A student's creative solution

Recently, our instructional technologist, Brian Zollinhofer, aka @zollinhofer, shared an email he received from a student.  He posted the email as a blog post on our school's tech blog, but I felt it needed to be shared here as well. Enjoy!

Last night, I got the following email from a student at home:

I need help with recording a photo story at home.

At the time, I wasn’t really sure what Billy meant, or how I could help.  I eventually figured that he needed a way to record his voice into his Photostory project.  Perhaps the program was having problems.  Perhaps he didn’t have a microphone to record his voice.  It just wasn’t clear from the email.

About an hour later, I received another email:

Never mind My Rock band mic [for the Xbox 360] works

I actually chuckled at Billy’s problem solving.  Instead of giving up, he thought of other ways he used his voice with technology.  The game Rockband came to mind and he realized that he was able to plug his microphone into his computer.  Good job thinking outside the box!  There’s proof that video games aren’t entirely bad.

Image credit: 

http://i187.photobucket.com/albums/x68/CRAZYTONTA/creativity.gif

Creative Thinking and Problem Solving

A few months ago Darren Kuropatwa suggested an activity as part of the Powerful Learning Practice. In his words, the activity was going to be "something along the lines of" Presentation Tennis.

Specifically, here is what Darren asked us to do.

We will collaboratively create a 20 slide presentation (not counting the title slide) called "Teaching Well". 20 slides in 10 pairs of contrasts: "Teaching well is more like < slide 1 > than it is like < slide 2 >." or however else you want to create contrast.

Each day one slide is added to the deck that builds on those that came before. The final 4-6 slides must bring the presentation to some sort of close.

The collaboration continues after the deck is done. The completed slide deck will be uploaded to SlideShare.net as a "Master Deck". To view our final project, click here

Time to Model

I was so impressed by the results of that activity that I decided to adopt the strategy and use it in my 8th grade computer class. The goal of the activity was to have each student develop a slide(a few made 2)that depicts what it means to be a creative problem solver. They were required to have an image and a quote that would assist them in depicting what constitutes creative thinking and problem solving. To view the slideshow, please click here.

I hope you enjoy my students' perceptions on this topic.