iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

Be more chef.

It is a mantra I’ve adopted and taken to heart these past few months as my brother lay in a hospital, seemingly impacting the world more from that bed, then many of could do with bodies that were not full of tumors and cancer.

My brother was a chef in every sense of the word. He took the circumstances that life gave him and turned them into something wonderful and new and beautiful.

When my brother passed away a few weeks ago, my thoughts turned to my own four children. How could I help raise them to be chefs? How could I raise them to not follow the recipes of life, but instead make their own recipes for their life? But, it is not just my kids, it is all of our kids.

The question is, “Are we raising/preparing/teaching our students/children to be chefs or cooks?”

Creativity and innovation are two skills that are highly coveted in today’s society. People that are creative and innovative have managed to blaze their own paths and remake the world in their own image. As a result, creativity and innovation will continue to be the most sought-after skills in our global economy. Because of this, schools have to prepare students for this workforce of innovation and put them the best position to be successful. So how can educators help their students cultivate their inner creator and innovator? I am glad you asked. Below you will find a graphic that lists 27 ways that you can help your students be innovative. I hope this helps.

Ever try rushing from a solo project into a team brainstorm? Switching gears on the fly isn’t easy–even when the thing you were doing alone is just as much a creative task as the thing you’re suddenly try to do in a group.

Ayse Birsel understands why. “When we’re working alone, it’s more contemplative. You only have you and your ideas, and there’s not somebody else there to judge you,” says the cofounder and creative director of design studio Birsel + Seck. In collaborative environments, she points out, “It can get competitive [and] really chaotic,” so it’s smart to “let people know ahead of time that the process could get messy, so trust the process.”

How do you prepare people for creative collaboration, though? Birsel has a few warm-up techniques up her sleeve. Here are three of them, none of which take longer than three minutes.

“Without imagination and investigation of ideas our collective fund of knowledge would languish. We do need assessments to determine what students learn and understand, but we can incorporate imagination in the creation of those assessments to insure that students’ creative thoughts and higher executive functions are incorporated into their assessment experiences,” said Dr. Judy Willis in Planning For Creativity: 4 Simple Strategies You Can Master. Creativity should be encouraged alone with technical knowledge since the two go hand in hand.

And maybe more importantly, creativity infuses life with a different sort of depth and richness. As Osho said, “To be creative means to be in love with life. You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty, you want to bring a little more music to it, a little more poetry to it, a little more dance to it.”

Creativity in the classroom provides a more relaxed and open environment for the students to freely express their opinions and to learn faster. Here are some tips for helping teachers add creativity to the curriculum.

Launching a new idea or business isn’t easy. Ever. That much at least we know and acknowledge. But it’s also not a solo effort. As individual creators and entrepreneurs, we instinctively believe we bear the full weight of responsibility for bringing the new and wonderful to life. And we’re dead wrong. In fact it’s this belief perhaps more than any other that raises the odds that your brilliant, groundbreaking dream won’t come true.

The fact is, successful innovation is the job of the many, not the few. Indeed there are countless roles to be filled before, during, and after the ideating, far too many for any one person to sustain. It all adds up to the one thing every groundbreaking creator not only needs, but must actively seek out and cultivate: community.