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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Snippets of a learning conversation…

“I’m not ready to get my black belt, I don’t know everything I need to. I don’t want to take the test, I’m scared.”

She’s 12, do we push her to do something she doesn’t want to do. No. We made sure that she understood this..

She didn’t have to do it alone.

We said…

“You aren’t ready to take the test today.”

“You are ready to start the journey to being ready today.”

“Remember who you have to help you.”

“Sensei Kendall and Sensei Joe.”

“Your friends who already have black belts.”

Everyday she goes to the dojo, she is consulting her experts. The guys who have coached hundreds of kids and adults through the test.

We talked about trust.

“The experts will do their job and get you ready in time.”

“Just show up, they will know what you need to work on, just do the work that they advise you to do.”

“Each day you will get closer to being ready”

“They will figure out what you don’t know and make sure you work on it.”

“You are not in this alone, you have a class full of students who probably feel the same way.”

“Start to do the work and see if you don’t start feeling better prepared everyday. If you feel this way closer to the test, then of course you don’t have to take the test if you don’t want to.”

One week in, she wants to go to the dojo everyday.  She recognizes that she is learning. She knows that it isn’t all on her shoulders. She asks her brother to run her through her forms.

“I’m enjoying it more now that I go more.”

It’s ongoing.

It’s good.

Photo Attribution:

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Back to school is a good time to commit to searching out tools online that students can really use to make learning more effective. These are the top 12 free tools that I use with teachers and students and they can be found year round on my public netvibes page.

Many of these tools help make learning more visual and offer the opportunity to create personalized meaning and connections. Once these learning artifacts are created, students often feel more ownership and instantly want to share. Mindtools.

Picnik

Edit images and photos online for free Picnik

Visu-words

Explore words and their associations, chack definition and pronunciations using a visu-words

Timetoast

Create interactive timelines, for novels, historic events, your life and share them on the web using timetoast

Imagination Cubed

Draw, write or solve on an interactive whiteboard that has an unique playback feature at imagination cubed

Tiddlyspot

Use a wiki-to-go to save notes and links for each subject at tiddlyspot

Jing

Screencast a concept, solution or key topic to aid understanding by downloading Jing

The Big Picture

Stay on top of a project or organize a complete curriculum using The Big Picture

Etherpad

Collaborate with others to create a document or flesh out an idea using Etherpad

The Awesome Highlighter

Signup and use The Awesome Highlighter, which lets you highlight webpages and share them with others.

Dropio

Share and move files from home to school and back using Dropio (you may never need that flash drive again)

Text 2 MindMap

Gain control and organize all those ideas for your essay with Text 2 Mind Map

Save & Share

Don’t forget to create a space online where you can save all of these useful tools at Delicious. Did I mention that all of these are FREE!

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1. How will you share BLC10?

Links

Quiz

A quiz from the science channel distinguishes asteroids, meteors and meteorites  here

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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My son has always loved reading. In this photo, he’s not actually reading, a car ad caught his attention at a time when cars were his THING. He has always been a fanatical reader. I remember driving home from the library and he had finished a magic treehouse book in the car before we got home, a very short drive. This year though, our summer is missing something. Summer isn’t summer without the ritual of the midnight visit to the bookstore to await the release of the latest Harry Potter Book? I have happy memories of going with my son to these celebrations. I enjoyed having an excuse to let him stay up all night to read. This experience cannot be replaced, but a fun summer activity is to go out to your local bookstore and listen to authors reading from their books.

Last year, my son and I went to listen to D. J. MacPhale who wrote the Pendragon series. My son is a big fan of the series and was buying the penultimate book at the time. MacPhale, however, was almost in mourning because he had just finished the last Pendragon novel and was feeling the loss, plus the fact that we, the audience wouldn’t see the book for another 18 months didn’t help.

MacPhale told a funny story about how he had been telling a story at a previous reading about being contacted by the official British Pendragon association. During this previous reading he had done an impression of a snooty english woman, who was a member of this pendragon association. He told us how he felt so bad when the next person to ask him a question had been English. So, of course, being English I couldn’t wait to put him in that situation again and had to ask him a question. He was doubly mortified, yet amused, but the best was that we both succeeded in making my son laugh, quite a feat at 15.

A similar outing could be just the thing to encourage summer reading. Contact your local book store for details on which authors are on tour and visiting your local area.

