Creativity is messy, doodling is good. Peter Reynolds, nominated entrepreneur of the year from fablevision has given 16 year olds everywhere the ultimate excuse (especially the one sitting in a messy room upstairs at my house).

I heard the good news during my massCUE conference highlight- a session with Peter Reynolds talking about creativity and imagination and by default-education.

Peter doodled on a wacom bamboo tablet in flash while talking to a crowd of over 100. It was certainly more interesting and off-the-cuff than watching a regular powerpoint presentation.

Peter recalled how painful it is to watch anyone trying to draw with a mouse, or with a trackpad and does recommend educators provide tablets for students to draw with. Showing how math is behind all computer art, after demonstrating the pressure sensitivity of the tablet while in paint mode, he then zoomed in and showed the vector points of the brushstroke, and neatly segued into the story of how his 7th grade math teacher was extraordinary for recognizing his strengths. How he concentrated on bending the curriculum around him (Peter), instead of bending him around the curriculum.

Favorite Quotes

“give the test a rest” – allow time for play and creativity. It made me wonder how effective it would be to allow students to reflect on lessons or units by giving them time to doodle. Seems to tie in with the annotated reading I saw students creating at the New Media Literacies Conference at MIT.

“if you’re an adult and can’t draw you haven’t been hanging out with me (Peter Reynolds) enough” – if you get the chance to see Peter talk at his many book signings, workshops and interviews, go and hang out, draw again, doodle.

Fablevision Generosity

The fablevision website offers so much for free for educators, Peter jokes that he has to rely on his twin to remind him not to give it all away or they won’t have a company, but check into a few of the highlights…

• Posters for your classroom drawn by Peter
• His book The North Star is free to read online
• Read 17 tips for a creative life-long learning journey online or download it to your computer

Storytelling

As twitter has become my main source of new tips and tools, I now attend conferences looking for new tips and tools, yes, but more lately I am looking to have the opportunity to listen to great storytellers. I want to watch and learn how they get their message across. This is the skill I need to learn as a technology integrator and professional development instructor. Peter Reynolds is a great storyteller.

Would love to be able to pull off a presentation using a tablet, a blank screen and a few ideas to doodle with? Something to practice.

Image from fablevision clipart collection

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Attended a free webinar from O’Reilly media Thursday hosted by Dan Meyer, a math teacher from Santa Cruz. The seminar was boldly title “How to save Math Education”

Even if you are not a math teacher, this is talking about getting students to think…and applies to all teachers really. It’s just hidden in a math webinar.

Dan talks a mile a minute, but here are some highlights I managed to jot down while he was talking.

Talked about Deadwood writer David Milch, who espouses that students today are being entertained via media in a way that makes them crave easy resolution to problems. The one-hour crime drama gets neatly tied up at the end. Our students have an impatience with irresolution, they want easy answers and do not tolerate failure well.

Be less helpful

Dan talked about how he has been perfecting his facial expression when faced with questions from students. He prefers to always give them the quizzical look whether or not they bring him the right answer. He responds to the right answer and the wrong answer in the same ways.

“Right, why?”

“Give me the wrong answer”

Skill practice yes, Dan is still a proponent that this is essential.

But sees the need to address a bigger problem in math education and that is

“How to get students thinking about math reasoning in the world around them”

A great guiding question.

He mentioned a muji cronotebook… clock in the middle of pages, as an example. Bare, structure has to be built around it by the user. Same idea for math problems.

Talked about “The Wire” which has no musical cues for who is a good guy and who is a bad guy, so the audience has to be smart enough to figure it out on their own. Dan runs his classes this way.

Dan will often start with an image on the screen and start a conversation about it with the students.

For example a photograph of a blurred tennis ball against a background.

The next snippet of info revealed is that the exposure for the photo (using data in iphoto stored about the photo) is 1/25, a twenty fifth of a second.

Slowly he layers a framework on top of a problem and has the students have a conversation about it.

• He Builds from multimedia
• Asks concise questions
• Encourages Intuition
• Scales in difficulty
• Iterates (uses more than one picture)
• Transmits fast

His shopping cart blog post, went viral, shows that his ideas are gaining traction.

Cognizent that kids learn when they are improving old knowledge and filling in the creacks and fissures of old knowledge.

