Skip to main content

Getting Creative at LLI Mississippi

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of talking about creativity at the LLI Mississippi conference in Madison, Mississippi. I presented in a "fishbowl" format, meaning that I taught a lesson to 14 high school freshmen, as a group of 20 teachers observed from the outskirts of the room. This format is supposed to provide an "everyday" setting to a session.

My talk was entitled "Creativity Exercises That Build Connections" and we began by broadening the definition of "creativity" to include many different types of creativity, and thus a much wider range of people. We played "FUNctionality" and the "Why? Game". The students did a fantastic job of engaging and being fearless and creative with their answers. I think everyone had fun, even the teachers observing, as shown by the photo below.

A full house of creative teachers at LLI Mississippi

Encore Presentation

I can't stop laughing at the Santa hat on the
skeleton in the background of this image.
I guess the lesson went well because I was asked to present the same talk the following day, but this time with the teachers as players. Giving this specific talk was a blast, I mean, we spend the majority of the time playing games with crazy answers. What's better than that? So I jumped at the opportunity. If they could find a time to fit me in, I was more than happy to give it another go.

I'm pleased to say, the follow up session was even more creative, crazy and unpredictable than the first. Let me just say that I've never heard so many uses for a regular deck of playing cards.

Other Great Sessions

There were many other great sessions during the two day conference. We went home with lots of new ideas and inspirations. Here are just a few of my favorites:

Tim Elmore

Author Tim Elmore gave an inspiring talk about relating to people across multiple generations. It was very insightful and had me questioning the way the I approach situations with students in the future. I've definitely added his book "Marching off the Map" to my reading list.

Virtual Reality in the Classroom

Emily Brady introduced us to Cospaces, a virtual reality tool she uses to integrate VR with her everyday classroom curriculum. Before the session was even over, Juan Hernandez from Village Tech was already using the tools to prototype his Forge On challenge in VR.

More Creativity

Claire Reddig, from the Oakridge School in Arlington, TX demonstrated her ways of sparking creativity in her classroom with a class of middle school students with "Catalysts for Creativity". I left with several things I'm dying to try in my class later this year.

Many Thanks

There are so many people to thank for making this trip possible, of course Village Tech (VT) for the support to allow their teachers to constantly look for ways to learn new skills and techniques -- as well as the willingness to share our knowledge with others. To Juan, my traveling companion from VT, who thankfully loves Krystal's hamburgers as much as I do. Special thanks to the staff and students of Madison-Ridgeland Academy for their help and hospitality at hosting the event. And to Amber Colvin and Seth Burgess from the Lausanne Learning Institute for organizing the event for organizing the event, and allowing me to present again on day two for the teachers.

Now it's time to get back to work and put some of what I learned to the test.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Genius Hour: Week 8 - "The Final Stretch"

The weeks are counting down and we're nearly at the end of our first Genius Hour period. Students are putting last minute touches on songs and poems. They're polishing book layouts in Adobe inDesign, furnishing virtual houses in SketchUp, and they're practicing their dance moves. As we wrap up week 8 of Genius Hour there a few special things to note. Juniors are BACK! First, is that our juniors have just returned from their nearly 2 week long professional internships with companies and organizations around the area. I was dying to circle up and hear about those experiences, but they already lost time last week and I wanted to give them as much time as they had available. I was also aware they spent a couple of hours debriefing earlier that morning. Spring Is Here Next week is Spring Break! Most students will use that time to take trips, visit theme parks, and relax, but I have heard mention from several students or groups that they still have a little work and practic

FUNctionality! - See Things DIfferently

Educators, if you're looking for a quick, fun game for your class that also serves to help everyone see things differently, more creatively , then try this "FUNctionality" activity. This is a game I developed with the help of my students the latter part of the year. It's been through a few iterations already and I present it in its most recent, and balanced, version. Before we begin, let me ask you this, how could you use the object in the image shown below? For most people, a single purpose comes to mind and I'll go out on a limb and assume that I don't have to describe it. However, for students playing our game, this object spawned a wide range of uses that included, cleaning up spills, writing messages, drawing circles, dressing up as a mummy, measuring the length of something and stuffing a pillow or stuffed animal. The Setup This little game doesn't take much, just literally the things you have around your classroom, and a stopwatch (you can

The Latest AI Image Game Changer

First it was AI generated text that seemed to have all the answers (or at least did a great job of making things up if it didn't), then there were AI generated images that were winning local and international art and photo contests. But even these tools, as magical as they were, had their weaknesses, their Achilles' heel. For images it's been things like drawing hands, which to be honest I still have one heck if a time drawing...so I may indeed be AI...who knows, or rendering text that isn't gibberish at best or a mess of cryptic letter looking random shapes at worst. Over that past year and half AI text to image generators have made great progress in fixing those weaknesses, but one still remained...consistency, character consistency to be specific. But with the release of the lastest update of Midjourney 6, everything may have changed with two new simple tags --cref and --sref which stand for "character reference" and "style reference" respectably.