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Marianne Hart

The Creativity Crisis - Newsweek - 48 views

  • there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.
  • “Creativity can be taught,”
  • it’s left to the luck of the draw who becomes creative: there’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children
    • Brian C. Smith
       
      Students are labeled as "creative" if they display a knack for art or music, and sometimes in writing, however, they are rarely recognized as creative in math or science where a lot of creativity is not only needed, but excellent for learning within those very two disciplines.
    • Bill Genereux
       
      This is precisely why creativity education is important. It is needed everywhere, not just in the arts. Those teaching outside of arts education need to start recognizing the importance of creative thinking as well.
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  • When faculty of a major Chinese university asked Plucker to identify trends in American education, he described our focus on standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing. “After my answer was translated, they just started laughing out loud,” Plucker says. “They said, ‘You’re racing toward our old model. But we’re racing toward your model, as fast as we can.’ ”
  • The argument that we can’t teach creativity because kids already have too much to learn is a false trade-off. Creativity isn’t about freedom from concrete facts. Rather, fact-finding and deep research are vital stages in the creative process.
  • When you try to solve a problem, you begin by concentrating on obvious facts and familiar solutions, to see if the answer lies there. This is a mostly left-brain stage of attack. If the answer doesn’t come, the right and left hemispheres of the brain activate together. Neural networks on the right side scan remote memories that could be vaguely relevant. A wide range of distant information that is normally tuned out becomes available to the left hemisphere, which searches for unseen patterns, alternative meanings, and high-level abstractions. Having glimpsed such a connection, the left brain must quickly lock in on it before it escapes. The attention system must radically reverse gears, going from defocused attention to extremely focused attention. In a flash, the brain pulls together these disparate shreds of thought and binds them into a new single idea that enters consciousness. This is the “aha!” moment of insight, often followed by a spark of pleasure as the brain recognizes the novelty of what it’s come up with. Now the brain must evaluate the idea it just generated. Is it worth pursuing? Creativity requires constant shifting, blender pulses of both divergent thinking and convergent thinking, to combine new information with old and forgotten ideas. Highly creative people are very good at marshaling their brains into bilateral mode, and the more creative they are, the more they dual-activate.
  • those who diligently practice creative activities learn to recruit their brains’ creative networks quicker and better
    • Ed Webb
       
      Surely, "more quickly"?
  • Creativity has always been prized in American society, but it’s never really been understood. While our creativity scores decline unchecked, the current national strategy for creativity consists of little more than praying for a Greek muse to drop by our houses. The problems we face now, and in the future, simply demand that we do more than just hope for inspiration to strike. Fortunately, the science can help: we know the steps to lead that elusive muse right to our doors.
    • Brian C. Smith
       
      Likely because it was out of necessity and the hardships of life. Not that we don't have hardships and necessities, but innovation has solved a lot of problems and automation has made skills and tasks easy.
  • What’s common about successful programs is they alternate maximum divergent thinking with bouts of intense convergent thinking, through several stages. Real improvement doesn’t happen in a weekend workshop. But when applied to the everyday process of work or school, brain function improves.
    • Brian C. Smith
       
