After speaking with one of my students about how important creativity was in the classroom, I'm both encouraged and frustrated with how students view "creating."
Many students enjoy being able to do something different in the classroom than the regular worksheets or note-taking, especially when there is technology involved. They get to use what they are most comfortable with, and it's not pencil and paper. They also really enjoy getting to collaborate on projects when technology is involved, but as I would expect, only if they are able to choose their own groups. In fact, I recently had a class in which a student refused to work with someone else because of his sexual orientation. While this isn't acceptable, I have a hard time knowing how to handle such situations. This, like much of the technology we are using, is something new to classrooms.
One of the biggest detractors, according to my student, is that sometimes students just want to "glide" through the class with doing as little as possible. Allowing them to create something new doesn't necessarily instill a motivation in them to do well on a project. Instead, all they hear is that they will have to do much more work than they usually do in class. This becomes especially difficult if a student doesn't have a creative mind.
What I got from this conversation was that students need choice when creating something in class, or when allowed to exhibit their creativity. Allowing this choice would hopefully weed out the nay-sayers and those kids who believe that the project or creation is just more work. While it might be, it also will probably be more effective than other activities, and we need to allow students to see this as well.
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