The Creativity Crisis

A must-read for anyone teaching art. While our funding is being cut and there is more focus on high-stakes testing, we are producing students who are less equipped to compete in the 21st century job market. How many of you have heard the phrase that the most of the jobs our students will be doing haven't been invented yet? I wonder who will be inventing them?

The more creative a student is, the more likely they are to be "entrepreneurs, inventors, college presidents, authors, doctors, diplomats, and software developers." Another quote: "The correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ."

IBM agrees. When asked what the most important competency for leadership in the future will be, an IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs ranked creativity at #1.

How are we preparing our children for the future?

Full story: The Creativity Crisis.

Discovery Education Conference

I went to a great conference this weekend - a Discovery Educators conference. I found a lot of useful (and not-so-useful-but-fun) tools:

Wordle and Tagxedo - create interesting tag clouds. Tagxedo lets you control the shape. Here is an example:


I also like LinoIt, a sticky note / productivity tool. You can have different workspaces for school, home, work, and others. This might be a good system for the "Get r done" bunch.

I will post more links as I run across more from my notes!

eLearning

I am taking four online professional development classes. It's not that I need the hours - I always have plenty - but I am hoping to use more Web 2.0 tools in my classroom. Here are the four courses I am taking:

1. WebQuests, Treasure Hunts, and HotLists for Beginners
2. Designing a Virtual Field Trip (I can't find one I like, so I'm going to make my own)
3. Wikis and Blogs and Podcasts and Skype (I've never used Skype, and hopefully I will find more info I can use on the other three)
4. Becoming an Online Course Facilitator

I chose that last one because I have begun using Moodle to deliver information and tests to my students. Imagine an art teacher forced to shrink great works of art into tiny pictures and photocopy them in black and white to show students on their tests. That was me, only last year. Now, with Moodle, I can show my students large, full-color images of artworks for their tests. It is wonderful! I can even let them guess at an answer a second time for partial credit if they miss it the first time. I have uploaded projects and rubrics to Moodle, as well. And it grades the tests for you! Very nice and handy. I love it! And, best of all, it is free. Your school system just uploads it to their server and you can use it!

I think I will like the online classes. I just have to make time to do them!