      Everyday process of work or school... over time, consistent and non-prescriptive.
  • kids demonstrated the very definition of creativity: alternating between divergent and convergent thinking, they arrived at original and useful ideas. And they’d unwittingly mastered Ohio’s required fifth-grade curriculum—from understanding sound waves to per-unit cost calculations to the art of persuasive writing. “You never see our kids saying, ‘I’ll never use this so I don’t need to learn it,’ ” says school administrator Maryann Wolowiec. “Instead, kids ask, ‘Do we have to leave school now?’ ” Two weeks ago, when the school received its results on the state’s achievement test, principal Traci Buckner was moved to tears. The raw scores indicate that, in its first year, the school has already become one of the top three schools in Akron, despite having open enrollment by lottery and 42 percent of its students living in poverty.
  • project-based learning
  • highly creative adults frequently grew up with hardship. Hardship by itself doesn’t lead to creativity, but it does force kids to become more flexible—and flexibility helps with creativity.
  • When creative children have a supportive teacher—someone tolerant of unconventional answers, occasional disruptions, or detours of curiosity—they tend to excel. When they don’t, they tend to underperform and drop out of high school or don’t finish college at high rates. They’re quitting because they’re discouraged and bored, not because they’re dark, depressed, anxious, or neurotic. It’s a myth that creative people have these traits. (Those traits actually shut down creativity; they make people less open to experience and less interested in novelty.) Rather, creative people, for the most part, exhibit active moods and positive affect. They’re not particularly happy—contentment is a kind of complacency creative people rarely have. But they’re engaged, motivated, and open to the world.
  • solutions emerge from a healthy marketplace of ideas, sustained by a populace constantly contributing original ideas and receptive to the ideas of others
  • The age-old belief that the arts have a special claim to creativity is unfounded.
  • When scholars gave creativity tasks to both engineering majors and music majors, their scores laid down on an identical spectrum, with the same high averages and standard deviations. Inside their brains, the same thing was happening—ideas were being generated and evaluated on the fly.
  • The lore of pop psychology is that creativity occurs on the right side of the brain. But we now know that if you tried to be creative using only the right side of your brain, it’d be like living with ideas perpetually at the tip of your tongue, just beyond reach
  • those who diligently practice creative activities learn to recruit their brains’ creative networks quicker and better. A lifetime of consistent habits gradually changes the neurological pattern.
  • The home-game version of this means no longer encouraging kids to spring straight ahead to the right answer
  • The new view is that creativity is part of normal brain function.
  • “As a child, I never had an identity as a ‘creative person,’ ” Schwarzrock recalls. “But now that I know, it helps explain a lot of what I felt and went through.”
  • In China there has been widespread education reform to extinguish the drill-and-kill teaching style. Instead, Chinese schools are also adopting a problem-based learning approach.
  • fact-finding
  • problem-finding
  • Next, idea-finding
  • there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.
  •  
    For the first time, research shows that American creativity is declining. What went wrong-and how we can fix it.
meghankelly492

Project MUSE - Learning from Masters of Music Creativity: Shaping Compositional Experie... - 7 views

