Thinking Skills and Creativity, ISTE Standards

     The article on Thinking Skills and Creativity emphasizes the importance of collaboration and the power of improvisation. It says that schools need to educate students for creativity. Schools need to provide students with "opportunities to engage in collaborative knowledge building activities through disciplined improvisations." Students will need to be taught how to "engage in effective collaborative discussion."    A sentence at the end of the article especially concerned me. It says  "In many large U.S. urban school districts, schools have taken an opposite tack - toward scripted curricula that are teacher-proofed, removing all possibility for improvisational action."  That seems to be the direction we are going.
      When evaluation the ISTE Standards, ISTE defines creativity as constructing knowledge and developing innovative products and processes using technology.  It includes applying existing knowledge to generate new ideas, products, and processes as well as creating original works, using models and simulations to explore complex systems and issues and identifying trends and forecast possibilities. We can certainly facilitate and inspire student learning and creativity by teaching them a variety of technology tools, apps,  and websites.  We can then provide them with opportunities to choose and use the tools that they have learned to create a project related to their curriculum (math, reading, writing, social studies, science, etc.).  The biggest factors that would help facilitate this learning would be having more time to do these projects as well as the technological devices available for students (we are headed in this direction!)
     One project that we had our students complete last quarter was related to writing and persuasive essays. The students used Kidspiration to create a graphic organizer which would summarize their persuasive essay and also would be used when giving their persuasive presentation. They also typed their final copy of the persuasive essay on Google docs and added relevant images.  I'll look at this project and relate it to the 6 standards.
     1. Creativity and Innovation- they created an original work, but it followed a model. A new product wasn't created nor were trends identified.
     2. Communication and Collaboration - this project was certainly used to communicate, but each student created their own, so it wasn't necessarily collaborative.  It was one form of media and only engaged with their classmates.
     3. Research and information fluency - Through the persuasive essay, they did do some research to find facts and statistics to support their reasons.
     4. Critical thinking, problem solving, and decision making - The students did some critical thinking when choosing their persuasive essay topic where they identified an authentic problem. They did collect and analyze some data when looking for facts and examples to support their reasons.
      5. Digital Citizenship - Students did need to demonstrate digital citizenship when researching their topic and using technology to create their organizer as well as when typing their final copy. They added used the web to add images to their final copy.
     6. Technology operations and Concepts - Students needed to use Google docs to type their persuasive essay  using the research function to find images (came back to this on multiple occasions). They also used Kidspiration (Mac computers in library) to create their graphic organizer.  There is always much troubleshooting when using both the Dell computers in our cart and the Macs in the media center.  Printing is different on each device.