Moving at the Speed of Creativity

Tag: creativity

  • Classroom Creativity: The Longer Path to Success

    Today our school hosted a “Conference on Education” led and facilitated primarily by our own faculty. In addition to providing AV support for the keynote and breakout sessions, I co-presented a session with Megan Thompson, our lower school art teacher. The title of our session was, “Classroom Creativity: The Longer Path to Success.” Megan and I…

  • Triple Threat in Tech: A Reflection

    Last week I wrote the post, “MakerSpace Resources & Ideas for Digital Music Creation,” and recommended the 2013 K-12 Online Conference presentation, “T3:Triple Threat in Tech: Art, Music, and Media” by Carol Broos (@carolbroos). Although I know Carol and the amazing teacher she interviewed at the start of this video, Tricia Fugelstad (@fuglefun), I had never watched this…

  • MakerSpace Resources & Ideas for Digital Music Creation

    I received an email recently from a teacher asking about resources to use in a school MakerSpace to integrate music and digital musical creation. This is what I suggested. If you have other thoughts, resources or links, please share them as a comment or a reply to @wfryer on Twitter! Here are some resources for…

  • Great Class Castle Build in MinecraftEDU

    This afternoon after school we had our first meeting of “Makers Club” at our school for the semester. Generally we learn something new together and then students break up to work on different projects in our STEM classroom “Maker Studio.” Today, however, we opted to build a 64 x 64 block castle together (or at…

  • Cool iPad Art & STEAM Apps & Hacks

    Wednesday after school I shared a few different iPad apps and a great STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math) drawing device with our art teacher at school whose classroom is just down the hall from me. Here’s the list of links I sent her afterward as a follow-up, along with a few other videos and…

  • Sock Drawer Puppets: An Interview with Ashli Shockley

    Today our family visited the Farmer’s Market in Manhattan, Kansas. I was very interested to visit with Ashli Shockley, the creator of Sock Drawer Puppets. I’m a big fan of students using puppets to create puppet videos, and I’ve included puppet videos as a media product in the Mapping Media to the Curriculum digital literacy framework. I…

  • Creativity, Connectedness and the Adjacent Possible

    One of my favorite quotations is by Steven Johnson, who asserts that “Chance favors the connected mind.” Who we associate with, the environments in which we live and work, and the historical context in which we live have a profound impact on our creativity and the ideas to which we are exposed and develop. In…

  • Play with Sound Using Singing Fingers for iOS

    Singing Fingers (free on the Apple App Store) is one of my favorite iPad apps. It invites whimsical creativity. A few years ago when Gail Lovely (@glovely) put together a panel of folks at ISTE (in Philly, I think) to share favorite iOS apps, Singing Fingers was one of my selections. Today thanks to some video…

  • Amazed by Edgar’s Design Creativity in Minecraft

    Earlier this week one of my 4th grade STEM students, Edgar, visited me in my classroom after school with his mom. He brought his Android tablet computer, which he’s been using for the past several years to build a variety of different objects in Minecraft Pocket Edition. He gave me a tour of several of…

  • Sample Popsicle Catapult for STEM Class

    Half of my 4th and 5th grade STEM students (those not working in a center in our “Maker Studio”) are 2 days into a 4 day unit on creating popsicle catapults, which my district STEM mentor and peer teacher (Amy Loeffelholz – @AmyLoeffelholz) taught during our 2 day STEM Seeds PD Camp in June 2014. Students…