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Students leverage technology to take an active role in choosing, achieving, and demonstrating competency in their learning goals, informed by the learning sciences.

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Students critically curate a variety of resources using digital tools to construct knowledge, produce creative artifacts and make meaningful learning experiences for themselves and others.

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Students recognize the rights, responsibilities and opportunities of living, learning and working in an interconnected digital world, and they act and model in ways that are safe, legal and ethical.

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Students use a variety of technologies within a design process to identify and solve problems by creating new, useful or imaginative solutions.

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I Can Statements for Speech and Language | I can statements, Speech and language, Speech

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Oct 27, 2017 - Hi Speechies!   I LOVE the idea of using I can statements in my speech room. I keep them posted where the kiddos can see them and refer back...

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Students develop and employ strategies for understanding and solving problems in ways that leverage the power of technological methods to develop and test solutions.

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Students communicate clearly and express themselves creatively for a variety of purposes using the platforms, tools, styles, formats and digital media appropriate to their goals.

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Students use digital tools to broaden their perspectives and enrich their learning by collaborating with others and working effectively in teams locally and globally.

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When I started on this series of Design + Mental Health features, I'd assumed it would be fairly straightforward: I would speak to some designers about their mental health problems, contemplate how being a designer exacerbates them, and look at ideas of how agencies and clients can be more understanding of those designers affected. Then back it all up with the studies and figures we've all seen weaving their way around the internet about how creative types are more prone to anxiety, how prescriptions are on the up, and so forth.

But, like mental health conditions themselves, things weren't as simple as that; they were knotty and complex, much like our minds. And instead, I found myself agreeing more and more with certain interviewees at the dangers of flippant mental health reporting, and began considering how "ghoulish," to quote one, it is for us to become unwilling "tourists" into mental health issues. By "tourists," we mean the surface-skimming, mildly self-congratulatory flurry of blogs, Medium posts, and clickbait articles that tout mental health like it's the new hashtagfeminism.

Mental health is serious, ugly, and deadly-yet we're seeing it co-opted by brands and agencies alike in the name of thinly veiled marketing ploys and social media kudos.

And it made me rather uneasy at the prospect of this feature being lumped in with those sort of pieces.

Mental health needs to be discussed with the consideration and thoughtfulness it deserves; not as a sort of extension of "branded content" put out by a creative director waiting for an online round of applause from his share-happy mates.

It's been said before but it bears repeating: many are willing to discuss their experiences of depression and anxiety, even of anorexia; very few will open up about those mental illnesses that are still widely-though mostly privately-regarded as frightening and unpalatable. Things like borderline personality disorder, psychosis, and pathological sexuality aren't as easily wrapped up into neat sound bites accompanied by images of sunsets with aphorisms that might as well read "cheer up, sad sack."

But however much certain diagnoses fit within the Overton window (arguably, anxiety and depression are now widely accepted within discourse, unlike the conditions mentioned above), they all deserve to be discussed with respect, and with an open mind. This means moving away from widely-shared beliefs that any sort of deviation from being mentally "healthy" is inherently bad.

Robert Ballard, a freelance designer in London points out that the way we consider certain conditions to be wholly problematic is somewhat problematic in itself. "Someone shared something on social media a few months ago and the upshot was that there's a disproportionately high number of people with mental health issues in the creative industry, and it's a problem we should be addressing," he says. "And it made me think, as soon as you use that terminology it becomes a problem.

"In a way, areas like the creative industries, or being a musician or an artist, were areas where being a bit crazy or having a slightly askance view on things wasn't a problem as much as actually almost a kind of necessary aptitude to have to do that job."

He points to Ed Sheeran as exemplary of 2017's rather vanilla predilections when it comes to culture. "Popular culture as a whole has actually lessened its impact and become a lot more safe and stable because of an almost total absence of people you could describe as being a little bit 'crazy,' for want of a better word."

Ballard says that having prominent, successful creative people with mental health issues that manifest in ways that are clearly unpleasant-and a society that allows them to be so-is a crucial yet diminishing thing for other people who are suffering. The problem with that, I offer, is that we end up romanticizing the idea of the "tortured genius" in a way that could undermine the seriousness of such conditions. For the most part, we see the work; not the struggle. Isn't that just as dangerous?

"I think people are going to have problems anyway," Ballard says. "If they're going to have some sort of lineage they can identify with, or people who maybe stand in opposition to normality or a normal daily routine but have still found a way to 'be,' then it allows them the opportunity to express themselves. It's good for people to look and see those people as role models, in a sense."

