Addressing Creativity and Wellness with Your Students

Sean ThompsonBlog, Engage Better, Lesson Plan Better

TL;DR:

  • Kahoot teaches and reinforces understandings.
  • Vector graphics give students an outlet to share how their daily lives are going, and lead to open discussions with individuals and/or classes.
  • Educators can examine data from surveys in Google Data Studio to track wellness over time.

Last school year was one like no other before. We spent our summer uncertain as to what the new year would hold. We were happy to embark on a well-deserved rest, but we couldn’t help but feel a certain level of anxiety about the return to an uncertain school year.

Now, stop a minute. Imagine you are a child. You might not have lesson planning or pick-up and drop off procedures to consider, but your formative years have been upended! At times like this, you need understanding and support more than ever before. And you need it from the adults at your school, with whom you spend so many of these developmental days. Addressing creativity and wellness with your students is as important today as ever.

These resources are made to address some fundamental aspects of our roles as teachers that became more prominent because of remote learning: creativity and wellness.

Good teaching practice doesn’t change because of a virus. It does, however, create the need for new, creative ways of making sure everyone is maintaining a positive head space and motivation.

Let’s dive in!

Addressing creativity and wellness with your students is as important today as ever. Click To Tweet

Addressing Creativity and Wellness Through Games: Kahoot!

Kahoot is a fun, creative diversion for students. The following video shows how Kahoot works (forgive the early stage of COVID-19 look):

Here is a pre-made Simple Wellness & Health Check Kahoot that is ready to use.

This video shows how teachers and students can make their own Kahoots:

Addressing Creativity and Wellness Through Technology: “Bubbles” Course

The Bubbles course was made to enable conversations, while simultaneously offering children the opportunity to channel their energies into a creative outlet. This can help open up conversations with caregivers.

Here is the Course Intro video for your perusal. It is an easy course to follow and absolutely free for all.

I have shared tutorials on how to leverage Apple’s Keynote for vector graphics (images created by overlapping shapes and colors) creation and digital storytelling on my Digital Creativity Club YouTube channel.  This course also demonstrates how to use Google Drawings to the same end (though in not the same detail).

There is also a Student Creativity Challenges for Summer 2020 with both TEACHER and STUDENT versions available (basically the same with differences only for social media sharing).

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Addressing Creativity and Wellness Through Surveys: What Does the “DATA” Say?

Learning analytics and data visualization are either things your school is discussing already or may be very soon. The Google Data Studio dashboard below is a very simple “sandbox” demonstrating some basics of how data—in this case wellness data—can be exported from a simple Google Form. The data can be immediately visualized for developing insight and having discussions from the whole school down to a single student a counselor may choose to reach out to.

We have broken this sample down into the following four sections: stress, motivation, sleep, and happiness. They all have sliding answer scales from 0-10. This is a simple example of how we can visualize data from surveys with the proper systems.

  • Stress: In the past week, what was your overall level of stress?
  • Motivation: In the past week, what was your overall level of motivation to learn?
  • Sleep: In the past week, what is the average number of hours you have slept each night?
  • Happiness: At the moment, how happy are you with the way you and
    your family are getting along? How happy are you with how you are balancing your time? How happy are you with the amount of time you have been able to stay in contact with your friends?

Some helpful links include:

There are a number of ways to start addressing creativity and wellness with your students. Hopefully this inspires you to think about how you can start applying these concepts!

About Sean Thompson

Sean has been an Educational Technology Integration Specialist and Director of Technology, a Math and Language Teacher, and a homeroom teacher from Kindergarten to Middle School in international schools over the past two decades. He has traveled extensively across Asia speaking, presenting and participating in discussions regarding the effective integration of technology in an educational setting.

Sean’s passion for creativity has brought him to stages all over the world. He is highly prolific, regularly appearing on podcasts and vlogs. He manages his own online resources including the giveitaway.net free educational technology resource, the Digital Creativity Club YouTube Channel and Facebook group along with his Technology Embedded blog.

In 2014, he partnered up with DEEP Learning to support the team with the development, promotion and execution of professional development conferences for teachers worldwide. These high energy events have been held at prestigious international schools in Japan, Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia adding to the list of other venues he has presented in including those in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing and Manila.

Sean is also an Apple Distinguished Educator, an International Baccalaureate Educator Network Workshop Leader, a Google education Trainer and a Certified Google Educator available for professional development at your school.