Creative Kids

It's gone well.  First of all, we did a lot of Ginny's artworks lessons, and I added a little slideshow of what each child thought was their best work to the class webpage.  I then surveyed them to see how they felt about creating art on the computer, and they were overwhelmingly positive about the experience, as you can see from the graph. 

We then moved into doing some great songs on garageband, and making Keynote presentations.  They loved garageband.  We're going to make a class CD of their compositions, and are in the process of gathering their songs using the class hand-in folder in the lab.  A few experimented with adding voices to their songs.  I'd like to, someday, have the really musical kids have the option of adding music using a midi, but that's going to have to come later.  I'm researching inexpensive keyboards.  I've seen some reviews that some don't work with the new OS,  so I'm still looking into that.  Any ideas?

As far as audio goes, we were successful at adding audio using the ipod to Keynote presentations.  I wasn't as successful at adding it to my Rapidweaver webpage.  I'm still working the bugs out on that one.  Also, I'm learning to double check that the ipod is picking up the audio properly, as it happened  a couple times that I'd thought I'd been recording a chapter from the novel we're reading aloud, only to find it hadn't worked.  But, working out the glitches is part of the learning!

 The most exciting thing we've done is a large number of kids have made their own movies about what they've learned in science.  They wrote scripts, storyboarded their ideas, cast their characters, filmed it, and did the editing, transitions, etc. themselves.  They worked cooperatively and helped their peers throughout.  They included the rest of the class as actors in their movies.  Logistically, it was pretty tricky having as many projects as we did, as we were working with one computer and one video camera,  since the lab's  computers have a really old version of iMovie and making movies using it has so many compatibility problems that it's really not feasible.  We're all really looking forward to the new computers that are just getting set up for our school.  It's going to be great!

It was really impressive to see how proficient they are at problem-solving glitches that come along.  They also were quite amazing at performing multiple steps at one time, and using a variety of programs at once, transferring their knowledge from one program to another.  

So, as far as does the use of computers promote creativity, I'd say it's unequivocably yes!  Not only in what they produce, but also in how they creatively problem-solve to solve the inevitable technological glitches that come along.  They very competently would add Keynote episodes to their movies to illustrate an  idea they had (first nonchalantly converting them to iPhoto), and use steps to do so that I hadn't yet taught them.  It's exciting to see how confident they have become, and how intuitive some of the programs are.  The photo above is one that kids took using Photobooth to add to a movie.  As each project finishes, I'm adding it to a compiled class movie project so everyone can have a souvenir copy.  Each director team has made a DVD  right away, though, for a home showing to their families.  It's been fun!