Voice Thread

Below is what I posted on the VoiceThread. I loved watching the videos and really understood what he was talking about in them. Highly recommend you to watch the videos if you haven't yet.

What great videos! I was very interested in what was said in the first video of how creativity is killed throughout education. Teachers expect students to come up with their own ideas, their own way to solve problems, and their own answers for everything but are so quick to tell them they are wrong without really hearing why or how they believe their answers will work. During the second video, I found it very interesting that the number of kindergarten students tested on a certain aspect and considered genius was 98% however as they got older that number kept decreasing. Students aren't able to think the way their brains are trying to, they start thinking the way their teachers want them to. What is wrong with a high school student or even middle school asking...can the paperclip be 40ft long and made of rubber? Why does a paperclip have to be thought of as the one we "normally" see in a store. We learn the way something is supposed to look and then we can't deviate from that and that begins to kill the creativity in students. Just the same as why do we say all fire trucks are red, the sun is yellow and grass is green. These aren't the only colors in the crayon box so why should they be the only colors used for these objects? Not letting students have an imagination and not be able to expand on that imagination is a beginning step to them losing their creativity. If students are taught there is only one way to do everything they are going to go through life thinking it is either that one way...or it is wrong. That is not the way students need to be taught, they need to have their freedom to create, their freedom to imagine, and their freedom to experiment. Let them come up with an answer to a problem...and if it doesn't work then let them figure that out and figure out why it doesn't work and what they should do to make it work.

NETS T: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Video 1


Video 2