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This article details a group of Jr. High students who designed a solution to Help Sable Islands wild horses stay wild. This relates to the Horizon Report because students had to find a topic of interest, come up with research questions as wells as research and design their own prototype all while utilizing technology available to them. Click here to read more.

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Caitlin Martin. Camtasia is a program that allows teachers to record what it on their screen, then edit video lessons. Lessons are shared to students. Quizzes and links to outside source are also part of the program.
Click here to read about it.

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Even though this article focuses on examples from post-secondary schools, I thought it connected to the idea of students as creators. One of the aims at The Chalfonts community college is to "develop personal, learning and thinking skills, creative thinkers and team workers" through encouraging creativity across all subjects. The article uses an example about a boy who had difficulty writing properly, but when given control of tools and told that he could teach himself, he excelled in coding.

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At a time when many school and college leavers are facing exceptionally tough career choices, they can draw comfort from at least one area bucking the trend in job losses - the creative industries. The latest figures from the government's Annual Business Survey show the sector accounted for 5.6% of the UK economy in 2008 - about 2.3 million people are employed in creative industries including software, fashion, publishing, music and design. In fact, according to the culture and media secretary, Jeremy Hunt, employment in these industries has risen by 1.5% annually while other sectors have been shedding jobs in the economic downturn.

This is particularly good news for schools and colleges specialising in media, technology or the performing arts (and a rebuff to critics who believe "traditional" academic training for young people is of greater value to the UK than learning about animation or how to stage a musical, for example).

But there is a long-standing debate in education about creativity and the need to inject more of it into teaching. Can it really be taught?

At The Chalfonts community college, a non-selective school in Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire, they believe very firmly that it can. As part of an "enrichment curriculum" all key stage three students spend whole days learning how to use video, animation and digital imaging with industry professionals as part of the school's push to develop creativity across all subjects.

"The aim is to develop personal, learning and thinking skills (PLTS), creative thinkers and team workers," says Greg Hodgson, a senior leader at Chalfonts who also mentors students in the arts.

Digital technology such as digital imaging, film, animation, graphics and game-making is also a critical element in the school's GCSE art curriculum where it has, says Hodgson, enabled otherwise under-achieving students and apparently non-creative students to blossom by harnessing their fascination with gaming.

"One student, one of the lowest ability boys I've ever taught, couldn't really read and write properly and staff spent more time talking to him about his behaviour than his work. He particularly flourished when I gave him control of the tools and told him that he could actually teach himself.

"He was coding and writing action scripts using interactive Adobe Flash animation, which is a really high-level skill. One lovely piece of work featured moral dilemmas with the story of a girl who had the opportunity to steal. An angel and a devil both appear in the ether around this girl's head and the reader/viewer has to choose: does she steal a chocolate bar or not? In fact, this is the first stage of gaming: the interactive viewer clicks and decides which line of a story to follow."
Knowledge-driven attitude to learning
Creativity is at the heart of the school development plan for the next decade at Abbeyfield school, an enterprise college, in Wiltshire, in a move aimed at equipping students with more skills applicable to real life and overcoming a "utilitarian", knowledge-driven attitude to learning.

A key initiative under development is Abbeyfield Enterprise Town - a "high street" based within the school, which houses student-run companies, a council (formerly the student council) and even a bank - devised to offer the children "authentic learning" with real-world outcomes. The aim is to develop creativity throughout the curriculum and to link it to real-world experiences.

The school encourages students to develop their creative skills in an enterprise context. It offers Edexcel's Dida (diploma in digital applications) qualification, where young people form companies and design websites and e-logos as part of the enterprise module. Materials are collated using the free software, Openmind 2.0 from Matchware.

Students also work with external bodies. In one project, one school company was commissioned to record some of the work of charity Jole Rider, which sends bikes to Gambia for children to use to get to school. Students created an animated storyboard for the project and then, using digital cameras, animation tools and Vegas editing software, filmed the bikes being loaded on to planes for the flight out. Material was then uploaded to the charity's website.