Perhaps he has a point. The creative industry very often prides itself on valuing difference, but how often does that manifest itself in supporting and valuing those whose minds work in different ways sometimes in ways that can be difficult or challenging? Mental health, after all, isn't just about fragility: it can make us not just tricky to be around, but at times rather vile.

People often talk about the times they've been too anxious to work, or so depressed they've spent a week in bed; yet few admit to the times that being unwell has led to them being violent, or promiscuous, or unkind to those around them as well as themselves. Mental illness can make us selfish, unpleasant, smelly, and nasty people.

"That's why I really rate Tracey Emin as an artist," says Ballard. "People really want to polish and finesse their lives, probably because of social media, but she did [ My and said 'this is it, these are the condoms, the spliff butts, the vodka, this is what being depressed looks like, and it's shit and it smells and it's horrible.'"

Many of Ballard's thoughts are echoed by Eric Maisel, a trained psychotherapist turned "creativity coach," who turned his back on the psychotherapy model in his bid to "support the paradigm shift from seeking meaning to making meaning." Essentially, he rejects the idea that certain psychotherapy models purport the idea that an "expert" knows what's going on in another person's head better than they do.

Crucially, he rejects the definitions spelled out by (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) and ( International Classification of Diseases), ideas that pin "anxiety" as a "mental disorder." He describes anxiety as a natural "feature of our learnt warning system against danger... We don't do a beautiful job of dealing with what's dangerous, but that doesn't change how we feel or react."

"There are scores of reasons why creative folks experience more anxiety without it being a mental disorder."

For Maisel, one of the fundamental reasons people in creative roles are more likely to be affected by anxiety is because they're constantly being forced to make choices. "Choosing provokes anxiety," he says. "Most professions don't demand that you have to make one choice after another, which provokes anxiety. Going into the unknown-even if we're adults-going to that blank canvas or place of not knowing can feel dangerous. [As designers] we will be judged, criticized, and pushed back, and we hate that. People hate putting things out into the world and getting nothing back. We all care about reactions and a thing's response in the world. If anyone had to put things out in the world like creative people do they would experience anxiety."

So is anxiety just anxiety? Are we wrong to differentiate between anxiety as a noun, and anxiety as a "condition?" It's dangerous to sum up depression as flippantly as feeling "a bit sad," but maybe some labels can be counterproductive. Then again, the last thing anyone with mental health issues needs is having their experiences minimized.

A recent is among the great smoldering pyre of online fodder that cheerily points out how "creative" professionals-"creativity" defined as "the production of something new and meaningful"-were about 8% more likely to suffer from bipolar disorder than the general population (with that statistic in writers raised to a startling 121% more likely). And while we've seen at least a 121% increase in articles like this recently, Simon Kyaga, the lead researcher of the study on which the piece is based, makes some salient remarks in arguing against diagnostic definitions of "sick" and "well" in mental health patients. "The underlying traits [of these illnesses] might confer advantages, e.g. creativity," he told Fast Company . Discussing bipolar in particular, he says:

"When you're manic, you get more things done, but you also get more and wider ideas. And the more ideas you have, the more creative you are."

He's right, of course. The click-and-share headline would read, "Mania! The 1,03,997 projects they started next will BLOW YOUR MIND!"

So how could mental health be discussed more effectively and thoughtfully by the creative community? For Ballard, the proof isn't always in the discussions, but the work itself. "It would be much more impactful and genuine thing if you [saw their work] and felt you could relate to the sadness or the elation or the joy in that, and I can see that the person that came up with this has felt the same way as I have on some occasions.

"I would much rather give them that acceptance when I see something so deeply personal and it connects with me, not talking about it or breaking it up or being, like, 'we need to talk about mental health in the creative industries' for a bit of social media content."

The conundrum in any discussion of mental health, and indeed creativity, is the thorny subjectivity of it all. We can try and describe as best we can how we feel-creative people are more adept than any at showing, if not telling how they feel-yet for all the most heartfelt and expressive and raw missives in the world, we cannot truly ever know or judge how another person is feeling. It's a weight that bears down heavily, writing a piece like this; how do we engage with mental health issues but not trivialize them? How do we warn against such trivialization without adding to it?

Part of the way through writing this piece I came rather unstuck (nothing to do with writing the piece, a natural and expected cycle) after a few glorious months of manic positivity and productivity. I find this experience best summed up by T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land: "I can connect/Nothing with nothing"-a sudden bleak inability to think; or read; or speak; or keep my eyes open. A strange prolonged time of waking up all bloodied for no apparent reason, with all the odd hallucinations and an urgent deluded drive to detach from everything that's actually very important-partner, job, home city, and so on. Which in the grand scheme of it, is really nothing, but feels quite nasty.

