Here is Gregg Fraley @greggfraley speaking at TEDx hosted by NASA. Whilst I listened, I doodled…only to find that one of his key recommendations was to purchase and use a notebook to capture random thoughts and ideas as we go through the day. How good did THAT make me feel?!
The time when I am able to work from home is precious. It gives me the opportunity to immerse myself in readings, resources and videos that push my thinking forward. It turns out that what I’m able to do during this time is develop my creative behaviours. It makes me consider the age-old tension that we all face between achieving curriculum coverage and offering opportunities for deep thinking.
Trying to design opportunities for learners to respond personally to the issues and concepts they encounter is, without doubt, one of the toughest challenges when it comes to carving up a fifty minute block of time into meaningful learning ‘chunks’. Perhaps one answer is the development of doodle-techniques, just as I have tried here whilst listening to the talk. We know that the majority of information we encounter is channelled through our visual receptors, so having a focus on making connections between the visual and cognitive parts of our brains is something that deserves more time?
Watch and enjoy…my sketches are below (ordinarily, I wouldn’t have included them, as I don’t feel that they are ‘good enough’. If you wacth the TEDx Talk, however, you’ll see that I have had the courage to remove the “YARDSTICK OF COMPARISON”. I found that they are perfectly valid forms of my self expression – thanks, Gregg!).
N.B. The original TEDx Talk post was originally posted on my main blog site www.fullonlearning.com
Full On Learning 
Yea! Love it. Will show you my visual listening tomorrow. But coming to the end of the WeCreate meetings it serves to remind me how I need to choose to be creative, continue to push it in my school, and to continue to expand my tool belt (or magicians hat as I drew it). Quite how i will do this without my fellow WeCreate-ers to spur me on termly I guess I will discover. But many of these things I already do I just need to be reminded that they ARE good and to do them. I especially like the idea of self-expression being in all your life not just part of it- I’ve always tried to keep my work sketchbook/notebook separate from my home one. Maybe I won’t in future. My husband also watched this over my shoulder, this is something like what he said-not all as I can’t type as fast as he can talk!What are the other creative tools that he was talking about? Maybe though he’s inspired us enough, to push us into the idea of being more creative. That we need to get back to the idea of play and it reminded me of what we do already and the importance choosing to be creative and most importantly avoid comparison, we are all on our own journeys at different speeds.