Group items tagged

"Many of us will have fond memories of children's TV engaging us to turn our used bottles into rockets, our wooden spoons into cartoon character puppets, and attaching googly eyes to anything which keeps still for more than 3 seconds! Schools are great at turning recycling into creativity, and design is at the heart of this. Later, the skills pupils learn turning pasta into planes and tins into trains fuel are the beginning of making the engineers and artisans of the future."

"An interesting 3D design platform with challenges to aid learning and a variety of options. Free version has limited shapes library."

Some great reminders for those designing blended learning courses.

1 Minute video instructions for making a model hill fort.

"Free, open source version of Minecraft. Enable 'Creative Mode' to let your pupils to build as their imagination and creativity allows. Download for Windows, Mac or Android devices. The game is supported by a community and a huge set of mods to modify the game for individual needs."

"A useful collaborative graphic design platform which works across many devices through a web browser."

UKEd Magazine with educational articles on pedagogy and teaching ideas. This issue has a STEM theme.

There is a Photoshop group on subreddit. They often take pics and do all kinds of things with them. Of course, I hope these don't "get back" to those who are the topics like this viral photoshop of a little girl with an owl. And yet, this is also a concept we can apply when we teach PhotoShop.

Apple app to make and publish beautiful interactive magazines and documents quickly and easily. It has a wide range of themes, fonts and you can add your own images. Students can type or use the speech-to-text function, which make it accessible for a wide range of abilities.

A primary school in England used Minecraft for a whole school, cross-curriculum project. Inspiring stuff.

Infographic Summary, Archive and Storify from a ukedchat discussion focusing on design skills

Very cool graphic design tool that you can use to make graphics for your blog, etc.

Take off in the classroom

Innovative floating school designed and created in Nigeria

If you need help picking colors that go well together, I love color schemer for that. You can use the RGB colors even in Microsoft office or you can use the HEX for websites, etc. I teach my students about colors but even if you don't have time for that, you can at least teach them to generate a color palette.

Fascinating article on design thinking and an attempt to catalog all of the schools using design thinking. I do predict that STEM, design thinking, and creativity are going to become increasingly valued by parents and many who are disenfranchised with a testing environment that is rapidly driving everyone involved to the edge - particularly the students. "Mapping a global movement. A global movement is unfolding, and in response to the overwhelming interest around design thinking in schools, IDEO and the d.school have created a new directory - Design Thinking in Schools - to highlight the network of institutions that are at the forefront of this movement. The directory, launched in mid-October, already features a wide range of programs and resources. There's a mix of learning environments, from charter and district public schools to museums and summer camps. The programs are diverse, including after school "lab" environments and schools that use design thinking as the basis for subject-matter courses. "