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Presentation on Visual and Creative Thinking. The presentation explores how professional in all fields can apply creative and visual thinking skills to their work as well as why people ignore the talents that made them naturally creative as children. He will discuss the myths that people hold about creativity, why they exist and how you can overcome them

"I share during many talks that creativity is a mindset not an art set. The elephant in the room is once you buy into the mantra, what steps can you take to act on the mindset? There are so many cool ways to build up our creative abilities. What I am striving to do with all my work on the Educated By Design project, is to discover ways in which creative exercises can compliment development of fundamental literacies and competencies to make our students and ourselves more capable of doing great work. For those who have yet to see the work from Stephen McMennamy, you are in for a treat. His ability to look at the world around him and find creative connections in seemingly divergent of objects is uncanny. "

"There have been complaints leveraged against out of the box robots like Dash and Dot, Ozobot, Hummingbird, Sphero. The complaints usually revolve around the canned and prescriptive nature of their uses and programs, that they lack creative engagement by the younger users. I personally love the excitement my learners have using these robots. As with all tools and technologies and with creative framing, though, they can be used in creative and imaginative ways. Mention robots to many English teachers and they'll immediately point down the hall to the science classroom or to the makerspace, if they have one. At many schools, if there's a robot at all, it's located in a science or math classroom or is being built by an after-school robotics club. It's not usually a fixture in English classrooms. But as teachers continue to work at finding new entry points to old material for their students, robots are proving to be a great interdisciplinary tool that builds collaboration and literacy skills. (How Robots in English Class Can Spark Empathy and Improve Writing) This past term, I had my 2nd through 4th grade students work on their robot-enhanced creative writing and stories. In small groups, students were asked to create a fictional storyline and use StoryboardThat.com to create both the physical scenes and the accompanying narrative. As part of their directions, they were told that they were going to create a 3D setting out of cardboard boxes, foam board, LED lights, and other craft materials; and that they would use Wonder's Dot with the Blocky App and Ozobot as the characters in their stories. Preparation time was divided between storyboarding, creating the scene, and learning how to use/code the robots. Because of all of the preparation and practice, the recording actually went quite quick and smoothly. Here is a break down of the learning events that learners were asked to complete:"

"I just came across this handy graphic on creativity and want you to have a look as well. The visual features a variety of ways and techniques that can inspire your creativity and drive you to act creatively.These ideas seem simple and common sensical but are often overlooked. You can share them with your students and try them with your kids, just remember whatever method you use, you need to be consistent and repeat it everyday. Habituation is a key element in the creative process."

"But when you're new at something, it's slow. It's painful, even. You suck at it. And when you realize you suck at it, you feel defeated. You second-guess every move. You are thinking so intentionally about every step that you sometimes feel like you are going nowhere. Over time, though, it becomes the backdrop. You've moved past the mechanics and you know what you're doing. It's a bit like driving a car. Remember when you sucked at driving? Remember when your heart would race if you went on the freeway? Remember when you had to tell yourself to turn on the turn signal? Well, that's what it's like when you are new at a creative process. You're suddenly the pimple-faced new driver trying to avoid an accident. I mention this, because I notice students who have never hit a place of creative fluency. They have no creative endurance. They give up quickly. They get frustrated too easily. They need too many instructions. But, honestly, it's because creativity has always been icing on the cake (which, honestly, is precisely what makes carrot cake a cake and not a loaf of zucchini bread). It's always been a "when we get to it" activity. It's been the culminating project. Then suddenly you have students who struggle to get anything done. However, it's not laziness. It's actually the byproduct of rarely getting the chance to make anything. "

