I’ve been reviewing some of my old Theory of Knowledge (TOK in the International Baccalaureate) curriculum as I prepare for a creativity workshop, and thought I’d share two really successful challenges (I hate the word “assignment”) I gave my students – one at the end of the semester and one at the close of the year, though both could be used at either or both times. The Listicle This is based on the concept of a “listicle”, made popular by Buzzfeed. Usually listicles are in

Started thinking about this play on words when I was reposting a Stephen Downes piece earlier. I think we “peek” into others’ minds as we experience (note not just read) content they share. Sometimes that causes little peaks or spikes of thought and creativity in our mind…Perhaps the “peak” can also be a wonder or an idea you have that might challenge the one from the author. I think this might be a great reflective “exit ticket” exercise at a meeting or in a class of student

Took a drive today and that is my number one mundane thing to do to get creative inspiration. I can’t tell you how many ideas I have had to write on receipts strewn on the car seats or notes hastily recorded on my phone. Today I was thinking about Learning Steve Wheeler had just published a blog about a short film I saw yesterday called What Is Learning? I plan to pen another post regarding that, but in pondering I thought about a reflective tool I like to use with my daughte

I love to reflect on my day with my #oneword project, but today I thought- what if I looked back upon my week and could distill 5 big takeaways from the previous 7 days? So, I am going to give it a whirl with the “Friday 5”. I don’t intend to write a blog post or contextualize in any other way (aside from this first post)…it will be purely an image (with text) Tweeted/ Instagrammed/ Facebooked out and perhaps someone will find it amusing or useful. As with anything on the web

I asked this question as a Twitter question of the Week to my students around New Years, and decided to pose it on Twitter and see what people would respond with (I also asked my daughter). I did a bunch, too (and in my usual habit attempted to rhyme). Here are the Storified Tweets: https://storify.com/amyburvall/lessandmore …and then I did my little video action with Paper by 53 and Reflector App and iMovie… (be sure to read the contributor list) I was tickled to see my frie

On my plane ride last night I had a thought – what if I could essentialize my day into 1 word? What would be the most important? I am a big fan of creativity in restraint and am currently working on a workshop on Visual Thinking called “Image is Everything” where this sort of minimalistic synthesis is addressed. I also see it as a way to experiment with and practice my typography, since my palette is self-restricted to hot pink and black I really need to play in other ways. P

I’m really excited to be joining Mitch Resnick and the crew from MIT Media Lab for the “Learning Creative Learning” MOOC (#lcltalk). I had the pleasure of visiting the Lab a few years ago as part of Alan November’s Building Learning Communities conference. We dabbled in remix culture and I explored collaborative storytelling with the Scratch program. Our first assignment was to read Seymour Papert’s Gears of My Childhood and write a short description about an object from our

omne trium perfectum original image by Gwenivere Burvall You’ve probably always heard there is magic in the number 3. The fairy tales that shaped our childhoods are filled with this: Three fairies, Three wishes, Three Little Bears… This literary device, also known as a “tricolon”, seems to be a simple but universal and powerful structure that, I think, is wonderfully applied to the task of… REFLECTION I’m going to begin by giving a shout out to my friend and sometimes colleag