Catch Up Time

​After a mostly wintery April vacation, it was nice to finally see the sunshine. Hoping to have the last of the snow leave my gardens this week.  I have a lot of little catchup items to share this time.




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​I went down to Connecticut today to attend the Greenwich Country Day School's Maker Faire. Although I was very disappointed that the scheduled keynote speaker, Colleen Graves was unable to attend due to a family emergency, I did enjoy listening to Ron Beghetto speak about creativity.

​A couple points that resonated with me:

• Creativity ≠ Originality
• Creativity= Originality * Task Constraints  Essentially- something has to have a purpose, meaning, not just be cool, novel. 
• In Education we actually do mean to be Creative INSIDE the Box
• He also spoke about the spectrum of creativity- Mini-C: within your personal context, little C: share out your work, Pro-C: make creative contributions to your community and finally Big-C: Over time- legendary work, stands the test of time.

Beghetto also stressed the use of "What if?" as a way to find new ideas, fresh perspectives, rather than asking a more aggressive, possibly negative connotation- "Why?"

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My favorite workshop of the day was with Rush Hambleton- "Meet the Microbit". It was fun to experiment with this relatively inexpensive, easy to use pocket size computer that lets you get creative with digital technology. I had played around with these a little bit, but working in small groups I learned a lot more than I had previously tried by myself.  With the new version of Scratch coming out in August  children will be able to program physical devices (like micro:bit).

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Catch Up Time

Adobe Spark

Finally, the wonderful set of tools is free for both teachers and students- and is now COPPA compliant so kids under 13 can use it with supervision.  A couple of our 4th grade classes have used this on some of the global projects they have done in the past and now we can give them accounts that they can use for so many projects!  Richard Byrne has a nice roundup of the features on his blog.

Images for student work

We have a tab on our HES Symbaloo with a lot of these links, but Tony Vincent recently put up a nice post with some that we don't currently have listed. Check them outhere.

Checkboxes in Google Sheets

One of the things I really like about Google Keep is the quick and easy way to create checkboxes.  Now, for all the spreadsheet fans- you can create checkboxes in Google Sheets. Alice Keeler writes about it here and shows you how- step by step.

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#FlipGrid

Two great updates from FlipGrid to share. First- and this is happening soon- Wednesday, May 9th - World Record Wednesday.

Quote from the blog:
"It starts with you. It starts with us!
On May 9, 2018, you can be part of history! Our Global Classroom will aim for the student voice record books and attempt a World Record on Flipgrid. 24 Hours, all nations, all learners, across the globe, sharing the same message. We are calling on students, educators, digital citizens and global ambassadors to join together using your phone, tablet, or computer to record a message uniting The World"

One more from FlipGrid... AppSmashBash.  Want to do more with FlipGrid? Looking for ideas? Check out the webinar  #App SmashBash.

Flipgrid Webinar Unplugged 10: AppSmashBash from Flipgrid on Vimeo.