Thursday, July 24, 2008

A Dose of Inspiration (Hopefully)

Below is my entry into the Slideshare World's Best Presentation Contest--Cultivating Creativity in the Classroom. It is not exactly what I hoped it would be. The original font that I used did not make it through the upload (it was a great one too--I think it changed the whole tone of the slide show). I also had to remove several slides because the PPT file was too large (75mb!!) to upload.

I'm not sure how big a role standardized testing plays in the everyday life of a teacher in other states, but here in Ohio no curricular decisions are made without mentioning the words Achievement Test. Even in my school district, which continues to have success on the test each year. This presentation is meant to be a quiet wake up call for teachers. Though it barely scratches the surface of what we know about creativity, it will hopefully awaken a few folks to the idea that preparing for state tests doesn't have to consist entirely of paper/pencil drill and practice drudgery. It's possible to teach many concepts by allowing students to create products that display their learning. Another hope of mine is that teachers will begin to think of themselves as creative and begin to search for ideas in the world around them with the hope of improving their instruction.

I also wanted to provide a few links to the authors that I quote in the presentation:
Plus, creating this presentation was my effort at being more creative. I've been presenting at conferences for years now and over time my presentations have improved significantly. This is the result of my reading a couple books, watching a certain movie, and reading a really awesome blog. Here are links to those:

Cultivating Creativity in the Classroom

2 comments:

N.D. said...

I really enjoyed the slideshow. I think it was great! Nice job.
I think the idea of an IDEA BOOK is a great one and I want to do it. I definitely find myself struggling between horrible topics that must be taught and trying to find anything interesting about them (for students).

Murray said...

Cool, Jamie.

Certainly inspirational. The key slide for me was the one about engaging students in traditional classrooms. That model is a dinosaur.

Good luck in the contest.