"Regardless of whether you think every infant needs an iPad, I think we can all agree that technology has changed education for the better. Today's learners now enjoy easier, more efficient access to information; opportunities for extended and mobile learning; the ability to give and receive immediate feedback; and greater motivation to learn and engage. We now have programs and platforms that can transform learners into globally active citizens, opening up countless avenues for communication and impact. Thousands of educational apps have been designed to enhance interest and participation. Course management systems and learning analytics have streamlined the education process and allowed for quality online delivery. But if we had to pick the top ten, most influential ways technology has transformed education, what would the list look like? The following things have been identified by educational researchers and teachers alike as the most powerful uses of technology for learning. Take a look. 1. Critical Thinking In Meaningful Learning With Technology, David H. Jonassen and his co-authors argue that students do not learn from teachers or from technologies. Rather, students learn from thinking-thinking about what they are doing or what they did, thinking about what they believe, thinking about what others have done and believe, thinking about the thinking processes they use-just thinking and reasoning. Thinking mediates learning. Learning results from thinking. So what kinds of thinking are fostered when learning with technologies? Analogical If you distill cognitive psychology into a single principle, it would be to use analogies to convey and understand new ideas. That is, understanding a new idea is best accomplished by comparing and contrasting it to an idea that is already understood. In an analogy, the properties or attributes of one idea (the analogue) are mapped or transferred to another (the source or target). Single analogies are also known as sy

"The most powerful thing she said was something that education policy makers will ignore at all costs. That is that Creativity is the next essential literacy. Now keep in mind I am just beginning to try and wrap my mind around what that may look like. My first belief in this discussion is that creativity is something that begins at a young age. I also believe that creativity and imagination go hand and hand. When I teach my courses for the college I refer to imagination as a sense of wonder because often people are distracted by the word imagination. This is because it brings up a short time in their life when they were encouraged to imagine. As an education system we ignore imagination and we have quickly weeded out that perceived "unnecessary" tool over the past 20 years. "

"A few days ago, I met Manuel Herrera at MORENet. He has an amazing maker space where students engage in creative thinking on a daily basis. It's a bastion of creativity and wonder and his passion for it is contagious. However, as we talked about prototyping and design thinking, he mentioned something surprising. "We have a 3D printer, but only a few students know how to use it for creative purposes. Most students download templates and print things out. There's not much actual creative thought that goes into it." "So, what's the answer?" I asked. "I think they need to start by making things by hand," he said."

"Creativity works in mysterious and often paradoxical ways. Creative thinking is a stable, defining characteristic in some personalities, but it may also change based on situation and context. Inspiration and ideas often arise seemingly out of nowhere and then fail to show up when we most need them, and creative thinking requires complex cognition yet is completely distinct from the thinking process. "

""Creativity isn't about music and art; it is an attitude to life, one that everybody needs," wrote the University of Winchester's Professor Guy Claxton in the lead-up to the 2014 World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) dedicated to creativity and education. "It is a composite of habits of mind which include curiosity, skepticism, imagination, determination, craftsmanship, collaboration, and self-evaluation." Sounds like the perfect skill set for equipping young people to navigate an increasingly complex and unpredictable world. Encouragingly, there's plenty of evidence -- from both research and practice -- that most of the above can be taught in the classroom. In fact, innovation and education experts agree that creativity can fit perfectly into any learning system. But before it can be incorporated broadly in curriculum, it must first be understood."

"The question of what creativity is and how it works will perhaps remain humanity's most unanswerable - but that hasn't stopped us from trying. On the heels of Neil Gaiman's recent reflection on the subject comes one from filmmaker Tiffany Shlain, founder of the Webby Awards and daughter of the great Leonard Shlain of Art & Physics fame. In this short installment from AOL's The Future Starts Here series, Shlain offers ten steps to the creative process based on her own experience in film and art, expanding, perhaps inadvertently, on Graham Wallace's famous 1926 model of the four stages of the creative process and incorporating other notable theories of yore, like John Dewey's emphasis on hunches and T.S. Eliot's insistence on idea-incubation."

"Looking for some inspirational  ideas to unleash your creativity and kickstart the new year? The TED talks below are definitely a must watch. The start of a new year is traditionally the time that most people set out goals and resolutions and create to-do lists. These talks will help you come up with creative ideas to include  in your resolutions list and most importantly, will "offer the kick-in-the-pants you need to unleash your creative spirit."