  • n contrast to others who are not as prone to divulge their feelings about their creative process
  • "Variation in style may have historical explanation but [End Page 94] no philosophical justification, for philosophy cannot discriminate between style and style."3
  • The testimonies of the composers concerned bear on questions about (a) the role of the conscious and the unconscious in music creativity, (b) how the compositional process gets started, and (c) how the compositional process moves forward
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  • It is hoped that the themes that emerge by setting twentieth and twenty-first century professional composers' accounts of certain compositional experiences or phases of their creative processes against one another will provide a philosophical framework for teaching composition.
  • Furthermore, the knowledge of how professional composers compose offers the potential of finding the missing link in music education; that is, the writing of music by students within the school curriculum
  • Such involvement may deepen their understanding of musical relationships and how one articulates feelings through sounds beyond rudimentary improvisational and creative activities currently available
  • raw philosophical implications for music composition in schools from recognized composers' voices about their individual composing realities
  • It is hoped that the direct access to these composers' thoughts about the subjective experience of composing Western art music in the second half of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century may also promote the image of a fragmented culture whose ghettoization in music education is a serious impediment to the development of a comprehensive aesthetic education.
  • n other words, there is a striking unanimity among composers that the role of the unconscious is vital in order to start and/or to complete a work to their own satisfaction.
  • I need . . . to become involved, to come into a state where I do something without knowing why I do i
  • This is a complex problem and difficult to explain: all that one can say is that the unconscious plays an incalculable rol
  • Nonetheless, these self-observations about the complementary roles of the unconscious and conscious aspects of musical creativity do not cover the wide range of claims in psychological research on creativity
  • I strongly believe that, if we cannot explain this process, then we must acknowledge it as a mystery.25 Mysteries are not solved by encouraging us not to declare them to be mysteries
  • When Ligeti was commissioned to write a companion piece for Brahms' Horn Trio, he declared, "When the sound of an instrument or a group of instruments or the human voice finds an echo in me, in the musical idea within me, then I can sit down and compose. [O]therwise I canno
  • Extra-musical images may also provide the composer with ideas and material and contribute to musical creativity.
  • ome composers need to have something for it to react against.38 Xenakis, however, asserted that "all truly creative people escape this foolish side of work, the exaltation of sentiments. They are to be discarded like the fat surrounding meat before it is cooked."
  • as, as these examples show, dreams can also solve certain problems of the creative process.
  • In other words, to compose does not mean to merely carry out an initial idea. The composer reserves the right to change his or her mind after the conception of an idea.
  • n sum, self-imposed restrictions or "boundary conditions"55 seem to provide composers with a kind of pretext to choose from an otherwise chaotic multitude of compositional possibilities that, however, gradually disappears and gets absorbed into the process of composition which is characterized by the composers' aesthetic perceptions and choices.
  • Therefore, it is not surprising that influences from the musical world in which the composer lives play an important role in the creative process
  • Thereby the past is seen as being comprised by a static system of rules and techniques that needs to be innovated and emancipated during the composers' search for their own musical identity.
  • I strongly suggest that we play down basics like who influenced whom, and instead study the way the influence is transformed; in other words: how the artist made it his own.
  • Nothing I found was based on the "masterpiece," on the closed cycle, on passive contemplation or narrowly aesthetic pleasure.61
  • Furthermore, for some composers the musical influence can emerge from the development of computer technology.
  • In sum, the compositional process proceeds in a kind of personal and social tension. In many cases, composers are faced with the tensive conflict between staying with tradition and breaking new ground at each step in the process. Thus, one might conclude that the creative process springs from a systematic viewpoint determined by a number of choices in which certain beliefs, ideas, and influences—by no means isolated from the rest of the composer's life—play a dominant role in the search for new possibilities of expression.
  • If a general educational approach is to emerge from the alloy of composers' experiences of their music creativity, it rests on the realization that the creative process involves a diversity of idiosyncratic conscious and unconscious traits.
  • After all, the creative process is an elusive cultural activity with no recipes for making it happen.
  • n this light, the common thread of composers' idiosyncratic concerns and practices that captures the overall aura of their music creativity pertains to (a) the intangibility of the unconscious throughout the compositional process,68 (b) the development of musical individuality,69 and (c) the desire to transgress existing rules and codes, due to their personal and social conflict between tradition and innovation.70
  • In turn, by making student composers in different classroom settings grasp the essence of influential professional composers' creative concerns, even if they do not intend to become professional composers, we can help them immerse in learning experiences that respect the mysteries of their intuitions, liberate their own practices of critical thinking in music, and dare to create innovative music that expresses against-the-prevailing-grain musical beliefs and ideas.
  • Therefore, it is critical that the music teacher be seen as the facilitator of students' compositional processes helping students explore and continuously discover their own creative personalities and, thus, empowering their personal involvement with music. Any creative work needs individual attention and encouragement for each vision and personal experience are different.
  • After all, the quality of mystery is a common theme in nearly every composer's accoun
  • Failing this, musical creativity remains a predictable academic exercise
  • Music teachers need to possess the generosity to refuse to deny student composers the freedom to reflect their own insights back to them and, in turn, influence the teachers' musical reality
  • Indeed, it is important that music teachers try to establish students gradually as original, independent personalities who try to internalize sounds and, thus, unite themselves with their environment in a continuous creative process.
  • Music teachers, therefore, wishing student composers to express and exercise all their ideas, should grant them ample time to work on their compositions,
  • n sum, music knowledge or techniques and the activation of the student composers' desire for discovery and innovation should evolve together through balanced stimulation.
  • While music creativity has been a component of music education research for decades, some of the themes arising from professional composers' experiences of their creativity, such as the significance of the unconscious, the apprehension towards discovering ones' own musical language, or the personal and social tension between tradition and innovation, among others, have not been adequately recognized in the literature of music education
  • By doing this, I strongly believe that musical creativity in general and composing in particular run the risk of becoming a predictable academic exercise
  • which merely demands problem-solving skills on the part of the student composers (or alleged "critical thinkers").
  • . On the other hand, only few music educators appear to draw their composer students' attention to the importance of the personal and social conflict between staying within a tradition or code, even if it is the Western popular music tradition, and breaking new ground at each step in the creative process and, possibly, shaping new traditions or codes.
  • Culture is a precious human undertaking, and the host of musics, arts, languages, religions, myths, and rituals that comprise it need to be carefully transmitted to the young and transformed in the process."85
  • Nevertheless, further research is needed in which women's voices can be heard that may offer an emancipatory perspective for the instruction of composition in education which will "challenge the political domination of men."
Has Slone

Always Write: Cobett's "7 Elements of a Differentiated Writing Lesson" Resources - 10 views

