I’ve been thinking a lot about identity lately. What people think of you. What reputation means, particularly in connected environments. What is the balance between making and talking? What’s the ideal ratio of creating and sharing versus keeping your work to yourself? What “counts” as “evidence” (you can read all about my thoughts in this post). How can we distill the totality of ourselves into a tagline? Writing that aforementioned post I re-read one of my favourite pieces

I often talk about, as an intro to my Creativity presentations, the fact that a lot of people who meet me for the first time ask, “Are you an artist?” At first I apologetically replied “no”, despite the fact they probably caught me in the act of sketching in public. (my new response is “aren’t we all?”). Another common one I get is, “you must be in the fashion industry”, perhaps because I am usually a tad overdressed or whimsically dressed and always in black. Identity in the

For a few weeks now my Building Learning Communities Conference buddy (that’s Alan November’s cool conference in Boston in July) Erin Olson ( @eolsonteacher )and I have been doing a little virtual volley project we are calling “Visual Verse”. We both love to write poetry and to sketch, but I do gravitate to the latter of late and she to the former. Each Sunday she sends me – all the way from Iowa and by way of the magic that is Twitter- a piece of poetic verse. My challenge i

The other day I was struck by an article on Cultural Literacy  in one of my favourite magazines, Wired, which claimed: “When it comes to living in the here and now, your education is incomplete” After teaching Middle and High School (emphasis on Juniors and Seniors) for the past 22 years I could not agree more. Kids seek relevance more than anything. They want to know WHY the curriculum (usually “chosen” for them) is something they need to know and HOW, specifically, it will

For better or for worse, I’ve always been a tad obsessive (let’s blame my maternal grandmother, who purchased 5 of the same type of sweater sets or perhaps my paternal grandfather, who’d make the same special “recipe” for weeks on end – we called it “a kick”).  Creatively, this can be beneficial. I have a weird internal engine that propels me to make as many as of whatever-I’m-currently-into-at-the moment as possible. Of course I inevitably get bored and move on, but there ar

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

If you had control of the district ed-tech budget what would you do? Recently, I keynoted In Texas at Region One’s “Using Technology to Make a Difference Conference”. My keynote centered around “New Literacies” and how technology can be integrated seamlessly to cultivate those (see all 400+ hand-drawn pink slides here). We then broke up for a workshop later on Remix and Re-Contextualization for the Classroom (If you are interested, I’ll be doing a Master Class at Alan Novembe

It’s been exactly a week since I stood onstage at the lovely Kamehameha Schools presentation hall in Hilo Hawaii  (aka The Big Island) to do the closing keynote for the Hawaii Island TechEd Collaborative Conference  (#hitc2014). It was called “Digital Life” and, I’m told, named so because my “Digital Life” parody video of the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star” was an inspiration at a faculty meeting. I had a great day doing a short workshop on fostering creativity on a da

One of my favorite quotes on my classroom’s massive white glossy “inspiration wall” is from John Cage: “There is no win, there is no fail, there is only make” My personal goal this year is to get students involved in the creative process as much as possible, shifting away from consuming and stressing the importance of producing, contributing, making, and sharing on a daily basis. In addition to their regular steady diet of project-based assessments, I’m trying to have several

I wanted to make something with the words most frequently used in our #etmchat sessions, as shown here: At first I decided to make a poem of sorts: So I went to my iPad and played around with the VidRhythm app. Here’s what became of it: #dataviz #etmooc #fun #twitter