Jun
10
Digital Creativity?
June 10, 2008 | | Leave a Comment
I read an interesting article recently by Anthony Jones titled “Encouraging creativity with digital technology in early primary classrooms”. It was centered around an investigation of children’s creativity during computer-based activities.
Jones (2004) stated that many teachers think as one of the major benefits of technology in the classroom is in “the opportunities it offers for creativity, thinking and problem solving” (p. 1). Prior to this e-learning subject, i certainly wouldn’t have thought of computers as being used to express creativity, but more as a necessity for boring things like word documents and excel spreadsheets.
This investigation was focussed around children in early stage 1 who were all between 5 and 6 years old. In the investigation the children were required (over the period of a term) to produce a number of art works. These were in the form of pencil drawings and directed digital drawing tasks using the software “Microworld” . In both instances, there was evidence of the children using creativity, however it was evident that the computer classes were more beneficial and enjoyable to the children. It was said that after each class the children would walk around the room to see what their classmates had created on the computer and would often be begging their teachers to let them print their artworks to take home to mum and dad!
Through this study, it can be seen that even very young children are capable of creativity when working with technology in a computing environment!
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