    • Has Slone
       
      This is a neat way to start a writing class with the creating plot ideas....
  • One of the goals I ask teachers to set after my training is to find new ways to push students to analyze and evaluate as they learn to write.
  • As part of my teacher workshop on the writing process, we investigate multiple uses of student samples. One of my favorite techniques involves having student compare and contrast finished pieces of writing. During both pre-writing and and revision, this push for deeper student thinking both educates and inspires your students.
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  • The handout has student writers analyze two fifth graders' published writing with a compare and contrast Venn diagram.
  • Revision is hard, and most teachers recognize it as an area of deficiency; the truth is, a lot of really great writing teachers I know still freely admit that revision is where they struggle the most.
  • revision shouldn't be the first of the seven elements to work on
  • When students like what they've written in rough draft form, they're ready to move to revision. My other six elements aim at helping students increase their pre-writing time so they both like and see more potential in their rough drafts
  • I believe in the power of collaboration and study teams,
  • Professional development research clearly cites the study team model as the most effective way to have learners not only understand new ideas but also implement them enough times so they become regular tools in a teacher's classroom.
  • Below, find three examples created by study teams during past workshops. I use them as models/exemplars when I set the study teams off to work.
  • My students learn to appreciate the act of writing, and they see it as a valuable life-skill.
  • In a perfect world, following my workshop,
  • follow-up tools.
  • I also use variations of these Post-its during my Critical Thinking Using the Writing Traits Workshop.
  • By far, the best success I've ever had while teaching revision was the one I experienced with the revision Post-its I created for my students
  • During my teacher workshop on the writing process, we practice with tools like the Revision Sprint (at right), which I designed to push students to use analysis and evaluation skills as they looked at their own drafts
  • I used to throw my kids into writing response groups way too fast. They weren't ready to provide critical thought for one another
  • The most important trick learned was this: be a writer too. During my first five years of teaching, I had assigned a lot of writing but never once had I written something I intended to show my students.
  • I have the following interactive plot element generator (which can be replicated with three coffee cans and index cards) to help my students feel in control of their options:
  • If you want to hear my take on graphic organizers in detail, you're going to have to hire me to come to present to you. If you can't do that, then I'll throw you a challenge that was thrown once at me, and completing the challenge helped me become a smarter designer of graphic organizers. The challenge came in two parts: 1) learn how to use tables and text boxes in Microsoft Word; 2) for practice, design a graphic organizer that would help students be successfully with the following trait-based skills:
  • "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, etc," which is an interesting structure that students can borrow from to write about other topics, be they fiction or non-fiction.
  • Asking students to create daily journals from the perspective of other animals or even inanimate objects is a great way to borrow this book's idea.
  • it challenges students to analyze the author's word choice & voice skills: specifically his use of verbs, subtle alliteration, and dialogue.
  • Mentor Text Resource Page here at my website, because this topic has become such a big piece of learning to me. It deserved its own webpage.
  • Here are seven skills I can easily list for the organization trait. Organization is: 1) using a strong lead or hook, 2) using a variety of transition words correctly, 3) paragraphing correctly, 4) pacing the writing, 5) sequencing events/ideas logically, 6) concluding the writing in a satisfying way, 7) titling the writing interestingly and so that the title stands for the whole idea. Over the years, I have developed or found and adapted mini-lessons that have students practice these skills during my "Organization Month."
  • Now, let's talk differentiation:
  • The problem with focusing students on a product--instead of the writing process--is that the majority of the instructional time is spent teaching students to adhere to a formula.
  • the goal of writing instruction absolutely should be the helping students practice the three Bloom's levels above apply: analyze, evaluate, and create.
  • Click here to access the PowerPoint I use during the goal-setting portion of my workshop.
  • Improving one's ability to teach writing to all students is a long-term professional development goal; sticking with it requires diligence, and it requires having a more specific goal than "I want to improve writing
  • "Trying to get better at all seven elements at once doesn't work;
  • strive to make my workshops more about "make and take,
  • Robert Marzano's research convinced me years ago of the importance of having learners set personal goals as they learn to take responsibility for their own learning.
Florence Dujardin

Creme 2002 - Creative Participation in the Essay Writing Process - 26 views

  •  
    This article reports on a qualitative action research project which looked at the possibility that giving students an opportunity to explore their relationship with their essays through a range of creative writing techniques might enhance creativity in university writing. The project comprised a series of practical and experiential workshops, with questionnaires and follow-up interviews. The workshops are described, and themes arising from the different strands of the project discussed, using case study material from individual students. Drawing on a range of theoretical perspectives from psychoanalysis, literary theory and academic literacies, the discussion covers notions of genre, writer identity, creativity and play. We argue that approaches introduced in these workshops have implications for mainstream practice in ways that could enable students to feel freer, more empowered and more present in their university writing.
Elizabeth Resnick