Links

BookTour is a website that lists author appearances, book events and literary happenings near you.

Reading Rockets website has video interviews with many children’s authors

The best example I have seen of book tours online is Neil Gaiman reading The Graveyard Book. At each book store, Gaiman read a different chapter of the book and they have been compiled. The book won the Newberry award this year. How generous and what a treat for readers. Make sure your local bookstore knows about his latest offer, a chance to win a Halloween bookstore party hosted by Neil

To tap into kids interest in their ipods and mp3 players, don’t forget e-reader apps for the ipod touch include kindle, stanza plus the Barnes and Noble e-reader.

Check to see if your library has audiobooks for downloading to ipods. This can help reluctant readers get started with an author series. ITunes has some old time radio podcasts that would also be interesting for boys especially http://bit.ly/r8lTY

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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If you are in the midst of summer reading have fun with it, the following sites were mentioned in the slideshare above.

Type in the name of the book and the author into  What should I read next? and the site will make suggestions for your next book.

Type in the author of the book you enjoyed into Literature Map and other authors that write similar genre and themed books will start to bounce around the original name.

You can talk online with others who have read the same books as you using shelfari . This site also lets you embed pictures of the books you have been reading into blogs, wikis or start pages such as netvibes .

Bookcrossings is a fun outdoor activity your children can get involved with. Sign up to the site and register the book you are going to set free into the world, then leave it somewhere with a note as described on the site. The books sets off on an adventure that can be tracked online. Another way to use this site is to try and find books from bookcrossings. From the site

BookCrossing is earth-friendly, and gives you a way to share your books, clear your shelves, and conserve precious resources at the same time. Through our own unique method of recycling reads, BookCrossers give life to books. A book registered on BookCrossing is ready for adventure.

Leave it on a park bench, a coffee shop, at a hotel on vacation. Share it with a friend or tuck it onto a bookshelf at the gym — anywhere it might find a new reader! What happens next is up to fate, and we never know where our books might travel. Track the book’s journey around the world as it is passed on from person to person.

At Paperbackbookswap you can swap the books you have read for other books listed. Trent who writes The Simple Dollar blog loves this site and mentions it regularly in his blog as a way to save money on books.

Our librarian publishes a wonderful high school reading list that has many books on it that I want to read this summer.  It includes non fiction too, categories are:

• Science and health
• English
• History/social studies
• Fine Arts
• Math
• World Language

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1. Feels like summer reading…

Can you make a very reliable restaurant in your backyard?

Migrating humming birds were stopping for food along their migratory path this year and people noticed. Their progress is recorded on this map

As you can see it is over for now, the hummingbirds are north for the summer. Use the recipe here to get ready for their return to the south.

There are certain plants they like.

Check to see if there are any events near you.
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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I took this picture from my patio in my garden and is one of my favorite photos, it was so nice of the butterfly to stay so still while eating, as if it knew it was on camera.

Did you know how important it is to keep an eye out for wildlife this summer? The National Wildlife Federation is interested. They are hosting wildlife watch. This is a national nature watching program for people of all ages.

What I like about this project is their inclusion of twitter and flickr to create a sense of community about the project. It provides a safe context to show how many other people care enough to get involved and how children can make online connections with like-minded wildlife watchers. To announce the wildlife you have seen tag your tweet with #nwf and to include your photo join the wildlife watch flickr group.

Children can take a poll to identify the animals they most like to watch for, and their results will be included with other data for the federation.

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.

Related posts:

1. How will you share BLC10?

Staying out in the dark and watching for fireflies is not only fun, but you can now do it in the name of science.

Involve your kids in a collaborative science project that is hosted by the museum of science in Boston. No special training is needed and this is appropriate for all ages.

The Museum has teamed up with researchers from Tufts University and Fitchburg State College to track the fate of fireflies. With your help, we hope to learn about the geographic distribution of fireflies and their activity during the summer season. Fireflies also may be affected by human-made light and pesticides in lawns, so we hope to also learn more about those effects.

Details on how to participate are here

There is also a virtual habitat to help you identify what you see.

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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“Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.” –- Albert Einstein

Beware, this is a fun video, very silly, but seriously use it to show how important it is to learn anything really, you need to know when someone’s argument is flawed, no matter how convincing they can be in making the numbers work in their argument.

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