Tech Play 3: Creativity Tools

Introduction

Creativity tools in the classroom can be very usefull, especially when it comes to active engagement.  Which seems like this is what most school districts seem they are wanting from their teachers, to increase the leavel of rigor because once again this is what the state of Texas is requireing through their standardized test STAAR.  So finding new ways to engage students and keep the rigor inscreased is the challege that alot of teachers are facing in the classroom.  I know this from personal experience as I have this challege in my classroom, how to integrate technology to make learning more enjoyable for students.  I also have a problem as to finding the right tools to use, to ensure that the rigor of the classroom is still high.

Creativity Tools

I have picked two creativity tools that I can see to be very useful in the classrooms, especially those that teach history.

Animoto

This is one my favorite creativity tools to use in the classroom, in both the teacher & student sense.  For the student you can give them a topic to research and create a small short video that describes the mainpoints.  However, the one dislike that I have about this alot of the designs and music you can use ot make your video, you have to upgrade your account from the free to the professsional or the business.

In history, the course I teach, the goals or objective would be to create a short 30 second video that describes the mainpoints of a specific topic like urbanization.  This way you can see if the student has comprehended what they learned during the class discussion/lecture, or you might given them a topic of they learned about during the six weeks and see what they learned.  However, there are numberous approaches for which you can come about this, this could be a good first day of class assignment to which you have the students introduce themselves to you.  The affordances that this piece of technology all depends upon the assignment that the teacher gives to the student, that uses this creative tool.  Like the one that I would give to my students requires them to make connections and critically think about what they learned in class.  But from technology standpoint, I think that the affordance would be to have a structured way of creating a video that is designed to test their knowledge. 

Twitter

Some of you who are reading this might be asking yourself, how can twitter be a creativity tool.  Well, I'm not a real big twitter person, I don't utlize it as much as I do facebook.  However, I got this idea from one of my graduate professors, she had us do our class discussion through twitter.  I haven't had a chance to utlize it yet, because my own fear about using this idea is that what if a student does not have access to a device.  So I have yet to use it but have this idea in my head, and it keeps forming different branches of how useful this  can be to my students.  One thing that I like about it most all students know how to use twitter because they tweet on a daily basis.  So having a class discussion online to further the learning, after they leave the classroom this would be easy to do.  The one dislike I have about useing twitter is that they don't give you enough characters to make your point, and this can be a problem in a history classroom discussion.

The use of twitter in the classroom, can be very risky especially since you can not really regulate what the students type yourself.  However, if you see any inapporiate content you can figure out a consquence that is apporiate.  Now in the goals of using twitter as a method of class discussion, gets students to interact with each other.  What you would do is state that students have to make one orginal post based on a reading you assigned or something that you might have required them to watch. Then they are to reply, without using single word answers, complete sentences, a reaction to something another student posted.  Hopefully, this would encourage discourse and dialogue especially with contorversial topics.  I have found that most students have the ability to talk when students don't see them and they have some sort of anonimity.  The afforandance would it would get students to discuss the topics you find hard for them to grasp in the classroom, and to get them to talk and learn from one another as their own learning communities.

Conclusion

It is important to use creative tools like the ones mentioned above because it gives students an opprotunity to learn in a different format besides just straight lecture.  It also is a good way to engage them in the learning and test to see if they learned everything that you as the teacher want them to know.  However, I think that the most important thing that creative tools allows for students to do is have fun while they are learning.  I have found that when students have fun while they are learning, they learn more, in most cases.