Using "Music Writing" to Trigger Creativity, Awareness and Motivation | Edutopia - 7 views

  •  
    The Contemplation Writing Project, as I came to call it, uses an innovative form of writing called "Music Writing" to develop intra- and interpersonal communication skills (EI), creative self-expression (journal or therapeutic writing), thinking, character education, identity and values clarification in young people through music, writing, discussion and self-assessments.
Josh Flores

Annotating the Model Content Frameworks for ELA/Literacy by PARCC - 9 views

    • Josh Flores
       
      Quarterly Modules - but could be adjusted for your school's purposes.
    • Josh Flores
       
      Ingredients!
  • shape the content within the modules in any way that suit their desired purposes
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  • re-order
  • order in which the four modules may be used is not critical
  • ocus and emphasis on the types of texts
  • What changes
  • is the
  • analytic reading
  • examining its meaning
  • read and reread deliberately.
  • understand the central ideas
  • supporting details
  • entails the careful gathering of observations
  • overall understanding and judgment
  • omparison and synthesis of ideas
  • drawing on relevant prior knowledge
  • suggests that educators select a minimum number of grade-level-appropriate short texts
  • as well as one extended text
  • in lower grades, chosen texts should include content from across the disciplines.
  • upper grades, content-area teachers are encouraged to consider how best to implement informational reading across the disciplines
    • Josh Flores
       
      The Nonfiction Split
    • Josh Flores
       
      Elementary and Secodnary
    • Josh Flores
       
      Selecting Multiple Texts
  • present their analyses in writing and speaking
    • Josh Flores
       
      Listening and Speaking Tip: Class presentations with a rubric; allow class to complete rubric of their peers too and use video or text-to-speech based web 2.0 animation programs for shy students
  • all students need access to a wide range of materials on a variety of topics and genres
    • Josh Flores
       
      INTERNETS: Open Resource Revolution!
  • students improve both their reading comprehension and their writing skills when writing in response to texts.
    • Josh Flores
       
      I knew it!
  • notes, summaries, learning logs, writing to learn tasks, or even a response to a short text selection or an open-ended question.[9]
    • Josh Flores
       
      Examples of Writing Practices
  • hese responses can vary in length based on the questions asked and tasks performed, from answering brief questions to crafting multiparagraph responses in upper grades.
  • narrative story and narrative description
    • Josh Flores
       
      TWO TYPES OF NARRATIVE Writing
  • creative fiction, as well as memoirs, anecdotes, biographies, and autobiographies
  • include writing under time constraints
  • writing over multiple drafts
  • generate writing pieces in response to teacher-provided prompts and to their own prompts
    • Josh Flores
       
      LEVEL Qs: Teach students to generate Academic Questions to explore
  • For reading and writing in each module
    • Josh Flores
       
      Essential READING & WRITING Skills
    • Josh Flores
       
      for ELA/Literacy
  • Understand and apply grammar:
  • Cite evidence and analyze content
  • Understand and apply vocabulary
  • Conduct discussions and report findings:
  • grades 3-5
  • two standards progression charts for each grade level
  • Writing
  • peaking and Listening
  • Graham, S., and M. A. Hebert. 2010. Writing to Read: Evidence for How Writing Can Improve Reading. A Carnegie Corporation Time to Act Report. Washington, D.C.: Alliance for Excellent Education.
  • suggests both the number and types
  • Students
  • offer one way of organizing the standards
  • quarterly modules
  • reflects the integrated nature
  • four sections
  • to express an opinion/make an argument or to inform/explain
  • write
  • citing evidence
  • analyzing
  • grammar
  • vocabulary
  • discussions
  • reporting
Mariusz Leś

The Nerdy Teacher: What Makes Project Based Learning Effective? #Edchat #EngChat - 132 views

