Creativity & Google

Unlocking creative minds in the classroom

Through early learning children are engaged in so many creative exercises to motivate and stimulate young minds. They are painting, moulding, shaping, discovering, re designing, and so much more. But somehow, as we grow into our personalities as adults a lot of us have lost touch with our creative side. Like any other muscles in our body, in order for us to improve our creativity we need to use the creative side of our brain more often. I've found that the 9am - 5pm work lifestyle that many families and adults live by, simply does not allow for time to exercise this muscle. Unless our work calls for it, we may not engage our brains in creative thinking for many days.  In some cases you could argue that this can also be said for the classroom. It is SO important for our students to express their creative side on many, many, many occasions. We need to explicitly implement moments in our teaching that allow students to be creative as not only a way to express themselves, but to also help students become better problem solvers, communicators, and collaborators. In my classroom I try my best to implement lessons or occasions where students can be creative. It is through the lens of manaiakalani that I can try implement my students to be creators of content not merely consumers across any new or old area of learning. And that is something I believe to be really powerful. 

This brings me to google drawing.

Google Drawing

Some days I can't help but shake my head and giggle to myself about the number of times that I have sat in frustration trying to get my google docs or slides image to align and look how I want it to. On more occasions than I would like to admit, I would be so determined to get the background how I wanted it to look, I would google a picture, copy and paste the image, and then send this to the back. 😑

But.... google draw?! 

Mind blown. 

In a matter of 10mins I was able to create and insert an image, easily change the background, and even crop images to a shape. Its times like this that make me feel like a BT again. Why have I not used this sooner!?

An added bonus is the use of remove.bg to remove background images... game changer!

Im imaging my students creating a piece of digital art, using the functions of google draw at their advantage. Perhaps a picture of a beach? Or maybe a self portrait? Definitely something for me to have a think about. 

Google Slides

One of the creative tasks that I chose to look into was adding audio into google slides (originally I would have loved to look at animation, but that workshop was booked up lucky there is some slides I can look at instead)!

For my task, I decided to input some audio on a collection of slides I created a few weeks back for a friends quiz night. I thought it would be an easy and effective task that would take my quiz to that next level...

Using websites such as online-voice-recorder made this process so quick and easy. I was able to record my audio, save it to my drive, and then insert it into my slides very quickly and easily. 

While I was working through adding in my audio, in the back of my mind was my learners. I couldn't help but think how cool it would be for them to research about a natural disaster (our inquiry topic this term) and then get them to create their own quiz filled with their own questions. It will take a fair amount of time for students to research about their chosen disaster, and to then learn how to create it digitally... but I'm willing to give it a try. This could hopefully engage that creative side of their brain as well as those all important literacy and digital skills as well. 

Below is the slide deck of questions that I have made for my personal quiz night, with the now added in audio. Feel free to quiz yourself on your houseplant/garden knowledge! 😉