Innovation Profile 130

Creativity needs tools and time

If you are doing something creative it can be very annoying if the door bell rings. When your mind is fully engaged creative thoughts can flow; if you are interrupted it can be hard to regain the insights you were having.

When the school bell rings for the end of a lesson the school timetable demands that creative activity must stop, as must all the other kinds of learning that are happening in classrooms.

Why do we allow the organisation of schools to dictate an approach which inhibits the learning that teachers are trying to develop in their students. Different kinds of creativity require different amounts of time, often more than one lesson.

There are many suggestions for learning activities which have been contributed by teachers on the Adobe website. You can find these at http://www.adobe.co.uk/education/lessons/main.html. Some of these could perhaps be achieved in a single lesson, or could be done with the work split across a few lessons, but many could be achieved much better if students are able to spend as much time creating as they wish to.

20 years ago the difference between the creative tools at school and those available in students' homes was very large. Since then, particularly for creativity with visual media, very many more homes have acquired the basic tool - a computer. To add the software to this is merely a matter of appropriate licensing.

The tools are also more widely available in schools. Any computer in a school could be used to create visual media, at any time the school permits. Creative use need not be limited to just those computers in specific school departments, in class time.

If the first step to generating more and better learning is to consider where and when students can exercise their creativity, the second step is to gain some measures of the improvement this will bring. Creativity can be judged by the concentration and application the student shows, by the skills exercised, by the quality of the work, by the time committed and by the enjoyment experienced.

Consider how many of these might improve if creativity outside of lessons is enabled and encouraged.

The Adobe Systems UK Company Profile on our web site will give you an overview of the company and a list of other Innovation Profiles connected with it.

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If you know of examples of innovative use of ICT-for-learning that others would be interested in, please email innovations@eep-edu.org

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