Projects such as this bring home to children the fact that they are learning creative skills which relate to the real world, says David Nicholson, deputy head of Abbeyfield. "They learn how to communicate something in a moving image or still photography, which hits a particular target audience. It's using the technology and taking the skills they already have even further."

If school budgets don't stretch to acquiring some of the more expensive modelling, design and gaming packages, there is a growing number of open source - ie free - resources online.

One of the most popular is Blender, a 3D-modelling tool which can be used to create models in any subject and can also do animation - any form of simulation, in fact.

The design skills it develops are exactly the ones that the games industry is hungry for, says Leon Cych, a former primary teacher turned education consultant and member of the board of Open Source Schools.

"If someone wants to go into the gaming industry they could learn all the skills from open source software. Things like Blender would be perfect," he says.

Also popular, says Cych, is Google's Sketch-up. Less complex than Blender and used by a lot of schools for 3D modelling, it offers a series of animated tutorials or walkthroughs in the program itself and online to get you started quickly and easily.

"One of the great things about it is that you can make models which can be saved to Google Warehouse for sharing with other users or put on Google Earth, or converted into other file formats that can be exported to other manipulation programs," says Cych.

Other programs that schools find useful, he says, are Inkscape - a graphics editing tool, similar to Adobe Illustrator - and photo manipulation software, Gimp.

"One big advantage of open source is that kids can use it in school and then install the software on their computers at home without worrying about licensing, so it enhances home school links for learning."

Cych has compiled a list of open source 3D-modelling tools for use in education. (To visit the list, you will need to open and account at Wikispaces.com and then request entry to the wiki.)

Creativity now ranks with literacy and numeracy

Creativity, in fact, is now becoming a sought-after skill in all walks of life. According to a survey, Creativity in the Classroom, by digital media specialist Adobe, some 77% of employers and higher education lecturers quizzed said that they viewed "creativity" - interpreted as the ability to generate ideas, developing online content, delivering persuasive, polished presentations or being imaginative problem-solvers - as an "as an essential or important skill", alongside the basic ones of literacy and numeracy.

But many also felt it was lacking in prospective employees and undergraduates. And both bosses and lecturers called on schools to do more to instil creative skills in their students, citing the use of information and communications technology tools as an ideal way to do so. None of which will be news to teachers, who have repeatedly said there should be more scope for creativity in the tightly bound and crammed curriculum.

Kate Pullinger, a lecturer in creative writing and new media at De Montfort University, specialises in online literacy projects for young people. Her digital fiction work, Lifelines, has been shortlisted for an award at the national technology in schools show, Bett 2011 (Olympia, London, 12-15 January). She believes that it is impossible to ignore the outpouring of creativity that technology has triggered in young people.

"One of the most positive things about new technologies is the way that new forms of both 'publishing' and 'broadcasting' are available to anyone with the technology required and that kids are one of the main drivers behind this democratisation of access to media - from making videos and films for YouTube to creating music using Apple's Garageband to publishing photostories online via Flickr," she says.

"Allowing access to these technologies in the classroom from primary to higher education can only enhance communication and creative skills, which, at the end of the day, are two of the most important qualities required to be employable."

* At Bett 2011, Kate Pullinger is giving a seminar on digital literacy on 14 January. Adobe will be launching a new creativity toolkit for teachers.

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Get creative in school with digital media

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At a time when many school and college leavers are facing exceptionally tough career choices, they can draw comfort from at least one area bucking the trend in job losses - the creative industries.

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Wally Fischer (Start post with your name)

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Wally Fischer (Start post with your name)

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Write one or two sentences that describes your resource (link to an article or explanatory video) related to this aspect of the Horizon Report.

Press the "+" button in the lower right-hand corner to get started.

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The showcase series spotlights the most urgent issues in higher education. For each topic, we've gathered the tools and resources you need into one place, to help you guide your campus forward.