Things have been nastier, for most people. After it all passed, I wondered if any of it was there at all. Was I just making a big deal of it? When we're depressed or anxious and we get over it, were we just making a big deal of it? Are these labels helpful, or ultimately destructive? Maybe we just needed a nice snooze, and a glass of water. Maybe it's impossible to manage to tell other people what will make them feel better in a blog post, diagnosis, or even a prescription. One person's mental health experiences may be the key to their creativity; for another person, it might be the poison that stifles it.

Because "mental health" isn't a catchall term, we have to be more even more conscientious about discussing it in a way that's productive, inclusive, and sensitive to the horrible but occasionally rather brilliant nuances of it all. "Even with people who have very low-level anxiety and depression, you'd be hard-pressed to find two people who have had stories and reasons for them being in that situation that were similar on anything more than a surface level," says Ballard.

"When you reduce those things to a soundbite, that's the issue."

"I think maybe what's slightly different in my brain to what's in 'normal' people's brains helped me to [be creative] it in the first place. I think now what's slightly different in my brain to what's in other people's brains has precluded me from turning it into a stable, progressive career."

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We Need to Talk About How We Talk About Creativity and Mental Health

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When I started on this series of Design + Mental Health features, I'd assumed it would be fairly straightforward: I would speak to some designers about their mental health problems, contemplate how being a designer exacerbates them, and look at ideas of how agencies and clients can be more understan

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Screencasts are an excellent way to creatively communicate with either students, patients, or coworkers. Sharing your screen with peers allows them to see and understand your thought process while explaining certain things

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I can statements individualize how a person is feeling and empowers them and helps them understand that they are in control of their emotions.

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Flipped learning allows all students to be able to excel because instruction is recorded. Students can go back to the instructions given if they are having difficulty understanding the task that needs to be done fully.

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The Shift from Engaging Students to Empowering Learners

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This video explains the importance of shifting from engaging students to empowering students. The empowered classroom shifts by giving choices to inspiring possibilities. This means tapping into students interests and incorporating it in lessons.

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The coping skills toolbox is a great way for patients who are beginning to understand and get a grasp on their own mental health journey. It equips them with different tools that they can use when they are feeling overwhelmed.

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A creative outlet can be the difference between sinking or swimming, they can be helpful tools to channel our anger and frustrations and sadness into something else, whilst increasing our skill of something we enjoy. The sense of achievement I feel after writing a post I'm really proud of can be enough to drag me out of a depressive slump and get me feeling productive and motivated again.

I've always been a creative person, so I've tried most of the things on this list at some point, but if you don't know where to start, or would like to try something new, here are some ideas:

Drawing

Even if you can only draw stick men, this is a fairly easy and inexpensive hobby to pick up. No matter your style or skill level, most people can easily pass the time doodling. And if you're really no good at it, there's always colouring books.

Painting

Like drawing, this can be such a release, but this is something I've never been good at, although I wish I was. Luckily I follow a very talented painter who shares her amazing work online. You can buy Jemma's art here.

Making Music

In short, I'm not musical at all. However, my boyfriend plays the guitar and it always cheers him up when he's feeling a bit low. My brother taught himself how to play the guitar and in just a year his progress is pretty impressive. Even just listening to music can drastically change your mood.

Scrapbooking

I can't mention this without thinking of Leslie Knope, but it is a hobby I've always wanted to try. It's a great way to relive memories such as family holidays, and keep them forever in a pretty little album.

Journalling

You can rant about your day, make lists, or maybe try some bullet journalling to keep you organised and self aware. Journals can be great to look back through in years to come. Hang on to them.

Writing

Are you an avid reader who dreams of writing their own book one day? Creative writing is so therapeutic and you can write anything you want: short stories, long epics, mystery, comedy, poetry - you won't know what you're good at until you try it!

Sewing/Knitting

As well as being a valuable life skill, it's also incredibly calming and rewarding once you have a finished piece, and once you've got the hang of it you can knit scarves for everyone on your Christmas list.

Photography

I love going for long walks and taking pictures of nature, and the bonus is that it encourages me to go outside which is so important for good mental health. There are an abundance of photo challenges out there if you lack inspiration, and as almost everyone has a smartphone now, this is one of the easiest hobbies to start today.

