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Moving at the Speed of Creativity | blog "These are my notes from Matt Hardy's WONDERFUL presentation on February 9th on Classroom 2.0 Live about Blogging in the classroom and the platform he co-founded, KidBlog! The official title of his presentation was "Using Kidblog to Document Student Learning." "

" In order to help educators integrate iPads effectively, we have compiled a list of apps focused on learning goals consistent with the CRCD framework. While many of these apps have also appeared in our iPads in the Classroom section, this list is driven by specific learning goals that promote critical-thinking, creativity, collaboration, and the creation of student-centric learning environments. "

"Over the next two days, Candler asked us to get out of the traditional schooling box. And then kick the box mercilessly down the street. In an intense succession of collaborative brainstorming sessions, we practiced improvisation, collaboration, brainstorming, design and prototyping of new models for learning and schooling. We drew from 4.0 go-to thinking and action standards like Stanford d.school's process for ideation, Dyer, Gregersen & Christensen's blueprint for creative leadership in "The Innovator's DNA", Lemov's "Teach Like a Champion," a cornerstone of the new Relay Graduate School of Education, and Seth Godin's challenge for revolution in schools."

Visible Thinking is a flexible and systematic research-based approach to integrating the development of students' thinking with content learning across subject matters. An extensive and adaptable collection of practices, Visible Thinking has a double goal: on the one hand, to cultivate students' thinking skills and dispositions, and, on the other, to deepen content learning. By thinking dispositions, we mean curiosity, concern for truth and understanding, a creative mindset, not just being skilled but also alert to thinking and learning opportunities and eager to take them

"Maker Faire is the Greatest Show (and Tell) on Earth-a family-friendly showcase of invention, creativity and resourcefulness, and a celebration of the Maker movement. It's a place where people show what they are making, and share what they are learnin"

"Story Dice is a creative tool to prompt ideas for plot, character, and setting. This idea generator can be used effectively for both written and oral storytelling."

"A survey of 2,462 Advanced Placement (AP) and National Writing Project (NWP) teachers finds that digital technologies are shaping student writing in myriad ways and have also become helpful tools for teaching writing to middle and high school students.  These teachers see the internet and digital technologies such as social networking sites, cell phones and texting, generally facilitating teens' personal expression and creativity, broadening the audience for their written material, and encouraging teens to write more often in more formats than may have been the case in prior generations.  At the same time, they describe the unique challenges of teaching writing in the digital age, including the "creep" of informal style into formal writing assignments and the need to better educate students about issues such as plagiarism and fair use."

"Aragonese Portal of Augmentative and Alternative Communication gathers in a unique site all the materials, software, pictures and pictograms that facilitate communication of those of our pupils who have educative needs of communication. It also intends to become a useful resource for every teacher, providing sets of tools that ease preparation of their own materials. With that objective in mind, all the materials and tools are presented in a free way under Creative Commons licens"

"There are so many good free tools for creating comics and cartoons on the web, as well as apps for tablets and smartphones. I've built out a list of fun tools I am looking forward to trying out over the upcoming holiday break. I can't wait to brainstorm creative ways to leverage these in lessons!"

"For students in Grades 2-5, LEGO Education StoryStarter is the helping hand that kick-starts creativity and boosts reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills. With StoryStarter, learners work together to create and build stories with LEGO bricks and figures and then use the unique StoryVisualizer software to photograph, write, and publish their stories."

""What's worked well for us is the whole teamwork thing, realizing that we can't do it by ourselves and it's ridiculous to think we can," said King. "We show no shame in letting each other know when we fail." In addition, the school decided to group children by ability for 30 minutes daily in both math and English across the grade. That allowed some children to catch up, and a deeper dive for others even as they all learned the same basic material together. The change meant that for an hour each day, teachers left their classes and took a group of students that could number between 3 and 15, who were at a similar learning ability for that subject. As a result, the lessons, and the assessment of the children, had to be in lock-step. The strongest and weakest teachers worked as a team, and often met at the end of the day to discuss which lessons worked and which didn't. They also kept track of the progress of individual students using "exit tickets" or short assessments on tablets at the end of each class."

"Research shows that dropout rates, student achievement, and workforce readiness will improve by integrating student voices in the classroom and in society.   Student Voice was inspired by the lack of student voices in education. The Quaglia Institute for Student Aspirations identifies that the higher the grade level, the less students believe they have a say in educational decision-making and the more students expressed concern in the lack of curiosity and creativity in their current classroom environment. Increasing student engagement in schools has a direct correlation with higher grades and lower drop-out rates."

"Visible Thinking includes a large number of classroom routines, easily and flexibly integrated with content learning, and representing areas of thinking such as understanding, truth and evidence, fairness and moral reasoning, creativity, self-management, and decision making. It also provides tools for integrating the arts with subject-matter content. Finally, it includes a practical framework for how to create "cultures of thinking" in individual classrooms and within an entire school."

"Studies show that sketching and doodling improve our comprehension - and our creative thinking. So why do we still feel embarrassed when we're caught doodling in a meeting? Sunni Brown says: Doodlers, unite! She makes the case for unlocking your brain via pad and pen."

ducator Innovator provides an online "meet-up" for educators who are re-imagining learning. Educator Innovator is both a blog and a growing community of educators, partners and supporters. If we want to educate a generation of young people to be innovators - to create, build, design, and use their talents to improve their world - we need to value the creative capacity in the mentors and teachers who support them. Educator Innovator gathers together like-minded colleagues and organizations who value open learning for educators and whose interests and spirits exemplify Connected Learning: an approach that sees learning as interest-driven, peer supported, and oriented toward powerful outcomes. Educator Innovator and its partners support learning opportunities for teachers, youth workers, mentors, librarians, and museum educators that are open, re-mixable, and typically free or low-cost - and share the goal of more powerful and connected learning for youth. The Educator Innovator does not see learning as the province of one institution or service, but rather sees our learning institutions and organizations as a larger ecosystem for learning, one that can be more powerful by being more connected.

"The learners in my class of 2017 are geniuses. For over a year now, these students have had a chance to shape the agenda of their learning, at least part of the time. Because of genius hour, my students are learning to care again about learning. They choose what they will learn based on what they wonder about, what they are good at, and what they are passionate about."

"The school has an unconventional take on the iPad's purpose. The devices are not really valued as portable screens or mobile gaming devices. Teachers I talked to seemed uninterested, almost dismissive, of animations and gamelike apps. Instead, the tablets were intended to be used as video cameras, audio recorders, and multimedia notebooks of individual students' creations. The teachers cared most about how the devices could capture moments that told stories about their students' experiences in school. Instead of focusing on what was coming out of the iPad, they were focused on what was going into it."

"I have learned a great deal about visual notetaking the past year as I've been working on my second eBook project, "Mapping Media to the Common Core: Vol I." Canadian educator Giulia Forsythe has been and continues to be inspirational to me. Rachel Smith's 18 minute TEDx talk, "Drawing in Class," has also been a big influence. Since I believe we should all "walk our talk," I resolved before the ISTE 2013 conference to try the suggestions of Giulia and Rachel at some of the conference sessions and create my own visual notes. Here are the results."

"Providing students with ways to demonstrate their understanding and create content is even easier with technology tools. Students who have access to a computer with a web browser - including Chromebooks - will be able to create with the tools on this list."