How to Boost Creativity In the Classroom

Written with Alfonso Mendoza

Creativity is an essential skill students need to succeed in school and, more importantly, in life. It improves problem-solving, contributes to happiness in school, and gives students a sense of purpose. 

However, kids today have fewer opportunities to develop creativity than ever before. Before the age of screentime, children spent most of their time outside, playing with friends. Now children spend far more time watching TV or Youtube videos, playing video games, or texting. These activities don’t give children as many chances to develop their creativity.

Creativity is an important human ability. It is a process of generating new ideas, products, or solutions. Creativity can also be seen as the act of producing practical and original outputs in arts, communication, entertainment, design, science, and technology.

Creativity is usually considered property of the individual instead of coming from social and cultural factors. A person with creative imagination is often believed to have more creative potential than people who lack it. Nevertheless, creativity has been argued to be influenced by social factors such as culture and education.

Almost every educator would agree that creativity is essential; budget cuts to areas of education like art and music programs demonstrate differently. Creativity is a valuable skill, and there are common strategies teachers can use to help students develop it.

How to Boost Your Creative Skills?

• Generate ideas: The best way to come up with novel ideas is to generate as many as you can. Try to do this in an organized way, using exercises that include techniques such as listing, brainstorming, and mind mapping.
• Use your imagination: One technique for improving creativity is to imagine what would happen if you could control one of the variables in a given context, or if you could change something about the context altogether.
• Make mistakes: It’s important not to be afraid of making mistakes when coming up with new ideas; you should come up with new thoughts by changing existing thoughts and see where they lead you

With technology filling classrooms across the country, teachers have the tools to enhance student creativity and turn consuming information into creating content.

 There happens to be a plentiful bounty of tools and resources that teachers can utilize to reign in wandering minds. Many of these tools are free and easy to use, making it even more convenient for teachers to implement. Below are a few we would recommend.

Glogster Glogster EDU is a global education platform that allows students and educators to create interactive online posters that include text, photos, videos, graphics, sounds, and much more.

Storybird Storybird finds visually striking artwork and images from artists and illustrators around world and invites students to turn those images into creative stories.

Prezi Students and teachers can implement images into presentations using Prezi’s easy-to-use platform, as they combine all the standard components of a normal presentation with visually stunning effects.

Slidely Slidely is a free website and app that allows students to create eye-catching video slideshows that are accompanied by music and other effects. 

Generator Students to create their own storyboards using provided scripts and other free resources.

Tiki-Toki Tiki-Toki is a free web-based software that empowers students to create interactive and visually stimulating timelines. captions.

ThinkLink ThinkLink is a platform that helps anyone create and discover rich and striking images. ThinkLink allows students to transform those images into interactive and educational stories by adding music, videos, and text to their selected images.

Creativity is a skill that can be developed in students and yourself with practice. 

• Take frequent breaks from your work: This can be as easy as spending 10 minutes outside or getting up from your desk to take a walk around the office. Going back to work will give you fresh ideas and make you more productive.
• Limit distractions: Close any programs you aren’t using and create an environment in which there are minimal distractions, such as music or phone calls.
• Talk to people about their creative process: This helps you come up with new ideas while giving them some insight into yours, too!

Just Start

We believe in You!

Let’s change our mindset and start creating! Teachers who frequently assign classwork involving creativity are more likely to observe higher-order cognitive skills, problem-solving, critical thinking, making connections between subjects in their students. And when teachers combine creativity with transforma