Blog on Content Creation

Blog on Content Creation

In talking to a few students at our school about creativity, they both pretty much had the same things to say.  They believe that having more creativity type activities, lessons, etc. in the classroom would be a great way to energize their learning.  While some of the teachers that they have do some fun, engaging and hands-on activities in their high school classes – they definitely do not think that they have enough and believe that they would enjoy their time at school more if more creativity was a regular thing, not just a once-in-a-while thing.

I showed them two of the Web 2.0 sites that I’ve explored more about during this course and showed them our school’s Moodle system too.  I asked them what they thought of the sites and if they would like to see them being used more by their teachers.  They said yes to both questions.  For the Moodle, they thought that having the ability to submit materials/assignments online and/or be able to access their teacher during non-school hours was a big plus and that it would help them with their class.  They thought that having the ability to communicate with their class members (such as we do with the threaded discussions) was something really neat and cool and that it would help them to express their opinions more – something that could be very helpful to add to the creativity factor in the classroom I believe.

The other two sites I showed them were Prezi and Animoto.  They really thought that Prezi would be a great replacement to PowerPoint; they’ve done so many PowerPoint presentations over the year that while they do allow them to be somewhat creative, they truly believe that they are too commonplace and that when they are told by their teacher that they have to do another PowerPoint, they basically sigh, grin and bear it and do the PPT; they’ve gotten too complacent with that technology and I could tell that a change to Prezi would be a welcomed change for them.  I showed them the basic layout, how you could integrate the different components from the menu system into a really cool looking product.  In terms of Animoto, they thought that that would be a much valued and alternative way to do movies compared to what most of them use now (Movie Maker) that could allow them to be really creative.  I also think they like the fact that they could do their projects on either of the sites, click a few buttons and then have it available for others to see instantaneously.

They do value the current use of web technologies in the classroom.  They like doing research online and prefer it much more over going to the library and having to look things up in books.  In fact they told me that the computers in the libraries are very high in demand when they do go and that having more technology available to them while in the library would be an added bonus.  We have a lot of teachers that use YouTube kinds of sights and the students really like using that technology.  The continued use of digital medias such as video sharing sites is appreciated by the students; I could tell it’s much more worthwhile to them in their minds to see the videos online instead of reading about something in a textbook or library book.

So, all in all, if there were more opportunities for the students to engage in creative open-ended assessments/activities or ones that could be accomplished in various ways – all of which would be correct ways to do so – I think that they would be more excited about education.  They have too much of the lecturing type of classes going on and you could tell that they easily tune out too much in those classes and really don’t benefit from them.  The two students that I talked to were in a colleague’s media class (as I don’t currently teach) and they enjoy the hands-on types of activities in that class and in all classes in general.  I think that they believe that some lecturing is needed but there is too much of it going on and more could be done in a creative, engaging type fashion.  I could see either of these students doing a project in Prezi and/or Animoto and wanting to show it to their teacher and classmates to see if they could influence/change how that teacher taught to make things more ‘fun’ in their minds.