Teaching Creativity – The Case for Mind Mapping
If thinking is about making connections between pieces of information, then creative thinking is making the connections that no one else has seen. However, when we tell students to find relationships between seemingly disparate ideas, we often get blank stares—why? According to thinkers like Ken Robinson, it’s because our education system kills creativity. From the moment they lift a pen, students are taught to think linearly. It is no wonder that students can’t make connections between ideas when they reach college. We have strong evidence that Da Vinci, Descartes, Darwin and virtually every other iconic thinker traversed disciplines and distant plains of inquiry to reach powerful insights. Teaching Mind Mapping? I believe they can, particularly if they get access to helpful technology. Back in the 1980s, I became familiar with old fashioned mind-mapping back, and I used it to analyze and prioritize personal projects. And students value this too. About Jane Karwoski, PhD Print This Post
Super Resources
Introducing Glogster Glogster [31UGEB] Glogs: a Timeline Tool: and More Ideas: great example of a Glog: Book “How to Use Glogster” (141 pages.) Things to think about: What makes a good poster? Other Possible Tools: Are you Curious? Engage: Meet RoVen. Explore: In small teams, drive the rover and calculate the distance traveled in a particular amount of time. Elaborate: Using Create A Graph, develop a digital graph of data to display results. Evaluate: Gallery walk.
Classroom Freebies Too: Classroom Management Idea
Our first grade team met with our kindergarten teachers for a sharing session. They had just attended a Nellie Edge seminar and came back with a wealth of ideas. This one's such a simple classroom management idea, but I think it's so USEFUL. Have students leave a "reserved" sign to save a place or materials they are using. This works well at center time, math time, or any other time when students are using materials and temporarily leave an area. I created Reserve My Spot! Download the packet HERE.
10 Minutes to Make – Impact – Priceless (The ease/reward of a unit slideshow) | Language Sensei
As Foreign Language teachers we are continually focussing on teaching in ‘context’. It is the link between the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ that really helps to deepen both the learning (and the will to learn) within our students. One of the ways that I have started to experiment with setting context is through visuals – visuals from the target language country. So I hit the search engine – and looked for images – images of Japanese people doing, experiencing some of the activities that I knew were going to come up from my students – and also things specific to Japan. Quite quickly I had a set of 10-15 images that suited what I needed. I put the slideshow on ‘loop’ so that it played continuously as my students entered the room – and settled at their tables. Quick and easy to make – and a great (and easy) way to both set the stage for learning – and spark discussion. Colleen
When 'Do You Have Weapons?' Is Heard More Often In Schools Than 'Do You Have Dreams?'
In 2012, at the entrance of a West Philadelphia high school, an armed officer asked the poet Denice Frohman if she had a weapon on her. Standing before firearms and metal detectors, Frohman held up her weapon: a book. The officer was unamused. This March, at the 2014 College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational at the University of Colorado Boulder, Frohman described the encounter in a spoken word performance with fellow poet Dominique Christina. In a video uploaded last week by Button Poetry, you can see the poets' performance, in which Frohman goes on to relate what happened when she stood before a classroom full of students at that same West Philadelphia high school. "I asked them if they have dreams," Frohman recites in the video. The poets attribute the students' struggle to "No Child Left Behind," an educational reform policy often criticized for forcing public school teachers to "teach to the test." "The wind in my chest stood up. Watch the video above to see their performance.
Getting Grades out of the Way
Patrick Henry Winston “What was class average?” I feel like I have been asked a 1,000 times, and I confess, each time it makes me cringe. In the fall of 2006, just after yet another student in 6.034, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, asked the class-average question, we of the staff decided that we had had enough, and that it was time to start over in a search for a better way of certifying skills. We should find a way to deemphasize grades so as to make room for big ideas We should test understanding, not speed and general intelligence We should not care whether a student demonstrates understanding early in the semester, or late, as long as the student demonstrates understanding. Guided by our desire to test subject understanding and deemphasize quiz-taking speed, we decided to move from two material-packed quizzes to four more relaxed quizzes. Accordingly, we decided to transform each 0–100 numerical quiz score into an integer from 3 to 5.