"The students in Molly James's kindergarten classroom were tasked with creating a mathematical art gallery. They had each drawn a number and then searched for two types objects they could use to compose a visual number sentence - such as two rulers plus three scissors to equal five objects. After photographing and mounting their pictures on the wall in numerical order, the students sat on the floor with their sketchbooks and began to draw and talk. "I had expected them to learn something about number composition," James said, "but I didn't expect the remarkable observations they began to have about the photographs." For example, when one girl looked at a picture of two red scissors and three blue scissors (2+3=5), she noticed that the direction of the handles gave rise to a new number sentence: 4 scissors pointing left + 1 scissor pointing right = 5 scissors. James, who recently published a paper about creativity in the classroom, said moments like these remind her that "creativity is not fluff or an add-on, but is instead an essential part of what it means to be a mathematician."  In fact, she believes creativity is the key to helping her students become confident and skilled mathematical thinkers."

The difficulty with creativity is it is not easy and perhaps thanks to our experience of schooling not a natural attribute of many adults. What creativity needs is a process and/or a structure that allows us to bring our intellect to the development of creative solutions.

"This A to Z of Creativity and Innovation Techniques, provides an introduction to a range of tools and techniques for both idea generation (Creativity) and converting those ideas into reality (Innovation). Like most tools these techniques all have their good and bad points. I like to think of these creativity and innovation techniques as tools in a toolbox in much the same way as my toolbox at home for DIY. It has a saw, spanner, hammer, knife and all sorts of other things in it, they are all very useful, but you have to pick the right tool (creativity / Innovation technique) for each job. This site will try and provide a little guidance along with each tool to let you know whether it's best used for cutting paper or putting in nails."

"Did you know that January is considered International Creativity Month? This month, remind your students about the importance of being creative. Give your students the ability to creatively express themselves by providing various options for a particular class assignment. For example, instead of assigning the same writing assignment to every student, offer five variations on the topic to give the students more flexibility to choose something they find worthwhile."

"Facilitating creativity can be rewarding and exciting. Integrating creativity into the curriculum can be engaging to the learner. Creativity can be fostered by smell of a new crayon, the engagement of being able to tinker, the excitement of relaxing and creating, or some amazing technology already in your classroom. It allows student to go beyond the role of being curriculum consumers and blossom into curriculum producers. Creativity allows classrooms to go to the top of Bloom's Taxonomy in the vivid and colorful action verb each step was meant to be. I have divided these creativity resources into four different group I have included below. "

"There's an old saying that the things that change your life are the books you read, the places you go, and the people you meet. But I'd like to add a fourth: the challenges you face (and how you face them) will always change your life. If we want our students to respond to challenges with creativity and inventiveness, we must create the conditions in which innovation is not only possible but encouraged. You don't help students learn to invent by giving worksheets or cookie-cutter assignments. In fact, these one-size-fits-all approaches may actually take up the time that could be used for such creativity. ADVERTISEMENT According to the Torrance Test-which measures CQ, or creativity quotient-the United States has been declining in creativity since 1990. There has to be a reason. Perhaps it is because we focus on students' weaknesses instead of their strengths. In many schools, we'll put a math genius who struggles with grammar into extra English classes. Should we not give this math genius access to college-level advanced math work, and figure out the basic English requirements he or she needs for a basic understanding of grammar? Why do we think that all students should be good at everything? We can either be average at everything or exceptional at something. With this in mind, here are some things we need to do to encourage student inventors as we nurture student passions, interests, and strengths."

"Doing the same thing that we have always done is not going to make any us any more creative or innovative, but according to the "Creativity Research Journal" (as referenced in Red Thread Thinking), there are some things that we could do daily that will actually make us more creative. "

"In school, we learn about geniuses and their ideas, but how did they get those ideas? What are the mental processes, attitudes, work habits, behaviors, and beliefs that enable creative geniuses to view the same things as the rest of us, yet see something different? The following are seven principles that I've learned during my lifetime of work in the field of creative thinking -- things that I wish I'd been taught as a student. "