Dan teaches remedial algebra with students who have not succeeded because they have suffered from boredom, low confidence, did not do homework. He finds them eager to find out if they are correct. He approaches them with a rehabilatative process, gets with comfortable with the process of building a framework of answering their own questions.

The results he sees in his students over time is that they wait longer to give answers, they are confident with the wrong answer, they can verbalize their process more fluently.

In the chatroom Kathy Sierra mentioned a book that we all should read. What the Best college Teachers Do by Ken Bain. (As, are all book recommendations I hear about it’s now on request from my library.)

Dan is creating a website with this style of curriculum pieces called belesshelpful.com, he gave a chuckle when mentioning a launch time of Spring 2010. If you want to beta test, he mentions to contact him via dm or email.

I for one can’t wait to see the site. My main question is why does this not fly so well in schools, it should be spreading much more quickly. It seems like a no-brainer to me. Most classrooms have a projector, images are so easy to create, many cameras and phones have video, so that is really easy to create. You can cut youtube videos to the exact point you want to show them. The barriers to creating the starting point for this kind of lesson is not very high. Is it the ideas? Is it time? Maybe the interest in the shopping cart lesson might start to break open the math classroom. Hope so.

Chat Clip

from Dan Meyer to All Participants:

dan@mrmeyer.com

from Lindsey fallow to All Participants:

@dan – do you encourage kids to teach / guide each other? Or does it all flow through you?

from Brian Danielak to All Participants:

@lindsey – great question

from Kathy Sierra to All Participants:

I’d love to see *students* learn to create these.

from Kathy Sierra to All Participants:

Dan’s ultimate BLH (Be Less Helpful) points a way that allows for WIDE variety of implementations, topics, delivery mechanisms, teacher styles, etc.

Even if you don’t teach math, this is about teaching kids to think, to use their intuition, to be comfortable with being in the process of discovering, rather than trying to resolve quickly the “correct” answer that the teacher is eager to hear.

For more information about Dan, go and check out his blog. Subscribe in a reader. At least read this post

I found out about this webinar through twitter, I have quite a few others saved in evernote, so stop by, in the next few days I plan to put them all in a blogpost. Free professional development can only be a good thing to share.

Anyway, blog comments always make the rest of the day shinier, that's what it is here for.....

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The art museums I have visited this year have wonderful online features.
These Sol Lewitt Wall Drawings were fabulous up close. You have until 2033 to see them at Mass Moca, but you can take a sneak peak online and see interactive timelapses of how they were created.

Online art activities and ideas can be found at this online incredible art department

Worldwide art museums you can visit online and that have art activities include:

Chicago
Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago FREE

Washington DC
National Gallery of Art

New York City
Museum of Modern Art for kids MOMA

Museum of Modern Art an adventure in looking (older kids)

Queensland Australia
Queensland Art Gallery online activities for kids

The Getty Museum
Online Seeing Games

Museum Directory Europe

Summer Brain Fit is a 6-week series of online activities aligned with some typical outdoor summer fun that is intended to keep kids thinking and learning while enjoying summer.

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Summer Brain Fit is a 6-week series of online activities aligned with some typical outdoor summer fun that is intended to keep kids thinking and learning while enjoying summer.

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Twitter today brought me to this blog post on creativity

The post talks about how to encourage creativity in your classroom. Some tips include

Let the students sleep on it.

Interruptions can impede creativity so warn students when you are going to interrupt them so they can finish their thoughts.

Consolidate learning objectives into multi-disciplinary projects so they are not impeded by having to concentrate on too many things at once.

My favorite tip is to empower students to brainstorm projects for you and solve them together. This can raise self esteem and increase student engagement as they become invested in their resolutions.

I’d also like to add that lack of resources can induce more creativity. We have a large lack of resources, so plenty of opportunity for creative solutions, brought about together with the students.

For example, yesterday, while visiting another school’s language class in a well -equipped language lab, the class was listen to a prompt and responding. Students were working individually and the teacher could listen in.

On my return to our school I was teaching a class of spanish students who were using photostory3(free) to illustrate and record their spanish fairy tales. Students were showing each other their movies, they were checking their pronunciation with each other, and helping each other out with moving files around. Students were working on them at home and interest was high. Less resources, more creativity?

The John Cleese video that inspired this post is here

Thanks to Wes Fryer Speed of Creativity blog post too.

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