DFI: Creation is the Beginning

We need to ensure we focus on the opportunity to create. 

Creation is everything. Without creation we have nothing to share, nothing to offer. We are not empowered or validated. We are purposeless and limited, feeding off the creations of others.

Dorothy Burt did not call creativity lacking teachers purposeless life suckers, but she did stir an inner flame of creativity in the members of the DFI cohort today. She put creativity back on the platform of 'things that make the world tick'.

Quora succinctly described creativity by stating, 'When someone is creative they turn imagination in reality'.

Have the children in my classroom had the opportunity to create today?
Have I had the opportunity to create?

These are the questions that challenged me. These are the question that I should be asking myself everyday. The thought that niggled at the back of my mind while Dorothy shared was 'I need to be what I teach'.

I constantly need to be raising the bar in my own life. The children aren't mimicking or seeing the skills that I learnt before, the limited knowledge that I had as a child or even as a beginning teacher. They view the skills that I have now. The behaviour that I am displaying everyday. If I am encouraging them to be mindful am I demonstrating this in the classroom each day?

And so it follows:
Am I being Creative each day? What have I created today? As a teacher is it just new knowledge that I create? What about all of those other rich areas of creativity? Am I using these? Am I including them in my classroom everyday?

What is to stop us going back and re engaging with the richness of creativity of time and exploration?
We need to leave behind the old mentalities behind, as the weight of responsibility to 'do it all' becomes just too much to carry. Dragging old school approaches along within the phase of change fills me with a weight of guilt  and incapability. There is world of creativity waiting. In the building of new sites, the creation of new resources, the discussion and sharing of ideas. We should be excited and inspired by this and not overwhelmed.

What I love about the Maniakalani approach is the gathering of collective knowledge and the richness of meaningful experience. This gives such a genuine and grounded view. It is an old school view of the community carrying the knowledge. This is worth applying and hanging onto. It's another one of those 'things that make the world tick'.

Another point that resonated for me was something that I have been guilty of doing many times before. Dorothy went on to explain that...'Teacher's often expect that they plan for learning and the teaching of this incredible learning will go straight to the child's brain. Very few brains work this way. Most humans need a conduit to allow that information and skills to take hold. Something needs to happen to be done and this is the create process. All of these conduits can be amplified and are contained in digital technologies. An example of this was Lachlan's blog post. The head boy at a local high school who created and mixed multiple pieces of music, captured these with the digital processes and used his online platform to share and publicise his creativity to a wide audience.

Dorothy continued to explain that great shifts in learning and acceleration comes about when teachers intentionally plan rich tasks for children to create.

We can empower students through:

• choice
• information and knowledge
• developing skills
• building capacity
• scaffolding

Many of us create to learn. But learning and creation are synonymous. Learning comes from creation. The creation of a hook, event, assembly, moment, site or object can be the spark which ignites the learning. They are interconnected.

An example given in one presentation today explored the idea of starting learning with a hook. Teachers created plays, special assemblies and information videos to share with their learners the creation that the children would soon be partaking in. I considered wether the hook might the game away? Does it remove from the children the choice and the development of something new?
Why is it purposeful to learn prior knowledge if the task is already designed?

I am challenging this example because I accidentally discovered the richness of 'creation' when my class and I decided to build a canoe to learn about the process of paper mache. The project grew into its own beautifully unplanned rich inquiry. Experiments regarding, weight , balance, displacement, bouyancy, materials and all manner of cooperative learning ensued. because of this 'aha' moment I am always wary of the downfall of intentionally planning locked in content.

We can fall into the trap that one size fits all. This is the opposite to universal design for learning. I have fallen into this trap. I have been guilty of planning to use a special site, a special app, a technique or process without carefully considering the limitations of the 'create' section in my planning.

Dorothy explained it in, reffering to Chrissy Butler's work in universal design for learning, in words similar to this: As educators now, we cannot deny that everyone is different and unique. We know that learners don't learn the same way. If we give them one tool that they love and engage with even then it limits them to just one way.  The default used to be myself, starting from what I know - this is no longer true. There is no default. There is only multiple opportunities and modes and we need to use them.

It would be a scary downside if leaners and people simply consumed ( opportunities and technologies)  rather than created.

Dewey said, "Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results."

Leading companies have hooked into the creativity-less vacuums and theories and systems are beginning to emerge and flourish. Free tools are not only available but rampant. There are no barriers and anyone with the time to dedicate can access and create powerful ideas and methods of connection. Children are empowered by creation and the imbalance of power between children and adults is diminishing. But this is another curious social development altogether.

In finishing, I would welcome your feed on the thoughts, questions and reflections that I have shared here. Also, dear readers, this particular post was prompted by the Maniakalani Digital Fluency course in which Dorothy Burt presented via google Hangout.

Nga mihi



(The following notes are in reference to the DFI course and the new  tools and techniques I hope to action this week.)

Things I learnt:

• Make a new google site in a folder by just clicking on the plus button and selecting new google site.

• Get funky with slides: Change the html from 'present' to 'edit' to 'copy'.

• Sharing resources and the weight of creating multimodal learning pages is a treat. Thank you to all the amazing teachers who have shared their hard work and knowledge. I will be calling into the shared Excel document, adding to it and referring to it to boost, develop and create my own multi modal docs, slides, drawings etc.

• Sites can be used not only as a platform form class learning and planning but to collate information greater than can be contained in a multi modal artefact ( I don't know if this is the correct term.

• I am currently working on a Sight Sound and Motion sight to collate the vast amount of tools and creation possible fo our learning this term.

Things I have learnt and am definitely sharing with my learners this week:

• You can change the size of a google drawing by going, file > page setup > custom > pixels, and changing the size of your drawing by inputting different values.

• Don't go to google and find the image! Create the image: make it yourself!