally unusual, unexpected way. You might be surprised with the result.
• Let the students be producers and not mere spectators, recipients of knowledge.
• Enchant by telling stories and listen to the kids` stories.
• How about a treasure box of ideas for fun classes with made by your students?
• Ask open-ended questions and not obvious ones.
• Explore the topic of a dream classroom and listen to your students` ideas. You might get some wonderful tips for the creative classroom.
• Find partner classes for projects. Projects are always an effective way to boost creative outcomes.
• State a problem you have or a friend`s problem (real or totally invented) and ask students to collaborate and find solutions for it.
• Use art, visuals, words, music, body, action, mind, technology to enhance the creative classroom.
• Have your own down time in which you focus on pleasurable things in your life to give yourself some creative input. Read magazines, books, watch movies, take photos, a long shower. You`ll surely find inspiration in the little pleasures of life.

The fact that creativity is for everyone and is teachable is certainly a reminder for myself that we need to explore it in the classroom for the sake of humankind.
Of course, at the end of the game, I asked the kids to clean up the room, but though creativity can be messy, there`s also organization involved.
What other ideas could we add to nurture the creative minds around us?
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Watch this video on Creativity by Ken Robinson:

I’ve been mulling over for some days now what I read @Injenuity. Jennifer Jones wrote a compelling post about “Being Trapped in a Ning”
She mentions:

I have found that my most rewarding online connections are with people I know where to find when I need them. The tool doesn’t even matter. I’ve learned their habits and can locate them in a space where they are most comfortable interacting. There are people I’m connected with through gmail chat, skype, twitter, blogs, email and other networks, but I’ve learned which arena works best for communicating with each of them. For my Twitter contacts, I can quickly check their status on Twitter, and if they’re around, I’ll contact them through the method that works best. My colleagues all have preferred contact methods. I have some instructors who only use the phone, others email.

At the end of the year, I created the Ning group for my online students and blogged about it saying that Ning was the place where learning happened. http://explorations.bloxi.jp/a/ning-wher…
However, I must agree with Jennifer. Learning is not in Ning. It’s everywhere. When people already have their own spaces of self-expression, if they started blogging somewhere else, it’s like as if they’re dispersing their thoughts instead of aggregating them. For example, I love the fact that in the blogging4educators Ning, whenever we want we can start a forum discussion, or share something there. However, people already have their preferred way of sharing and collaborating. So, aren’t we forcing them into a relationship that existed before? Do we need to be in the “same room” to be tied and dialogging? Of course not. That’s why I feel now that I was pushing the members there, but, in fact, our bonds were already strong in other online spaces. I still like the idea of having everybody there and knowing that whenever needed we can just send a message to the network with something interesting. But, yes, Jen, what really matters is aggregating conversations and building up knowledge using each one’s favorite means and not forcing people into a digital trap. I do hope that the members in the blogging4educators don’t feel this way. I do hope that if they decided to join the group is because they saw value in it. However, it is worth speaking up our minds and questioning our practices. As for my students, it’s a different case in the sense that most of them don’t have an online presence in their learning process. They have their favorite social networks, but they consider it a different domain of socialization, not for learning, though they might be learning valuable skills. So, Ning, can focus their attention to the learning process. But, again, I have had such amazing interactions through emails, skype chats, Orkut messages with them that we might be trapped in some way. They might feel I don’t want to communicate in another digital medium, which is certainly not true. They are mostly busy adults who prefer to receive an email. Some will give me feedback and keep conversations. Others read my personal blog.
Ning is still an appealing place for learning and sharing, and I’ve had invaluable interactions there. For example, Celso, a former student, has been reporting his learning journey abroad in a forum, Marcelo talks about his news professional challenges in a blog.However, it only works if it’s the group willingness to interact there, and not us trapping a group of brilliant minds in a space that they don’t feel as theirs. It shouldn’t be unilateral where one person is trying to feed the group with information, resources, ideas, but an interactive space. If it’s not, maybe we’re using the wrong tool for the right purpose. Then, we’re missing the wonderful input each one can contribute in a network.
In the case of my online students, I know that some of them have fully profited from it and I have, as well. But, now, I think, couldn’t we keep having enriching connectivity where we started, on our class blog? A lot of food for thought there. I still believe in the power of Ning, but with more critical eyes, pondering its true value for networking. I’ll keep exploring it to have a clearer view how it’s useful in my professional development and in my students’ learning path.
Michele Martin discusses the issue in the Bamboo Project Blog. She sees the value of Ning for new users of social media, the ones who still don’t have their own blogs, or don’t use RSS to keep connected to others in their network. As I mentioned above, this is exactly the case when some of my students profit from Ning. Their shared space become a sandbox for their self-expression. It can be the spark they need to speak up their minds and find the tone of their potent voices. .

I learned about this inspiring video via Vicky Davis.
It gives teachers a general view of possibilities the online world offers to provide the students with meaningful, contextualized, exciting learning. A world of explorations.
Download

So, what will YOU do today?