Letting Go of Control

Control. That was the way of schools and classrooms not long ago. We wanted to have our hand in everything—to know everything and to guide everything. However, the more we use technologies in our schools and classrooms, the less control we seem to have. It is simply impossible to keep up with everything students are doing on their computers and digital devices. Use of technologies has helped students to take responsibility for their learning. School culture is evolving as it recognizes students as important partners in education.  Principal Eric Sheninger, TL Advisory Blog, tells us, “Giving up control and empowering my students to take ownership of their educational experience has been one of the best decisions I have ever made.”

Super Scratch Programming Adventure

Using Super Scratch Programming Adventure, students learn computer programming while creating their own games. The Adventure is available from Super Starch Press in print (under $30) and eBook (under $20) format. Students learn about variables, flow control, subroutines, and more by programming arcade-style video games. With interest in programming increasing, the Adventure is a great way to get students started with a programming experience that they will master and enjoy.

Redesign the Human Body & Other Projects

Shawn Cornally, who helps run a competency-based high school in Iowa, appreciates “nucleators”. His “nucleators” are objects, ideas, or tasks that encourage students to take off with design. In his blog, Cornally discusses integrating design into subjects like social studies and biology.  Students might be charged with designing a utensil for eating spaghetti, printing their utensil on a 3D printer, and then living with it for a week. Some might think of ways to redesign the human body so that it will be more efficient in today’s world.  Cornally is “digging the idea of fundamental design quanta....”

Maker Faire: The Greatest Show and Tell on Earth

There are Maker Fairs all over the world, and they are all about innovation. According to Maker Media, Maker Fairs are filled with the excitement and energy of a county fair. They are our school science fairs and innovation conventions expanded with the minds of all ages and subject areas such as science, engineering, art, performance, and crafts. Maker Fair participants are given the opportunity to show how they created their idea or product and what their creation can do. If there’s a Maker Fair coming to your community, encourage your students to attend and perhaps even participate.

The Maker movement promotes a DIY (Do It Yourself) attitude. It’s about practical learning and creativity. For the many students who don’t find school subjects interesting, the concept of creating brings action into STEM studies. Students become inventors, developers, designers, programmers, mathematicians, and scientists while still in school.

Incredible Bionic Man Challenge

Encourage your students to create a bionic body part for The Incredible Bionic Man Challenge.  According to the rules, students must be 13 or over, in Grades 9-12, and residents of a Cablevision service area in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut or Pennsylvania.

Winners will receive a trip to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. and $5000 for college. The contest begins on October 1^st and ends November 7^th.  Additional information is available on the Smithsonian Channel site. You’ll find guidelines to get your students started, help for teachers, contest rules, and FAQ. You and your students can also watch a preview of the Smithsonian Channel’s Incredible Bionic Man, which will premiere on October 20^th at 9 p.m.

Invent to Learn

The book Invent to Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom, by Sylvia Libow Martinez and Gary Stager, helps you bring the excitement of exploration and invention into your classroom. If you want to create an exciting classroom environment in which students learn by doing, this book gives you the inspiration, as one reviewer said, to trust children by giving them the opportunity to explore, create, and experience both success and failure.  The book is available on Amazon in paperback ($28.84) and Kindle editions ($9.99).

Moving Students Ahead in STEM Subjects

Students entering Deptford High School and many other high schools throughout the nation can select a program that includes college-level courses in engineering, robotics, and Computer-Aided Design. The Deptford program will follow the Project Lead the Way (PLTW) curriculum, which is now used in schools in all fifty states and the District of Columbia.  The PLTW program considers classrooms as innovation zones where hands-on learning and critical thinking take place.

Is There a Creativity Crisis?

In 2010, Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman challenged us with the article, “The Creativity Crisis” (Newsweek). They reminded us of Torrance’s creativity assessments and how he and his team followed students tested in 1958 for the next 50 years.  In 2010, Kyung Hee Kim, a researcher at the College of William and Mary, used the Torrance scores of over 300,000 children and adults to focus on how our children today compare in creativity to those of the past. He found that the scores of children tested from 1990 on were declining.  While a number of other countries are focusing on development of creativity in their children, researchers fear that America’s insistence on standardization is hurting our students and our nation’s future. According to the authors, “While our creativity scores decline unchecked, the current national strategy for creativity consists of little more than praying for a Greek muse to drop by our houses.”  Bringing creativity and problem solving into all subject areas will help, as will considering such ideas as choice-based art and bringing STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art & design, and mathematics) into the projects and activities of our youngest students.

Creative Spaces for Your Students

What we have in our classrooms and how we arrange our classrooms makes a definite difference. A March 2013 article in Edutopia shows offices at Google—definitely not your ordinary office space. It’s fun to observe, and it must be fun to work there. The piece, “How to Make Your Classroom a Thinking Space” is actually an excerpt from the Krauss and Boss book, “Thinking Through Project-Based Learning: Guiding Deeper Inquiry”. It asks us to envision an environment that stimulates creativity and provides an exciting and innovative workspace. The authors say that the creative spaces imagined by most people are not spaces in schools, but they should be. Although, it would be wonderful to be able to remodel our classrooms as we envision, funding for this is probably not available. Therefore, we need to be creative and think of ways we can make smaller changes that will provide for individual and group work, conversation, presentations, tinker stations, video booths, and wonderful splashes of color.

Encouraging Creative Kids

Research often tells us what we educators already know. This time, it’s about creative kids—they are the ones who not only do well in academic assessments such as the SAT and ACT but also in the ability to take apart and put together objects. These are students who do well on Differential Aptitude Tests, which measure spatial ability.

The problem is that spatial ability, “sometimes referred to as ‘orphan ability’” often goes “undetected”.  To solve this problem, researchers at Vanderbilt suggest that SAT, ACT, and other tests should include more questions involving spatial ability.  If we were better able to identify students with excellent spatial skills, these students could receive improved career guidance. Considering the world’s needs for the future, we should encourage those young people with spatial competence as part of their makeup to prepare themselves to become the innovators of the future. In the meantime, before the tests are changed, we know that teachers who detect signs of spatial ability in their students will continue to encourage them to move forward with this seemingly innate talent.