Currently, myself and some colleagues are undertaking the Making Thinking Visible online course offered through the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Adaptable to any subject area, Visible Thinking allows getting started almost at once with ‘thinking routines’ that help students ponder ideas from the subject areas.

I’ve compiled these “routines” into the booklet below for myself as a quick reference. The routines are simple and quick. Have a look if interested. You can download through Issuu here, or via Google Docs here.

My grade 10 art class are working on a major unit on generating ideas and creativity. To make a long story short, they have to visually represent a theme. They are still currently in the research and planning phase. I know their ideas may be adequate, but more often than not, they will require more breadth and depth. As a teacher, how can I push them to try new things? How can I get them to think outside the box?

If you can get your hands on Nicholas Roukes’ book “Design Synectics: Stimulating Creativity in Design,” I highly recommend it (Davis Publications, Amazon). He offers some enlightening challenges and ways to think. It’s pretty much a staple in the art room. His “Art Synectics” book is good as well.

Within the first few pages of Design Synectics, he gets right in to offer ways to challenge your thinking about your subject. I’ve compiled them below into a document for my students to consider and apply. Feel free to use it if it makes sense to you as well! You can also view the pages via Flickr here.

What advice do you give to your students of art? Yeah, the list varies, I know. I’ve compiled some ideas from books and sites etc., with Kit White’s “101 Things to Learn in Art School” being the most used. I was playing around with the Moleskine app on my iPad and my one page document on advice ballooned into the 36 page booklet below. It was also time for me to become more familiar with InDesign, so I decided to merge the two ideas. Only the text was done using this and I purposely kept the “art” looking crude. Have a look below and let me know what you think. Feel free to drop me a line if I have omitted a gem of an advice nugget for the art room. If interested, you can also view the booklet by individual page on Flickr here.

Following on from my post about Creativity 2.0 and web tools to use in your class, comes Best Embeds for Educational Wikis and Blogs from Making Teachers Nerdy. She offers similar tastes on options available for embeddable tools on your site. They are broken down into:

• Collaborative Project Tools
• Communication Tools
• Photos
• Student Products
• Video

Go have a look. I was glad to find Calameo as an alternative to Issuu. Calameo allows you to create digital books that also allow video and audio. Sign up required.

I am really loving Issuu as of late. I have written about it before here. As a teacher, one of the first places I go to look for resources is YouTube and TeacherTube. I like to embed these videos into my class websites. Now the next place I will try is Issuu. There are a lot of great resources there that may be untouched, like this one on Notes on Graphic Design and Visual Communication (thumb below). Teachers and students, SHARE your resources! Everyone is always nervous about putting themselves out there in the open but some of the best feedback I have received has been from strangers. When uploading, you also have the option of making it a downloadable PDF. Give it a try. I am currently pushing it in my school. I am considering using it to store my art units for students and then embed them into our class website.