Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wes Fryer

Category: creativity

  • Faculty Survey with Dr. Fryer

    Students working on our yearbook at Providence Day School sent faculty a survey this fall. Here are the questions they asked me, and my answers. Students sent this survey as a Google Form. I’ve included some hyperlinks in my answers below, but these were not part of my submitted answers for students on our Yearbook…

  • “Dance Off” Lego Robotics Challenge

    My middle school robotics students are having fun and learning a lot, working through the freely available Carnegie Mellon Lego Spike Prime Robotics curriculum unit on “Movement.” I have 6th, 7th and 8th grade students in this class. Since some students always finish faster than others, I’ve created an optional “Lego Robotics Bonus Challenge” for…

  • The Story of Bella Tunno (Narrated Sketchnote)

    Michelle Buelow is a successful entrepreneur and the CEO of Bella Tunno. Michelle presented about her journey and lessons learned in both life and business to our students at Providence Day School on September 14, 2022. This is a “narrated sketchnote” of her talk that I created during and immediately following her presentation. The original…

  • Reflections on Carnegie Mellon Robotics Academy (Part 1)

    This week I am attending a 4 1/2 day robotics workshop at Carnegie Mellon University, learning how to teach middle school robotics with the “Lego Spike Prime” robot platform. This is based on the Scratch programming language from MIT, which I love and have been using for over 10 years. In this podcast reflection (from…

  • Identity and Fire Cooking

    The Netflix “Chef‘s Table” BBQ documentary on (now) Australian chef Lennox Hastie, culinary artist at Firedoor Restaurant in Sydney, is an amazing celebration of both cooking creativity and the magical art as well as science of cooking with fire. The episode on Lennox is number 2 in the series: Learn more about him on his…

  • Social Media Stories, Instagram Reels and Mojo Videos

    I love to play with media. As my wife, Shelly, has become a health coach this fall and learned more about ways to use social media to “share our story” of weight, diet and health transformation, I’ve been learning some new things about social media along with her. One of the things I’ve learned in…

  • Lesson Ideas and Tips for Language Teachers using Scratch, Minecraft and more!

    A few weeks ago, I had a wonderful opportunity to share a Saturday morning Zoom webinar (for me in Oklahoma) with language teachers in the United Kingdom, as part of a webinar series hosted by the Association for Language Learning’s All London Branch. The title of my webinar presentation was, “Lesson Ideas and Tips for…

  • Amazing #STEM Animated Visual Notes by Dominic Walliman

    I agree and resonate with many of the things Jaron Lanier shares in the Netflix documentary, “The Social Dilemma,” but I disagree with his advice on YouTube’s “recommended videos.” Jaron advises we should never click on “recommended videos” on YouTube, since that furthers the dystopian economic model of “surveillance capitalism” upon which many of Silicon…

  • Designing And Narrating a Dream House Tour in Spanish

    This semester, for a variety of reasons, I’m having the opportunity to teach two classes of introductory 5th grade Spanish in addition to our 5th and 6th grade Media Literacy classes. 5th graders at our school take a semester of Spanish and a semester of French, and based on those experiences decide which language to…

  • YouTube Tips and Tricks (September 2020)

    A group of teachers interested in Google Educator Certification has started meeting periodically at our school in “Genius Bar Sessions” to dive into different Google products which we use as teachers. This week’s session (yesterday) focused on YouTube. The recorded lesson portion of our meeting is available as a 45 minute video on (where else?!)…