Cultivating Creativity: TECHNOLOGY CAN MAKE EVERY CLASSROOM CREATIVE

Wonderful to have been included in "Cultivating creativity" a powerful article in entrsekt magazine (July 2016)...

TECHNOLOGY CAN MAKE EVERY CLASSROOM CREATIVE
Veteran educator and ISTE member Mark Gura of Jupiter, Florida, says "through technology, every classroom can be a creative classroom." Students and teachers can say much more now that there are those wonderful tools to help them say it. It's the democratization of the media, he says - in other words, it's for everyone.

Gura grew up in New York City, where he taught for more than three decades. A prolific
writer, he recently completed his fifth ISTE book, Make, Learn, Succeed: Building a Culture of Creativity in Your School. He also teaches graduate teaching courses online, and as a former teacher of visual arts (among many other subjects) and as a technology director, he says he has been involved in promoting creativity he entire life.

He is convinced that the best place to inspire teachers to be creative is right at the beginning, in our teacher education programs. Classroom teachers need to make developing student creativity a goal.

LIGHT A FIRE
In his own teaching, he sees the power of firsthand joy. 

"The great thing about this is that once a student has had a few experiences like this, the experience of education itself is transformed, as that old saying goes, 'Education is not the filling of a bucket but the lighting of a fire!' What I want people to know about student creativity is that engaging students in activities to develop their creativity is one predictable way to light that fire."

"I've spent a lifetime in pursuit of that, and I think that in the end, it is probably the very most important thing that we educators can do for our students. By using student creativity as a focus, we have  a very clear path to take toward that goal!"