Crushing It With Creativity: The Virtual Summit Keynote

This past Friday I stayed up till midnight as I had the privilege to offer the opening keynote for EdTechTeam’s “The Virtual Summit”, EU edition. EdTechTeam Press published my book with Dan Ryder, Intention: Critical Creativity in the Classroom, and this event seemed perfect since its theme was “Creativity”.

A few days prior, Ed Tech Team published a blog post I wrote describing some of the things I planned to share. I decided to pen some verse for this:

Being creative can mean many things –

It’s painting, it’s dance, writing songs we can sing

It’s the essence of humanity – it’s how we survived

It’s the very best part of being alive!

But, though we are born creative souls, all

Often we feel we are hitting a wall.

Ideas fail to come, the page remains bare

The artist, upon a blank canvas must stare.

Is there a way – a tip or a trick

To get unstuck and make things stick?

To flow with that creative juice

To untie the internal editor’s noose?

All good things come with practice, it’s true.

But of course, you first must know what to do!

So let’s unpack creativity…

Find out what it is, essentially.

It’s sometimes frantic ideation…

But often,  stillness – incubation.

It can flood in a manic wave,

Or come as habit, day by day.

It’s both consumption and production –

At times even destruction.

It’s novelty, but remix, too…

Mash up the old to make the new.

It’s all about connecting dots;

Finding relationships others see not.

It works best with constraints, perimeters, rules –

Things like time, resources, tools.

Let’s de-silo disciplines,

Be unafraid of big questions,

Train ourselves to notice more,

And craft a clever metaphor!

Play and tinker without fear,

Turn the status quo on ear.

I hope this rhyme did resonate…

I’ll see you there…let’s go CREATE!

You can review the slidedeck here.

If you really want to hear my voice / experience what it was like in real time, the recording is here (I am at the very start and go on for about 50 minutes):

 

Thanks Andrew Caffrey for setting it all up…I hope folks found some of the ideas  and strategies useful. Please let me know if you try out anything with your students, or in your personal life.