Let the Students Create

Photo from Pixabay

I asked my son, who's 15 years old, what classes he looked forward to in school. Without hesitation he said, "Woodshop." He assured me everything else was a bore. (He doesn't go to school in the district that I work in!)

This didn't surprise me. I see it over and over again in my work. Students get excited when they're making something. From Art to our Woods classes to our STEM Lab, they love to create a final product.

And making isn't just something that gets the students engaged. When it comes to human beings, I believe we were created to create. Look at the world. It is changing rapidly because people love to create things that didn't exist before. We can't help but create.

It can't just be any old thing that gets us going, of course. It has to be a final product we are proud of. It has to resonate with our passions (which are one of the great things make us unique creations ourselves). It has be be something valued by our social groups.

But don't think of this only as some physical object we will show our friends. Whatever work we do, we can view it as making something. Whatever we love to do, we can think of it as making or creating. As teachers, for example, we make lessons, but we also make exciting classes. We make laughter and moments to remember.

And most of all, we make a difference.

Seth Godin said, "You are a genius and the world needs your contribution." Angela Maiers latched onto that thought and made a life changing movement in thousands of classrooms. There's isomething powerful there.

In the end, every person wants to make a difference or a contribution. For too many people, that desire has been buried by life's events and forgotten. Some still want it badly, but are misguided in the pursuit. They will make any difference, even a negative one, as long as they played a part.

I got into teaching because I wanted to make a difference. I'm sorry to say that for the first 14 years, I too often forgot that dream. I let the system wear me down. I ran a very traditional high school math class where I made decent lessons. Sometimes I made some fun classroom games, but I didn't let my students make anything interesting. They made pages and pages of math problems.

They probably remember making a lot of mistakes.

Thankfully my dream was revived when I was asked to teach a class about career and college planning. Slowly doors opened and now my days are filled with helping teachers and students make things worth talking about.

And that reminds me. Stories are something we can make too. We usually don't make those alone. We team up with our colleagues and our students.

There's much to think about here, but you get the point. I'll leave it with some questions.

• What do you love to make in school?
• Do your students get to see the things you love to make?
• What do you encourage your students to make?
• How do you let them show it off beyond the classroom?
• Do you remind them they were created to create?
• What stories are you making with your students? They are being made and told whether we think of them or not!  

10 Things that Make Life Exciting (and that even schools can afford)

I tried to generalize what I've seen excite students in school or what has moved me in big ways over the years. While new things and entertainment can achieve some of these, I wanted to focus on contributing rather than consuming.

Getting a glimpse of what you could be
Taking a step closer to what you could be
Playing a significant role in a successful endeavor
Having a big dream
Bringing a dream into reality
Seeing other people excited about your dream
Showing off what you made
Making a positive difference for others
Discovering something you care about or are curious about
Being lost in the wonder of amazing things

What am I leaving out?

What does this mean for school in general? Or for the lessons we'll soon teach?

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I'm doing a challenge this month to post on one of my blogs every day. It's in preparation for my conference session, The Way of the Google Drive. Be sure to follow me on Twitter or on either blog to keep up with the "thoughts and tools to inspire". 

Click here to see all the posts from Teaching Like an Artist with the tag The Way of the Google Drive.

Examples of The Way of the Artist

Last week I wrote about The Way of the Artist, how we can inspire with art by working through the three "not so simple steps":

• Dream big
• Do the hard work to make it real
• Show off the final result

Here are a few examples of projects I've done in the past that illustrate how it plays out in the classroom. Notice that these projects require the students to work through those three steps, but I as the teacher am doing the same thing as we go through the project. I dream up the end product, work to take the class through it, then write about it on my blogs. Art (and therefore inspiration) is happening at several levels and I try to make sure it impacts as many people as possible.

• Live video announcements - My work in the high school Communications and the Media class is filled with examples of students working to bring a vision into reality.
• Smart Jams Math Music Videos - This was one of my most ambitious projects. We made math music videos with fifth graders in their Music class. It was a great learning experience for all involved.
• Digital Storytelling with WeVideo - I made this creative project to introduce students to WeVideo. It's a good example of giving all students the same starting elements (photos in this case) and they combine them in imaginative ways to make something unique. It eventually grew into this much more popular project...
• Using Comics and Google Tools for Digital Storytelling - There are countless ways to use this tool, but I usually stick pretty closely to the process outlined here. This post links to some updates I've made since that original article was written.
• Reminding Students Dreams Matter - This is another music video project, this time a lot simpler than the Smart Jams one above. I put a lot of work into recording the song, but that's because music doesn't even count as work for me! It's another example where art was happening on several levels, for the students, teachers and my family as we made up the song. We shared it on Facebook to our community and it got a lot of love.

_________________________

I'm doing a challenge this month to post on one of my blogs every day. It's in preparation for my conference session, The Way of the Google Drive. Be sure to follow me on Twitter or on either blog to keep up with the "thoughts and tools to inspire". 

Click here to see all the posts from this blog with the tag The Way of the Google Drive.

Quick Songwriting with UJam

I put this video tutorial together for the teacher P^3BL session I'll be leading this week. The purpose of the session is to help teachers practice creativity and explore some inspiring projects. This possible project involves writing a short song and creating the music for it in UJam.

First, here's an example of a short chorus I created with my wife:

Here are several examples from a project I did with students for a math activity.

Before doing the steps shown in the video, teachers in the session would write a short chorus and make up a melody. The goal isn't to make a great hit, but simply to stretch and finish a digital project in the short time we will have together.

I've had a lot of success with UJam lately. Technology is certainly making songwriting and music creation accessible to everyone. In terms of the SAMR Model, I think this is a great example of Redefinition. It allows students to create a great sounding final product that (given most school budgets and time) would have been nearly impossible even 10 or 15 years ago.

Poetry Slideshow using Pixlr Express and Videolicious Free Apps

I'm working on one of my P^3BL sessions this weekend. One possible project from attendees will be a poetry slideshow. I made a very short example with two of my favorite free apps for the classroom: Pixlr Express and Videolicious.

First, here's the example I created. I wrote a simple haiku as a sample. It sums up how I felt as I watched some nice weather go by on spring break while working on this session!

The pictures were edited in Pixlr Express then I used Videolicious to make the slideshow and add narration and music. My wife read the poem.

You can see I added text with Pixlr Express to the first picture. Other than that, I didn't do a lot of editing. The overall look was achieved with the Silk Stylize option. It's in the Adjustments menu (not Effects as you might expect).

Videolicious is a great app that strikes the perfect balance between simplicity and control. It will only make videos that are a minute or less, but for a quick story or a video slideshow like this, it's wonderful. Here's a tutorial I created last year for a different project. It uses a previous version of the app, but the steps are the same.

I refer to an Edit option after selecting the pictures. That allows the user to indicate where the app will zoom on the picture. (Otherwise it just does it randomly from what I can tell.) I don't show how to use the feature in the tutorial, but I did use it on a few pictures when I made the short video.