EDU 642 Week 4: Application and Reflecting on Creativity

Application

When reflecting on the design principles and planning for my upcoming projects for next week, I do tend to keep Mayer’s segmenting principle and the multimedia principle in my designs. I feel that these principles guide my design in many of my lessons simply because I think it is critical for students to only have to see a few pieces at a time, otherwise, it is fairly easy to overwhelm them. I have also found this to be even more relevant when switching to online learning recently for all of my students. Many families are still struggling with the online learning component, so making it as simple as possible for them has been a goal of mine. Also, I think that creating in general it is important to add different components of multimedia to keep my students engaged in their learning and in the lesson as well. As I am thinking of my lessons for next week, I know that I want to have a good balance of both content and multimedia that helps my students learn, but also keeps them interacting with their learning as well. By using the multimedia principle, this also allows me to be a little more creative with what I add to my lessons. There isn’t a lot of opportunity to fully be creative in the classroom, however, with changing many of our curriculum materials to an online format, I have a little more room to be creative for my students, and I have really been enjoying that challenge.

Reflection

I really appreciated the readings this week on creativity in the classroom. I especially gained so many tips and tricks from Schrock’s Fostering Creativity in the Classroom blog post. The infographic on creativity in education was very relatable. Coming from the lens of an educator, I can empathize with many of the problems for creativity in schools that were brought up in the infographic. However, I do think it is powerful to note that 85% of educators believe that we can foster creativity through the use of technology. After reflecting on this and my own use of technology in the classroom, I know that I would like to do a better job of implementing this in my classroom. There were many tips on how to better implement creativity for students. A few that really stuck out to me and would be easy to include was having students pick their favorite music to play. I usually will play some quiet music while my students are working, so I think it would be more beneficial for my students to get the chance to pick once in a while. I also loved the idea of renaming ordinary objects. I believe that this is a great way to get students to start thinking of the box, which unfortunately, they don’t have many opportunities to do. Lastly, a few ideas from Hicks really stood out to me including allowing “genius” time for students to code, create, or just research something that is interesting to them. This is something that I wish I had more time to do, but I think that it would be easy to implement by setting up good expectations with students to make sure it turns out to be meaningful time for them. One of my favorite quotes from this blog post was “To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.” I think that this is very important for our students to understand and I feel that I try to set up a safe environment for my students, but I think that this quote brings out the importance of creativity as well.

I explored a few video creating tools to decide what tool to use to create my products for next week. I have already been using Screencastify for my recordings that I have done for my online program for my school. I usually embed myself in the camera and show my screen of a Google Slides presentation presenting a new topic and teaching about it at the same time. I am pretty familiar with it now, and I really like the usability of Screencastify. It automatically uploads to my Google Drive and I can easily trim the beginning and the ends of my videos to cut out when I start and I stop. I did have to buy the subscription so I could record longer than five minutes, but I have found it to be worth it. I also enjoy the features to draw and write on my slides from Screencastify while I am recording as well. I also looked into Powtoon as a video option. I know this is not the same as a screen recorder, but I liked the option of having something new for my students to show. There were many different features, but unfortunately to keep these features, I would have to buy a subscription. However, I did appreciate the change up from just a slide deck, and I think this would be a great opportunity to add more creativity to my lessons by using this program.

Ultimately, I really enjoyed reading the class material for this week and learning more ways to implement creativity into my classroom and through virtual learning as well. I grew in my learning of different methods to spark creativity for my students and I was also reminded how important it is to give opportunities for my students to create from time to time, and not get too wrapped up in the curriculum.

Sources:

Kutaka-Kennedy, J. (2015). A Proposed Model to Increase Creativity, Collaboration and Accountability in the Online Classroom. International Journal of Information and Education Technology, 5(11), 873-876.

Schrock, K. (2016, January 4). January 2016: Fostering creativity in the classroom. Discovery Education. https://blog.discoveryeducation.com/blog/2016/01/04/creativity/