  •  
    1. OWNERSHIP is key. For this project, the students were not listening to me on why Twain was or was not a racist, they were showing me and the rest of class what they thought. They were invested in winning their argument. They knew that their work was going to determine if he was guilty or not. Although I gave the assignment, the students were in charge the rest of the way. It was their project and they wanted to do it win. When students feel they own what they are doing, they will work harder. When the audience is larger, they want to impress everyone. These are not crazy ideas, they are the results of owning the work they are doing. OWNERSHIP is a major factor in the value of PBL. 2. CREATIVITY is the another major part of the PBL and is closely linked with OWNERSHIP. Students were allowed to be creative in their work as a lawyer or witness. Witnesses needed to stay within character, but could add their own elements on the witness stand. Allowing the students to create gives them a bigger sense of OWNERSHIP. 3. Another part of the PBL is the COLLABORATION. Students were working with each other trying to decide the best plan of attack. Witnesses would meet with their lawyers and discuss how the questions they were going to ask and how they should dress. The Jury worked on group projects researching the previous public opinions on Twain and his writing. Students were sharing ideas freely with one another. I had three sections of American Lit at the time, so I had three trails running. Lawyers would help others in the other classes and trash talk the opposing lawyers as well. It was all in good fun, but the collaboration had students working hard with one another to accomplish this goal. 4. Depending on how you set up your project, CRITICAL THINKING, is also an important part of PBL. With my Twain Trail, students needed to think about both sides of the argument. Students needed to prepare their witnesses for potential cross-examination questions. They needed to
Martin Burrett

Oneword - Writing stimulus - 46 views

    • Andy Whiteway
       
      Fantastic. Share with those who are struggling to get started in their creative writing. Use as a starter in an English lesson.
    • Dimitris Tzouris
       
      Very interesting!
    • Patrick Higgins
       
      My question is how this differs from using your Writer's Notebook?  
    • Sarah Schaller Welsh
       
      I am looking for cool ideas for a creative writing course...I feel like this could be a very useful tool.
  •  
    A great way for children to learn the art of story openings. They have 1 minute to write from a one word stimulus. The site asks for a name & email. I usually just cut and paste the work into Word instead. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/English
Brad Belbas

update on Warner Music (UPDATED) (AGAIN) (Lessig Blog) - 0 views

  •  
    This is a video of a talk that Lawrence Lessig (Professor, Stanford Law School) gave for an organization. In his talk, Lessig provides a powerful and piercing analysis and critique on the impact that legal restrictions on the re/use of media resources has on creativity and cultural production. During his talk, Lessig shows some remarkably creative mash-ups videos on YouTube to exemplify the kind of creativity/cultural production that is possible through ubiquitous digital media. Ironically, the organization that hosted the talk received a notice from Warner Bros Music after posting a video of the Lessig's talk on YouTube, which, according to Lessig's blog, "objected to its being posted on copyright grounds." Warner Brother Music Group has implemented content-id algorithms (i.e., technology that detects the digital "fingerprint" of corporate-"owned" copyrighted works) through media hosting services, including YouTube, FaceBook, and others. When the video of Lessig's talk was posted, it was 'dusted' for fingerprints of WBMG copyrighted works. The detection system identified the soundtracks in the YouTube videos Lessig showed, as materials to which they held copyright. Both the video of Lessig's talk and the blog conversation regarding WBMG's objection are must-see resources.
Deven Black

Overcome Writer's Block, Suggestions To Get You Writing Again. - 66 views

  •  
    Writer's Block can stop your creative efforts in their tracks and overcoming writer's block is a tough task. WEbook is here to help you overcome this creative hurdle. Use our 911 Writers Block for helpful suggestions and ideas to get the creative juices flowing again.Share: 
Thieme Hennis

Help Write a Children's Book Online at P2PU - 16 views

  • a new P2PU course that I am facilitating, Crowdsourced Art: A Participatory Exercise in Collaboration and Collective Creativity.
  • creativity should not be – and was never meant to be – the prerogative of a few chosen individuals.
  • This course will be an introduction to crowdsourced art, and an experiment in collective creativity. We’ll learn about crowdsourced art – the central topic of my PhD research – and we’ll work together to develop a children’s book about a snail called Hashtag and his adventures on the Internet.
marlene hardin

BoomWriter | Read, Write, Compete... And Get Published! - 123 views

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    Boom Writer blends creative writing and social media technology to provide a competitive writing platform that is integrated into the national education curriculum. The goal is to give schools a platform for a more engaging creative writing process, give teachers a tool that focuses their students on creative writing techniques and all the students have fun in the process. With a slick and easy to use interface, Boom Writer is a worth while tool for writing in the classroom.
Glenn Hervieux

inklewriter - 19 views

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    inklewriter is a free tool designed to allow anyone to write and publish interactive stories. It's perfect for writers who want to try out interactivity, but also for teachers and students looking to mix computer skills and creative writing.
  •  
    "Inklewriter is a free tool designed to allow anyone to write and publish interactive stories. It's perfect for writers who want to try out interactivity, but also for teachers and students looking to mix computer skills and creative writing."
Steve Gall

