Videos

When Students Launch Their Work to an Audience

This short video by John Spencer did a great job of explaining why students need an audience for their work. While doing the work to share with their parents or their classmates is fine, sharing it with a much bigger audience opens up new possibilities for the students. Students often work harder when they know they have a bigger audience, and learning alongside others helps them gain new perspectives. Students are able to get constructive feedback from others that hopefully would help them take more creative risks and have more of a growth mindset. Finally sharing their work with a larger audience helps students feel more confident in what they are producing, and isn't that exactly what we want? Creative, confident thinkers and producers!

This Could Fail

This is another great video by John Spencer because it teaches a very important lesson that we, as teachers, and our students need to hear: it's ok to fail! This is a video that I learned from, but also one that I think students would benefit from watching. In the video, he reminds us that every time we express ourselves creatively, it is really an experiment. It might work out, or it might not. The most important truth that he speaks is that if something you do creatively fails, YOU are not a failure. You can learn from that experience and use what you learned to help you succeed. This is how we take creative risks. We have to put ourselves out there and do hard things (for me, this would be doing creative things) and that is where we can find our creativity. What a great message!

Articles

Define: Creative Communication

This was a great article that fully explained what it means to be a creative communicator! It started out by defining the term and then went through background information, explained what is a creative communicator, talked about student choice, tools to use to encourage creativity, and how to create a lesson that helps students be creative communicators. Each link you click on takes you to pages of more information, more tools, and more resources! This is now a bookmark on my computer that I will go back to frequently, and one that really could have gone with each of the ISTE standards!

Resources and Activities

Flip

I immediately thought of this resource when I was reading about Creative Communicators. Clearly it has been a bit since I've used it because when I used it the name was still Flipgrid and now it is just Flip. Flip is a great website (and app) to use to give students a voice in the classroom! It is a video platform that allows students to record, edit and share videos. These videos can be used to show off student learning, comment on student work, reflect on student learning, and connect with other students. Teachers can even pose questions for students to record video responses to . . . really the ideas for how to use it could go on and on. Basically, our students have something to say, and Flip is a great way to give our students a voice (and it's free!)

Storybird

Storybird is a great way for students to creatively publish their own stories. This helps them use both their creativity and communication as they get their ideas across through storytelling. Storybird is a visual storytelling tool where students can create their own books or work collaboratively with a small group to create a book. Students can completely create their own story, or they can choose from illustrations, characters, and themes included on the website. They can create story books, comic books, poetry, and cartoons so share their creativity or to show something they have learned. It is free to use, and students can easily work on it as a group.

The 4 Cs

This is both an article and a resource, but I am including it in resources because it has some amazing resources linked in it! The article starts out by explaining each of the 4 C's in easy to understand language and a brief summary. Once you click on each of the categories, it takes you to a different page filled with resources and tools to use to foster each of these important skills in the classroom. Each of the resources also includes a brief description of what the tool is and how to use it. I was able to get some ideas for my graphic as well as some ideas for platforms to look at for our presentation on collaboration for this week. It also includes the names of books for you to go back to for references, and resources for both teachers as well as students. This is a great place to look for ideas to incorporate any of the 4 C's in the classroom!

Creative Communicator Tool List

Although this came from an article I already cited, it was too good of a resource not to list it separately! This is a simple chart comparing 14 different products that you can use in your classroom to encourage students to be creative communicators! It gives you direct link to the tools you can use to create each product, and provides advantages and disadvantages to using both of them. This will be a chart I refer to often as I am looking for new tools to increase creativity and communication in my classroom!

Reflections

My main takeaway from the readings and the resources that I looked through this week, is that it is our job as teachers to prepare our students to become active members of a 21st century society. This means we should be teaching them using the 4 C’s of education and the ISTE standard 1-6: Creative Communicator. We must do everything we can to provide students with real-world skills that they will need to be successful today and in the future.

As I searched for resources, the one commonality that I found this week is that our students need to be able to think critically and creatively and learn how to work collaboratively with others. In order to do that, they need to be good communicators and problem solvers. 2nd graders, in general, tend to be a bit ego-centric and think that their ideas are always the best and that their way of looking at things are the best way. In my classroom, I try to incorporate activities that encourage collaboration. Through collaboration, they learn how to be good communicators. They learn that this not only includes being able to explain their ideas thoroughly, either through voice or through a creative project, but they also must learn to appreciate other peoples' opinions. In the article “What are the 4 C’s of 21st Century Skills?” Stauffer explains that collaboration can teach our students that a group of people can create something even bigger and better than one student can individually (2021). By encouraging my students to work alongside others as they solve problems, I am teaching them how to become part of the world (or even just our classroom,) not just exist within it.

One of the resources that I have not used (or have not used in a LONG time and plan on using again) but am excited to start using with my students is Flip (formerly Flipgrid.) I feel like this particular tool hits on every single one of the 4 C's. It allows students to communicate with others as they respond to videos, think critically based on what the task is, be creative in their presentation, and collaborate with others when they use it for a group project. Again, thankful for this class that introduces (or in this case reintroduces) me to tools that I can take right back to my classroom.

I am ending with a quote that I also used for my infographic reflection, but I find it powerful enough to repeat. In the video “Introduction to 21st Century Learning Skills,” Stroup says that as teachers, “our goal is not just to prepare students for the next test, it’s to prepare them for the future.” (2023). To me, this is the most compelling reason for teachers to want to create Creative Communicators ready for their futures!

References

Augusta University. (2023, September). Introduction to 21st century learning skills [Video]. D2L.

Flip. (n.d.). Personalized learning using the power of video. https://info.flip.com/en-us.html

John Spencer. (2020, November 21). When students launch their work to an audience [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49wrEOza1BI

John Spencer. (2016, March 13). This could fail (why permission is critical to creative risk-taking) [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEW2nGzY9rU&t=3s

Stauffer, B. (2021, December 31). What are the 4 c's of 21st century skills? AES Education. https://www.aeseducation.com/blog/four-cs-21st-century-skills

Storybird. (n.d.). Read, write, discover, and share the books you’ll always remember. https://www.storybird.com/

21 Things 4 Educators. (n.d.). Define: Creative communication. https://21things4educators.net/14_Creative_Communication/define.html

21 Things for Educators. (n.d.). 14 creative communicator tool list. 21 Things for Educators. (n.d.). https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SD4GyGkctVZOnbJHAqFUMRUiEY4cg-xke4twLyTUsp0/edit

Wicked EdTech. (n.d.). The 4 CS. https://sites.google.com/view/wickedtech/the-4-cs

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