In my final week of reflection on ISTE Students Standards for my graduate work in Digital Education Leadership at Seattle Pacific University, I am focused on ISTE 7: Global Collaborator; specifically 7b students will us collaborative technologies to work with other to examine issues and problems from multiple viewpoints.
Recently, I have been working on reforming a unit so that my students will be developing their own podcasts during our guided reading of The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton. One of the elements on my rubric is creativity and originality with the podcast even though we spend a large section of the planning section scripting. If you are interested in having your students create a podcast I would take a look at this brief piece about making a podcast with students of a younger age range, but I think it could be helpful to any teacher. If I taught high schoolers, still I might give them this website and have them look through the resources provided. As Mark Warner states, “Podcasting is a wonderful way of allowing children to safely share their work and experiences with a potentially huge audience over the Internet. Schools are increasingly using the internet to promote what they do and to celebrate the achievements of their children, and podcasting is an excellent way of doing this” (2015). Then the second source that I provide here is a YouTube video about Audacity, watch it learn how to build an episode from beginning to end. It goes into a step-by-step tutorial that I think that I would have to look at a couple times or simultaneously when I was building my podcast. These are the nuts and bolts elements of the podcast but as I said I want to also assess the creativity of the student teams on their end resultss. So I watched an insightful YouTube video by Sir Ken Robinson.
Sir Ken Robinson in “Can Creativity be Taught?” states that “creativity as I see it is the process of having original ideas that have value” (1:25-1:27). Creativity is not a “freewheeling” process the beginning steps have some process to them, even if that process is about feeling and the gut instinct about what fits and what is right or wrong for the project or piece. I enjoyed his perspective on creativity; he argues that many people claim that they are not creative and they are referring to arty or crafty. But his clear distinction comes in when he states that creativity is “anything that involves human intelligence” and it is a myth that we cannot teach it (3.29). Teaching is not a process of direct instruction as Robinson says but a process of enabling and giving students opportunities. Therefore I need to think about the original value that I place on the Podcasts that I want my students to create. He goes further to say that those teachers who claim that they cannot assess creativity are limiting the scope and capabilities of their students. Teachers must identify the criteria and value of originality and what originality means to the project the students are working on. I have found that having my students help create their rubrics allows them to buy into their education at a higher capacity because they feel like they are at the wheel and driving the whole project. But my mentors for this class shared a couple of rubrics that might be helpful to this process and how to assess a creative project like a podcast.
Green, Carey. “Podcast with Audacity – watch me build an episode from start to finish – free Audacity tutorial.” YouTube. YouTube, 01 Jan. 2013. Web. 05 Mar. 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piuMLXF2rZY
Kepp , Phyllis, Warner , Mark . “Podcasting.” Teaching Ideas. Teaching Ideas 1998-2015, 30 Oct. 2015. Web. 04 Mar. 2017. http://www.teachingideas.co.uk/multimedia/podcasting-0
[TheBrainwaveVideoAnthology]. (2014, August 30). Sir ken robinson – can creativity be taught? [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlBpDggX3iE