Imagination Prompt Generator: Random Writing Blog Prompts, Writer's Prompt To... - 3 views

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    "Are you looking for some random writing prompts or story starters for your journal, blog, or other creativity-related project? Well then, you've come to the right place!"
Mr. Stanley

Teaching Document Design, Not Formatting Requirements - ProfHacker - The Chronicle of H... - 69 views

    • LuAnne Holder
       
      This would be a great activity for introductions.
  • One of my colleagues asks her students to sketch their names using a typeface that conveys something about themselves
  • One thing I do is bring in the style manuals from different local companies and show students how each company expects different things
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  • Students in all disciplines are more than capable of producing and analyzing visual work in amazingly rich and complex ways.
  • many faculty members continue to specify detailed formatting requirements for student writing.
  • Your paper must be double-spaced, 12 point Times New Roman, with one-inch margins.
  • Such draconian formatting requirements stifle students’ creativity and cut off any critical thinking about what should be a crucial part of any writing-intensive classroom, namely visual design.
  • Teaching Document Design, Not Formatting Requirements
  • well-meaning and thoughtful teachers establish hard and fast formatting rules that may make their lives easier, but do a disservice to their students.
  • By making these requirements, we are telling them not to think critically—or even at all—about the visual layout of their documents.
  • We are telling them we value conformity over creativity, practicality over originality, our needs over theirs.
  • It all starts with students recognizing that design is a part of what they do when they write.
  • the rules we give our students should be negotiable, and in order for them to be negotiable, we need to talk to our students about those rules, why they exist, what the consequences of breaking or following them are, and so on.
  • Your paper should be readable and take into consideration the needs of your audience.  Most importantly, though, you should have fun and be creative with your design.
  •  
    Teachers need to allow their students more room to creatively use visual design, and at the same time, teach students to be aware. Forcing students to follow exact formatting requirements is counterproductive.
anonymous

Shift to the Future: What Kids Say About Blogging - 6 views

    • anonymous
       
      Writing becomes authentic and important because it is something that a 'real' audience is going to see!
  • The cool thing about this is that family members can far more easily be involved in her learning and in providing regular feedback than they could be if her writing was only contained in the traditional paper journal.
    • anonymous
       
      What an easy way to have parental involvement!  This would solve some of that issue of parents not knowing what their children are doing at school or what is going on when the child gets older and more close-lipped.
  • ...5 more annotations...
    • anonymous
       
      Don't we ALL benefit from somebody interacting with us and commenting on our thinking?
  • Grandparents and other relatives rarely have an opportunity to observe or see what their grandchildren are doing in school. The student blogs also allows them to be a part of our classroom community.
    • anonymous
       
      What a wonderful way to connect to folks who are outside the realm of the classroom but still have an interest and care about the student!  :)
    • anonymous
       
      Looked at this class blog.  Wouldn't this be a wonderful exercise?  The teacher could blog, the students could blog on personal level but also have a class blog which is a place for inspiration for writing exercises (thinking like a language arts/writing/reading teacher here) when students don't have their own inspiration/focus for creative writing.   This blog would also be a great place to steal ideas!  :)
    • anonymous
       
      When I visit with teachers and suggest they have students create a web site or blog as an educational tool, often the teacher will tell me he/she doesn't have time to read/monitor that.  However, most teachers have students complete writing assignments and turn them in for a grade - lab reports, essays, reports, etc.  So, wouldn't this also be a way for students to create such assignments?
    • anonymous
       
      This article shows the versatility of the 3rd grade students' blogs - one reported on planet studied, one on animal, etc.  So, it wouldn't have to just be a place for creative writing/online writer's notebook!
Martin Burrett

Writing Sparks - 16 views

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    "A superb creative writing site to stimulate ideas for opinion pieces, news articles, stories or poems. There is a teachers area with whole class whiteboard resources, and a pupil area where your pupils can write their pieces and print."
Martin Burrett

Nation Novel Writing Month - 45 views

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    November is National Novel Writing Month. Use this site to get your budding authors writing their own novels. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/English
Martin Burrett

Descriptionari - 13 views

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    "A superb resource which lets users search for descriptions by keywords which have been submitted by other users. Wonderful for creative story writing."
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