Bringing creativity back into college classrooms

The inspiration for this task comes from the 2018 ADE Institute but is still relevant and fun.

When the ADEs were in Texas for the Global Institute 2018, we were promised some wonderful resources under the heading #everyonecancreate. And Apple delivered! The timing could not be better as we face 8 weeks with our year 9 and 10 students before they go off on a well-deserved summer vacation. I am so pleased with the English department because they have all decided to take this project up with their classes. What follows is a possible timeline and implementation strategy.

Step 1: Download all four books from iTunes: Everyone Can Create project guides and Teacher Guide These are pretty big downloads so when you get your students to do it, I suggest you get them to download them at home.

Step 2: What I did was take my class on a Photo Walk which is one of the activities in the Photo book When they were done, they added their photos to a Padlet and continued with the next activity, which was personalising their photos.

Step 3: Next I gave them a timeline. This gives the students an idea of what they are working towards, and for how long.

Step 4: They got into groups and started to choose the tasks they wanted to do, based on the matrix. The best way to approach this is to work down each column, as one activity builds on the next. At this point, teachers can step back because each activity (the name of which correlates to the activity in the book) is totally self-explanatory. Students can navigate their way forward from here. We took our bland doc and turned it into this matrix:

Step 5: Some teachers like a lot more detail, so this planning sheet is really for those that like a step-by-step approach, but it is by no means the only way!

Step 6: Teachers will need to give some grades so we looked at an existing rubric and adapted it to look like this:

Step 7: The master plan is to use these skills and key competencies to get them to create a short film under time constraints, which will culminate in a Film Festival. IThere is more detail about the film festival in this link. And more details for the students in this link.

I really hope that the students enjoy this project and unleash their creativity!