Filmmaking

I love film; I'm obsessed with all the aspects that go into making one but I've never ha a go at it myself. You could go it alone, or gather a couple of friends and make a fun day of it. You could make a silly short film, a gripping thriller, or a thought provoking documentary. You're the director!

Makeup

Makeup is an art. I follow the incredibly talented Adele and I have no idea how she draws such intricate lines on her EYELID. There are plenty of tutorials out there to get you started - why not take that unloved palette out and give it a try?

Cottage Crafts

Jewellery making, soap making, card making, the list goes on. You'll be the best gifter at Christmas!

Woodworking/DIY

This is a great skill to learn if your depression has a tendency to make you feel useless. You can craft some really beautiful and unique items once you're skilled enough.

Programming

You could create mods, apps, games, anything! If you've got a tech brain, this one's for you. What would you create?

Cooking/Baking

How therapeutic is cooking? Not only is it an important life skill you should definitely know how to do, but you get to eat as well! Check out The Anxious Cook to see really amazing recipes from someone who uses cooking as an outlet for their anxiety.

Youtube/blogging

And finally we get to my main creative outlet - you're on it right now! There are blogs and videos about anything nowadays: Lifestyle, fashion, travel, gaming, the list goes on. If you're passionate about it, you can talk about it. You can even start a blog or a channel about one of the many hobbies listed above!

Did I miss any? What's your creative outlet?

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Creative Outlets for Managing Mental Health - No Light Without Darkness

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A creative outlet can be the difference between sinking or swimming, they can be helpful tools to channel our anger and frustrations and sadness into something else, whilst increasing our skill of something we enjoy.

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Creative Outlets for Managing Mental Health Article

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Creative Outlets for Managing Mental Health Article

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This article describes the importance of variety in different coping skills. This can vary anywhere from blogging to woodworking.

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Online Journaling is a great opportunity for students to explain their thought process in creative ways.  Teachers and health care providers can have access to their cite and gain information about the student/patient

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Red Reasons to Give to Charity Infographic

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In my poster, I decided to cover the importance of online health and wellness for people who experience issues with mental health.

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Common Sense Education provides educators and students with the resources they need to harness the power of technology for learning and life. Find a free K-12 Digital Citizenship curriculum, reviews of popular EdTech apps, and resources for protecting student privacy.

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In the digital citizenship column of common sense media, it provides several different lessons that address the importance of digital citizenship

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This article explains the complexity that mental health is with every individual. No two people are going through the same thing and that is important to realize when helping someone through tough times.

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During my interview with a Guidance Counselor, one thing she told me is how she has to uniquely cater to every single one of her students needs. One student may need her to reach out more than another student does.

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LucidSpark is a collaborative whiteboard app that allows students and coworkers to work on the same page at the same time. This app allows students to solve problems and communicate with peers while doing so.

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Creating my own personal learning network allows me to connect with other people who are in my profession. I have found great articles and ideas from people I would not have found elsewhere.

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Aw snap! Google Earth isn't supported on your browser. You may need to update your browser or use a different browser. Please see our system requirements for more information. Chrome is a great choice and you can download it here.

Or if you're feeling adventurous, you can try Earth anyway by choosing an option below.

Learn more about Google Earth.

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Aw snap! Google Earth isn't supported on your browser. You may need to update your browser or use a different browser. Please see our system requirements for more information. Chrome is a great choice and you can download it here. Or if you're feeling adventurous, you can try Earth anyway by choosing an option below.

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The headspace app helps people struggling with their mental health, it allows them to have access to several different gateways to distract themselves or receive help or advice

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This survey I created helps professionals get a grasp of where their students are at without calling them out individually in person.

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How to spot the signs of mental illness video

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How to spot the signs of mental illness video

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To learn how to deal with mental illness, it is important to understand it and evaluate it. This video shows possible ways a person may be acting if they have mental illness and how to help

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Google earth is a great way to understand the lifestyles of others and experience what life looks like on opposite sides of the globe without leaving your house.

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Google forms is a good way to check for understanding over a vast majority of people in a community.

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Teaching digital citizenship training certificate 

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Teaching digital citizenship training certificate 

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The digital citizenship training brought to light the importance of training your students to be good stewards on the internet. I thought that the set up of the website was very helpful and useful.

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QR codes are a good way to connect with students with avoiding in person confrontation which can be uncomfortable for some students. The code can pull up a link where students can share their thoughts. This can be used for educational purposes as well

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Loom is a great tool for students to use when responding to fellow classmates or the teachers previous video. It gives the teacher a clear understanding that the student is getting ideas out of the material and gives other peers a chance to see what students took away from their own video.