Mrs. Wolinsky, thank you for letting us explore...

This time of year I try to fit in a unit on Creativity and Design in the 4th grade classes. I started the unit last week with an exploration of Lego Digital Designer. This is the first step of unit that is about exploration, self-discovery and creating using design tools. The next couple of weeks will be spent moving on to Scratch. Some of the students have been attending an after school class through Yarmouth Community Services with a more extended time to explore this theme. The students who have been in the after school class have been a stimulant to their classmates to explore and learn during our class periods. What did I hear from a student as they filed out of the lab? "Thank you Mrs. Wolinsky for letting us explore today!"

Yarmouth Media & Learning Day - March 16, 2012

Once again we organized an "unconference" for our spring professional development day that started with a keynote by Wes Fryer, followed by a selection of sessions by Wes and Yarmouth faculty. The site for the course is: Yarmouth Learning with Media Day. I created a summary of the feedback from the day which was very positive about the opportunity to work as a K12 faculty on enhancing the ways we use media, ourselves and with our students. 

Creativity & Design with Technology Class

We are halfway through a Community Services Class title "Creativity & Design with Technology" for 2nd, 3rd and 4th graders. This is a class I have thought about offering for a long time as a way to explore creative options using technology in a more extended format than we have time for in the school day. There was a great deal of interest in the class and the original limit was extended from 12 to 15 to the current 17 participants (12 boys and 5 girls). I am maintaining a web page of the sessions that hopefully encourages students and families to continue to explore at home.The site link is: https://sites.google.com/a/yarmouthschools.org/yestech/creativity-design
and this is the content so far:

Session 1: Download Lego Digital Designer -  PBS Kids Lab -   Session 2: Design a Comic Website -   Session 3:  Download the Skitch program (mobile app too) -  Drawing, snapshots and more. PBS Kids Lab -   Sessions 4 & 5: Download the Scratch program -    To learn more about Scratch: Cyberchase Inventor's Workshop - I came across this site which has provided resources and inspiration for this course: http://www.computersforcreativity.com. It has been very helpful to have two YHS students  help during each class session and a fourth grade student who attended Scratch camp at  MIT last summer has been a guest teacher for the last two sessions. The experiences we are having in this class will impact the "creativity & innovation" mini-units that I usually teach in the spring to all grade levels. Some other links that I hope to use for ideas to continue this into the future are: http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663416/prototype-design-camp and http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/gever_tulley_s_tinkering_school_in_action.html.

Automating vs. Transformative Uses of iPads - from Sylvia Tolisano

Slideshare.net is a great source for presentations. Sylvia Tolisano is a prolific contributor to the learning community around technology and global collaboration. Here is a link to her "Ipads in Education Part 1"which has great tips for getting started.

In Part 2 asks the essential question, "What is the difference between transformative use and automated use of iPads in the classroom?" Sylvia displays some of her app choices and provides several activities using iPads in transformative ways.

iPads in Education- Part 2

View more presentations from Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano

Deepening Learning through Storytelling - Wes Fryer in Yarmouth

One thing I would like to get better at is sharing professional learning when I go to a workshop, etc. This morning we were fortunate to have Wes Fryer at the YHS faculty meeting. This is a link to the site he used: http://wiki.wesfryer.com/Home/handouts/deepening to talk with us about "Deepening our Learning Through Storytelling: creativity, STEM and stories." Hopefully I'll have a chance to share more with faculty groups at a future time as I think his message is applicable to all levels.

Lego Digital Designer, then Scratch

Our Building Leadership Team has been reading Daniel Pink's "A Whole New Mind". In the book Pink talks about a cultural need for people who exercise creativity and have an interest in design as we head into a future that has many unknowns and a reality that many jobs will be outsourced or replaced by devices. In the chapter titled Design he writes,

Design--that is, utility enhanced by significance--has become an essential aptitude for personal fulfillment and professional success...as more people develop a design sensibility, we'll increasingly be able to deploy design for its ultimate purpose: changing the world. (p. 70)

With those thoughts in mind we have been spending time on technology applications that expect students to be creative, collaborative and original in their thinking. After a very brief introduction, 4th grade students used Lego Digital Designer to create models and characters. The next step was to move to MIT's Scratch program. Working in pairs the students used the "Getting Started" packet from the Learn Scratch site. It was interesting to observe the issues some had following directions carefully to learn the twelve introductory concepts. From there students are saving their individual or collaborative projects and heading in a variety of directions. For a more thorough description of teaching Scratch to students in the elementary grades I recommend Bob Sprankle's Bitbybit podcast #84.

Next week we will have a few 8th graders from our Middle School come to help the 4th grade students. Some of them have joined the MIT community of Scratch collaborators and have spent considerable time at home designing projects. It will be great to have their help and inspiration.

Scratch! (Creativity & Innovation)

This week I have been teaching 4th graders to use Scratch from the MIT Media Lab. It's GREAT! I can't remember when I've had this much fun teaching and the room has been full of kids who are empowered, active and creating. I used the videos from the Scratch site to introduce the concept of the program to the students and gave them a few starter commands from the Scratch Cards. Within twenty minutes the students were recording their own voices, "whirling" sprites, adding sound effects, creating speech clouds, and creating iinteractions between sprites. It has been fascinating to see some students focus on sounds, others on motion and others on looks and paint features. Doing this with several classes has given me the opportunity to see teachers who have supported creativity and innovation in their classroms and are cheerleaders as their students explore this entirely new realm. Where does this fit in the curriclum? To me it teaches thinking, problem-solving and feeds the "dessert brain" referenced in Edutopia magazine by Hugh Osborn.