Creativity in the Classroom

Every year I set technology goals to implement in my classroom and for my own professional growth. This year, two of those goals are to blog professionally, and to have my students express their creativity in many ways. 

Last Friday, I had the chance to hear Dean Shareski speak at my SAGE (Special Area Groups of Educators) conference at Manitoba's province wide PD day. Dean's amazing session on 5 Minute Creativity got the wheels turning in my head for simple ways to have creativity in the classroom in easy but thought provoking ways. It also made me realize that creativity doesn't just have to be arts related and that I was already giving my students chances to be creative with the videos we create and the point of view blogs we write amongst other projects. I decided that I wanted to focus on quick creativity activities using technology in achieving my goal as then we could be creative more frequently.

I decided to take Dean's idea of the what if videos , where people complete the sentence "what if everyone" and you make it into a video, and combine it with something my students use on a regular basis. I thought it would be interesting to create a what if blog and then get responses from around the world. My students each contributed their own what if to our class what if blog and I tweeted out our blog link asking for the world to join in by commenting back to us about their what if. 

We received a comment from Dean Shareski himself and comments from across North America, Australia, UAE, and the Netherlands. My students loved seeing how people around the world were looking at and sharing in their creativity. Quite a few teachers even commented on our blog and on Twitter about how neat this project is. 

 Here is the link to the what if blog if you wish to contribute: What if

I was all set to move on from this project when I thought; what if I switched it up and we drew our favourite what ifs out and wrote them out to share with our global audience. We decided that we would pick our favourite one, draw it, write about it, video record ourselves (on iPod touches) sharing what would happen, and then use Aurasma with them. The plan is to use the art as a trigger and then have our video-recorded explanation of the what if scenario as the overlay. We will be starting them this week and and they will be displayed on our bulletin board for student led conferences. I can't wait for the parents to see how creative we can be!

Through this what if project I learned how easy and quick creativity can be. Dean has inspired me to continue to try new quick creativity activities. Our quick creativity journey will continue after student led conferences with 6 Word Stories to share who we are with our blogging and tweeting buddies. Stay tuned for our creativity updates.