Fostering creativity and innovation in school children

It's good to find out what kids do really well. I thin k that is one of the main tasks of a teacher: to find the strengths in your students, and look for attributes other than the ability to sit compliantly in class, use neat hand writing, or fit in. Social awareness is important, but what other skills can be developed in children in the classroom that help them to learn really well, and be an asset in the classroom, rather than bored and mischievous. This UK program looks at these issues and provides some insights into how we can build on the talent of children and harness this to their best advantage.

http://www.smh.com.au/tv/show/make-your-child-brilliant/london/20110307-1bkol.html

How do we develop and teach creativity in higher education?

But first, what is creativity?

Let's start with Health professionals and creativity

Siddiqui (2008) has done some work with the health professions and creativity and she has some definitions of creativity in her paper (2008):

1. Amabile (1996) - 'a set of skills and attitudes needed in generating ideas and

products that are relatively novel, high in quality and appropriate to task in hand. '

2. Beghetto (2005) - creativity requires 'both novelty and usefulness'

3. Costello (2007) - creativity requires a 'future orientation' and requires problem solving ability.

4.'Noller (cited in Isaksen, Dorval, & Treffinger, 1994) - 3 parameters for creativity: knowledge, imagination and evaluation. '

5. ' A comprehensive definition of creativity can then be ‘the ability to make something new, whether a thought, or idea, an object, a product or a process, a work of art or performance, or an interpretation (Morrison and Johnston 2006). '

Source:

Siddiqui, Zarrin S, (2008). Creativity in higher education: Great expectations. 2nd International Conference on Assessing Quality in Higher Education, 1st – 3rd December, 2008, Lahore - Pakistan, http://uwa.academia.edu/ZarrinSiddiqui/Papers/78584/Creativity-in-higher-education-great-expectation

Itunes U - distributing educational content

iTunes U is another means for educational institutions to manage and distribute content to students. Institutions that become members of iTunes U receive access to a site that uses the facilities we already recognise from the Apple’s iTunes Store. Lectures, performances, demonstrations etc can be uploaded for broad dissemination or passord protected for particular classes to use.

Who is using iTunes U? See the Apple site for some examples.

If you have iTunes installed on your computer you can search for some music from the iTunes U channel. For example, you could look for Shostakovich's Festive Overture played by the Oregon State University, subscribe to the Open University's Start Writing Fiction class (audio and text), or listen to weekly 2 minute talks from Texas A & M university on engineering innovations.

There are pros and cons with all this of course. If you want to read some of the arguments you might try Gardner's blog for some discussion about ownership of content, and what Apple's agenda might be in setting up iTunes.

What next? messing around with technology

Esther and I are messing around with the technology. We're trying out Wimba's virtual classroom (video conferencing) right now.

See our thoughts:
http://techplayground.wordpress.com/

How are we doing?

Are we getting any better? have we improved on this? What do we really require to make this a more interesting model? If we talked to ALL the teachers about how students learn today, would it really change things? Or does the situation, lack of time and resources mean we can never make that quantum leap forward?