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"Simply put, the key to increasing creativity in any organization is to make it start acting like a creative organization. Suppose you wanted to be an artist: You would begin behaving like an artist by painting every day. You may not become another Vincent Van Gogh, but you'll become much more of an artist than someone who has never tried. Similarly, you and your organization will become more creative if you start going through the motions and acting the part. The following are 24 suggestions to encourage you and your colleagues to jump start creativity in your group."

How to Ensure that Making Leads to Learning http://t.co/jqjmk9NJlo #makered

"Project-based learning is a matter of identifying needs and opportunities (using an app like flipboard), gathering potential resources (using an app like pinterest), collecting notes and artifacts (with an app like Evernote), concept-mapping potential scale or angles for the project (using an app like simplemind), assigning roles (with an appp like Trello), scheduling deadlines (with apps like Google Calendar), and sharing it all (with apps like OneDrive or Google Drive). With that in mind, below are 30 of the best apps for getting this kind of work done in the classroom, with an emphasis on group project-based learning apps for both Android and iPad (and even a few for plain old browsers)."

"BoomWriter is a collaborative writing website that is free for teachers and allows students to create, share, and even publish stories and other original content. BoomWriter's easy-to-use and interactive group writing platform lets teachers deliver a fun and engaging personalized learning experience, while elementary, middle, and high school age students work online to develop their reading, writing, and peer assessment skills."

Threaded discussion is an old technology. It's inspiring to think of new ways we can talk together at a distance that allow integration of both synchronous and asynchronous technology. I often thing we'll look back on the course management systems we use today and think of them as something like a 300 baud modem. Eyes Front! What's over the horizon line?

""I want to integrate making in my classroom. Where do I start?" I see this question pop up all the time in the feeds, listservs, and blogs that I read, and I am continually surprised by the great resources that appear in response. Check out the #makered hashtag on Twitter, join the K-12 Fab Labs and Makerspaces Google Group, read about what Maker Ed and Agency By Design are up to - and then speak up! These groups are filled with generous, welcoming educators who want to share with and help each other. Ask for support fine-tuning a project prompt, invite other schools to participate in competitions and local events, or ask for advice on safe and effective ways to use a new tool. Model the collaborative, open-ended, growth-oriented approach to learning that you'd like to see in your students, and enter the conversation. "

"According to Marc-André Lalande,  "a Personal Learning Network is a way of describing the group of people that you connect with to learn their ideas, their questions, their reflections, and their references. Your PLN is not limited to online interactions, but it is that online, global interactive part that really makes it special. It is personal because you choose who's part of that group; you choose if you want to lurk-just check out what people are saying-or if you share; because you choose when to do so, and how to do so." As for this graphic? You can thank Sylvia Duckworth, who always does a great job sharing simple sketch notes to help teachers. (She also took our 12 Rules of Great Teaching and created a predictably wonderful graphic to supplement the text, among others.) We've taken her graphic and provided starting points for each 'reason' a teacher need a PLN."

"I have been experimenting with different phones and apps for creating a 360° spherical panoramic image. Below are my recommendations. In addition, once your students or you create a 360° image, please ask to join my Flickr group, 360 Images for Schools, Creative Commons-license your image so others can use it, and upload the image to the Flickr group."

"In an effort to incorporate the iPads into small group intervention stations for middle school math, I spent a few hours collaborating with Cheryl Mutz, an NEISD district Math Instructional Specialist, to create an apptivity to support the study of sequences in 8th Math. The intervention apptivity would be used in a small group setting (two students to an iPad) and the students would have 30-45 minutes to complete the task."

"Each morning as we start our day together, I draw attention to things that my students may have missed or mentions from our Twitter feed. This short time together each morning discussing our Twitter feed has resulted in rich discussions that prompt thinking, cause us to wonder and lead us to seek out further information. There are many opportunities during the school day to incorporate the use of twitter. A good place to start is to read the tweets from the other classes you follow, ask questions or provide comments as a whole class. The following examples will give you some ideas on how to involve Twitter in literacy, math and science. All of the Twitter activities explained can be done as a whole group, small group or by individual students. "

"Money As You Grow features lesson activities for students from pre-K through college. The interactive site outlines financial literacy milestones for each age group. Click on an age group and milestone to see a short list of activities that you can do with students to help them reach a new financial literacy milestone."

