Creativity Tools in the Classroom and Beyond

This week, we discuss creativity tools, that is the technology which affords the students the ability to create and do so with their own expressions. Creativity is often associated with the arts, but here it is used more broadly, applying to the tools which allow students to generate an artifact in some kind of personalized way. For purposes both academic and professional, this artifact could be used as evidence of learning or accomplishment and would be an excellent candidate to add to an ePortfolio or as a stand alone tool to generate content or media. In the classroom, these creativity tools can be used to heighten student engagement and encourage active participation with the material while also allowing students to create documentation of their own learning that can supplement or even supplant traditional assessment and examination. While exploring creativity tools, I came across several worth mentioning for both classroom and professional purposes which I will introduce with regards to the type of content that is generated in each. I have found this to be a useful classification for the varying types of creativity tools, as the manner that any content is made can differ wildly, but the outputs can be compared and discussed more categorically for narrative purposes. In this post, I will discuss two creativity tools whose outputs are multimedia videos with potentially interactive features, one creativity tool whose output is a visual presentation, and one whose output is an interactive document with embedded code and other features. This wide variety of output types is only a sample of the potential outputs allowed by creativity tools, but each of the tools discussed has a unique feature that it could add to any learner's academic or professional toolkit. Most of the creativity tools that I explored generated video style outputs. These tools differed greatly in the manner of generation, however, and I will discuss each along with its potential application. Firstly, is a resource called voicethread.com, which outputs videos that can be generated through collaborative work between students. Through this website, learners or professionals can create a video (or upload existing media) and edit it with other students, adding in comments, illustrations, audio clips, and other multimedia content to generate a unique presentation that can be shared to further add and modify the video or simply shared as a video file to be watched and listened to by an audience. This tool allows students to creatively express the knowledge that they have and work collaboratively with others. Another resource which produces a video output is itempool.com, which allows students to work with YouTube to create videos (potentially live videos that could be streamed with other classmates) and then add interactive questions, polls, and results that can be used for a wide array of applications. For instance, instead of a traditional oral report, a student could stream live to YouTube and be watched by the rest of the class but during the live stream, questions and graphs can be displayed on screen that the audience can respond to live, displaying results and submissions. This could be used to have students create lessons and activities to present to their peers with interactive capabilities that result in a published (to youtube) video that can be viewed with all of the interactive content seen (and often still answerable, although the recorded stream does not update with new data, the website will allow new answers and responses). This could also be used for student to create interactive discussions and polls, less as a lesson delivered to students and more as a snapshot of the conversations between students with live polling and results embedded in the video. Ultimately I see both of these resources of great use to teachers, learners, and professionals who wish to create video content that engages the viewer, but they also have the further benefit of acting as tools for education to the learners. As a teacher, I would like to utilize itempool to create lessons of my own for students. The last of the video output programs that I will discuss here is very different from the others, but I believe still classifies as a creativity tool within educational technology, that is the video game Civilization. This video game (and more as we continue to see video games popularized with educational applications) allows users to play through a virtual civilization simulator, introducing students to various social science topics as well as economic, cultural, scientific, and geographic ones. The reason that this qualifies as an creativity tool, is that after the game students can view and save a video of the playthrough, thus creating evidence of learning that can be an expression of each individual student. These videos likely do not offer much for a professional artifact of learning, but can be a fun addition to any student's portfolio that can remind them of the learning that took place. Most notably, however, I would love to see a utilization of the video output of a civilization playthrough edited with the voicethread tool to add deeper educational value and the opportunity to narrate the playthrough. Students would engage with this material deeply as it has the fun aspects of a game and making/editing a video but also has many important concepts and content knowledge embedded in the lesson. The last creativity tool that I will discuss (and the one that will take the focus of the rest of this post) actually outputs a document that may be reminiscent of a simple text document, however its utility is much greater. This tool is known generally as a computational essay, but I will discuss its application using Jupyter Notebook specifically. A computational essay is similar to a traditional essay in that the author will create a document with text that discusses some idea or conveys some information, but the computational essay combines modern electronic capabilities to create an electronic document (often a pdf) that has embedded code, graphics, images, and even animations. These may not seem as enticing to students as the video based creativity tools discussed above, however the output document can be quite powerful, both as evidence for learning and achievement but also for professional applications. The documents created can be shared and used to convey a great amount of knowledge while also including hyperlinks and other resources strengthening the power of these essays. Further, the ability to embed code, images, and animations, allows students some freedom to create unique documents with huge professional value. As mentioned before, this tool is not as flashy as the video editing tools discussed above, but for my physics classroom (typically comprised of late teens and young adults) I would like to introduce them to this tool for its practical, professional uses (although I will likely use the other tools as well).

One potential uses of a computational essay (created through Jupyter Notebook) in class would be to simply augment a lesson that involves a traditional essay. In my physics class, this may pertain to some essay involving the history of physics or an experimental laboratory write-up. The computational essay affords students identically to an essay, but additionally allows students to add in charts, tables, equations, and even hyperlinks. This produces results that are only slightly more valuable than a typical essay and would pedagogically not be much different from the blog discussed in previous weeks. A much more transformative lesson plan could involve the computational essay redefining what an essay looks like. To do this, I would like to incorporate coding into the physics classroom from the start of the semester (which seems to be the direction that physics education is taking anyway) thus allowing students to create simple codes and programs to make calculations and display data (for Jupyter Notebook, it specifically utilizes the programming language Python). With the ability to code, even at a novice level, students can create essays that include snippets of that code which can be used to create plots of data and even animations. This code can completely change how we typically interact with essays, affording a much more creative experience overall. In particular, I would incorporate this into a simple harmonic motion lab, in which students will write their results using the computational essay format. Their essays should contain animations, demonstrating the motion of an object moving back and forth (in simple harmonic motion) as well as graphs displaying the energy changing as the object moves. Further, students could embed videos of their lab, and any other additions to create a unique and personalized, professional document. In terms of content of this lesson, the ability to code is surprisingly minimal but the students MUST know the physical equations in order to get the correct animation, thus allowing easy assessment of mastery. Further, the essay itself will contain the students reflections on the lab and their understanding of the equations, adding another avenue to better assess, for both academic and professional applications. Pedagogically, I worry that students will not be as engaged as with some of the other creativity tools, however, because while creating the document it mostly feels just like writing an essay, plus the students may be intimidated by the notion of coding and writing an essay together. However, the pedagogy involved in the use of coding may overshadow the shortcomings of the essay itself. The use of coding allows students to create their own program to probe the calculations or relationships involved. This allows students to write simple programs, see an output, and evaluate their understanding rather quickly by assessing their own program. Overall, the coding within the computational essay could be considered its own creativity tool, however by combining it with the essay there are immense gains to the content knowledge and the assessment ability of the output without hindering the pedagogical advantages of coding to drastically by combining it with the essay.

Creativity tools are an important addition to any educators toolkit as they provide students a way to create products that show the student's creativity which can also be used as artifacts to be put into an ePortfolio. The creativity tools discussed above focus on video outputs and a document output that can function as both assessments of learning while also being fun and engaging activities or produce stunning and unique documents. These kinds of tools offer an experience that cannot by other tools as they are a unique mix of self-expression, content generation, and novel procedures to keep the students engaged and produce outputs that can be kept, maintained, and even modified as evidence of learning. There are many other creativity tools that I did not discuss here and one of the most powerful characteristics of creativity tools is that there are a wide variety which allows for students to use a creativity tool which may not be the preferred tool by others or even their instructor, but gives them a unique and expressive experience that will keep them personally engaged in their learning.