"Google Educator Groups (GEGs) are communities of educators who learn, share, and inspire each other to meet the needs of their students through technology solutions, both in the classroom and beyond."

"From Creative Schools by Ken Robinson and Lou Aronica, published April 21, 2015, by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright by Ken Robinson, 2015. Creative Teaching Let me say a few words about creativity. I've written a lot about this theme in other publications. Rather than test your patience here with repetition of those ideas, let me refer you to them if you have a special interest. In Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative, I look in some detail at the nature of creativity and how it relates to the idea of intelligence in the arts, the sciences, and other areas of human achievement. In 1997, I was asked by the U.K. government to convene a national commission to advise on how creativity can be developed throughout the school system from ages five through eighteen. That group brought together scientists, artists, educators, and business leaders in a common mission to explain the nature and critical importance of creativity in education. Our report, All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture and Education, set our detailed proposals for how to make this happen in practice and was addressed to people working at all levels of education, from schools to government."

I am a huge proponent of using hands-on, interactive learning activities to explore ill-defined problems as a way of teaching for all age groups. Given the spontaneity and uncertainty of these types of active learning environments, I believe educators should observe, reflect on, and analyze how learners interact with the materials, the content, the educator, and the other learners. This practice is in line with the teacher as ethnographer. In my role as a teacher as ethnographer, I made some initial observations during my first two weeks of teaching maker education for elementary age students. With half the kids under 7, I learned a bunch about young makers. Young makers are more capable than what people typically believe. Young makers need to be given more time, resources, strategies to learn how to solve more ambiguous and ill-defined problems (i.e., ones that don't have THE correct answer). Too many don't know how to approach such problems. If a project doesn't "work" during the first trial, they way too often say "I can't do this." They have a low tolerance for frustration; for not getting the answer quickly. Young makers often celebrate loudly and with extreme joy when making something work. Young makers like to work together but lack skills or desire to peer tutor one another. Young makers usually like to stand while working. Young makers are more capable than what people (adults) typically believe. During our maker education summer camp, the young makers made LED projects, circuit crafts, and simple robotics. Looking at the instructions for similar activities, the recommended ages were usually 8 and above. Yet, my group of 14 kids contained half under that age. The kids of all ages struggled a bit - as is common with making type activities but all were successful to some degree with all of the activities.

"This study guide outlines questions and discussion topics, along with additional readings and videos for a book club or study group about Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom. This study guide was conceived as a 6 week online course, but it would be easy to modify for a different time frame or face-to-face group. "

"I have recently been asked to provide a number iPad sessions for teachers. I had one school where they had recently bought a large number of iPads and wanted to start from scratch. Another had a 1:1 Program in a particular year group but wanted their colleagues to get an understanding of the potential of iPads in the classroom. I was able to use this Teacher ToolKit idea for both groups. "

"Recently on westXdesign-via scoopit-we found an interesting graphic about naming 12 principles of collaboration. Collaboration is among the most-often promoted fluencies of 21st century learning (along with creativity and communication). However, there are very few frameworks or models that exist to support the development of better collaboration forms. As it is, in many K-12 learning environments, collaboration is limited to teacher-created grouping, or more scattered project-based learning groups that converge on a single project and thus a single goal. The following principles of collaboration (seemingly created for businesses but clearly applicable to learning) push that idea a bit further-with some important emphases on the individual, including:"

"Just a few years ago, mobile devices were almost unheard of in classrooms. Over time, teachers and administrators have been experimenting with how to make mobile devices into powerful learning tools, and have come up with some strategies. A group of administrators from some of the first districts to pioneer Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies and other forms of mobile learning are now sharing their experiences with those hustling to get on board. The Consortium of School Networking, a professional group for district leaders, is trying to make that knowledge more widely available through its Mobile Learning Initiative."