Images

 I love nature.  It fascinates me.  Flowers are probably my most favorite thing in nature, and I love to take pictures of them.  This picture is one that I took in Madison, GA.

 I secretly have always wanted to live in the country with big open fields.  I just think of it being so free.  I took this picture on the way back to my hometown, Valdosta, GA.  I love the open road and the countryside.

 This is a sunset in Valdosta.  I remember driving down the road looking at it, and I just had to take a picture of it.  The colors were so wonderful.  I love the sky; it makes me feel so blessed.

 This is a picture I took in my pool back at home.  My mom had bought bubbles for my younger cousin, so my boyfriend and I decided to blow them.  I snapped this picture as he was blowing the bubbles.

I took this picture one morning before class.  As I walked out of my front door, there were hundreds of birds flying over my head, and for some reason it just encouraged me.

I do not drink regular coke, but I like it when it comes from the glass bottle.  I don't know why that is; maybe the taste is just different.  I'm not sure, but I love coke out of a glass bottle.

I took this picture this summer, right before my dog, Sarah, passed away.  We were in the mountains on vacation.  Even though that was a terrible time for us, she just looks so peaceful in this picture, and it is what I see when I think of her.

Jones sodas are so strong and sweet.  They are probably my second favorite sodas next to Mountain Dew.  The pictures that they use for the label are pictures that people have sent in to Jones, and I just really like the bottle, and the soda.

I took this picture one morning before class.  I walked outside and looked up, and there were so many clouds.  It almost seemed surreal.

I took this picture at Ponce Inlet, just a few miles from Daytona Beach this summer.  One morning we rode bikes to where we would eat breakfast every morning.  It was about a two mile ride.

I took this one night after I had eaten dinner on East Campus.  Clouds are very interesting to me, and they were such a deep color that I had to take a picture of them.

This is the neighborhood that I live in, and it always has the prettiest sunsets.  If I am ever there at sunset I always look outside because they are always so gorgeous.

I took this this summer in my hometown.  I love this picture because I was able to capture the sky containing a storm and a clear sky.  God is awesome.

This picture was also taken at Ponce Inlet.  The rainbow was so perfectly placed right over the ocean that I almost couldn't believe it was really there.

I took this picture in Cleveland, Tennessee.  This summer, we went white water rafting there, and the fields there were absolutely beautiful.  They looked like paintings.

Mobile Apps

5 Creative Mobile Apps

Adobe Photoshop Touch is one of the apps I found very creative.  This app lets you apply professional effects, combine images, and share these with your friends and family through social networking sites.  This app is available for both iPads, iPhones, and Androids.  With this app, you can also sync your files to Adobe Creative Cloud and open them in Photoshop.

Another app that I found that was very interesting and creative was Mark On Call.  This app is very similar to the Floor Planner site we used in class at the beginning of the semester.  This app allows you to use your interior and architecture skills or plan the arrangement of things in a room.  This app would be a wonderful way for teachers or speech therapists to design their classroom or office right on their mobile phone. 

Sketcher 3D is an app that is used to create three-dimensional shapes.  This is a great app for people to create objects or design buildings and spaces.  Anyone could use this app for whatever they are thinking about building.  You could use this app to build a house, car, anything!  You can move, rotate, and scale your objects that you create on your device.

I've always wanted to create my own beat or music.  I have a Mac laptop, but GarageBand confuses me.  This app called Caustic 2 is an app that allows anyone to create digital music with their smartphone or tablet.  It contains synthesizers, samplers, and a sequencer.  People that have reviewed this app have given it an average rate of 4.8 out of 5.  This app is very user friendly and a great way to explore digital music.

I do not have the creativity for drawing, but I imagine if I did, I would often times get inspirations in random places.  Artists can not carry around a large sketchpad and pencils with them all the time, so there is an app that allows you to sketch right on your smartphone or tablet.  This app is called Sketji.  It is a sketching app that allows you to draw strokes on the "canvas" and the app makes it look like the sketch had been drawn with a real brush.   

Puzzles and Gaming

One educational game that I found is very basic, and it is called First Grade Learning Games.  This app is great for first graders to use to practice their math and reading/vocabulary skills.  This game is great for ages 6-8.  It is great for students just starting first grade, but it is also useful for students that need to review or brush up on these subjects.  The recent reviews have given this app five stars, and say that their first grader loves it.  In my opinion, this is a great educational game.

Another game I found is called RedFish.  This game can be used for kids 3-7 years old, and it teaches them to count, read, spell, and even compose music.  On this game, there are more than 50 creative exercises that the kids can use to learn.  Most parents that have written reviews say that the game is wonderful and that they highly recommend it to others.  There are learning activities and open ended play on this game.

123 Color HD: Talking Coloring Book is a wonderful for pre school and kindergarteners.  There are many different pictures to choose from.  Children could choose to color animals, nature, pumpkins, people, pretty much whatever they want!  This is a great game to spark creativity.  Children have many choices of colors, and they have the freedom to color whatever color they want.  Parents have rated this game five stars.

This is such a great educational game called Haiku by PBS parents.  This is a game for kids to be able to describe a memorable moment they've had and learn about syllables.  I remember that whenever my teacher taught us haikus, I had such a hard time comprehending them.  I feel that if I had had this game when I was younger, I would have been able to understand Haikus more.  This is a great learning tool for kids learning poetry.

 

Point of View seems to always be a tough subject for students to understand.  This game called Point out the View allows kids to click on different people and see a room from their point of view.  Depending on where they are standing, the point of view changes.  The point of the game is for the player to show what each person sees from their point of view.  This game would have been so helpful for me when I was just learning point of view.  I think this is a great educational game that all parents should use.

Documentation

The first part of my learning contract was mobile devices.  I searched through many different apps and found some that I thought were extremely creative.  This project was not frustrating for me at all.  I really enjoyed finding these apps.  I even downloaded some of them.  I love how technology has come so far and that we are using it for our benefit.  Instead of just using technology to watch shows or play mindless games, there are apps that spark our creativity, and I think it is wonderful.

The second part of my learning contract was images.  I used pictures I had taken on Instagram on my phone.  I love pictures.  I am the type of person that can go through pictures and look at the same ones over and over.  This has been my favorite part of the learning contract because of my love for pictures, and it has been fun to go back through my old pictures and explain why I took them.  I really think that a picture says a thousand words, and I think that if teachers showed their students pictures of things and made them think about every detail, the students would learn to think more critically.

The third part of my learning contract was puzzles and gaming.  I found five games that I thought would be very useful for children ranging from pre school to elementary school.  When I was doing this part of the project, I couldn't help but wish we had had these things when I was younger.  Somehow technology just makes things more interesting and fun, and if I had had games to help me learn new concepts when I was in grade school, I would have enjoyed them a lot more.  This part of the project was very cool to me and I am glad that I chose to do puzzles and gaming.

Creativity and Innovation

 I chose to do my video on a talent of mine: playing MarioKart.  Because there was so much I could do with this project, I decided to do something fun with it.  I had a lot of fun making this, and with some help from my friends I tried to make it creative.  This project was great and I enjoyed making it.  Here is my video.



As I have said before, I do not consider myself to be very creative.  I have a hard time coming up with things on my own, therefore I enjoy looking at other people's creativeness.  One thing that I love to look at on Pinterest is wedding ideas.  I found wedding photography by Laura Ashbrook and the pictures are absolutely beautiful.  The pictures are so original; I had never seen pictures taken like this before.  I feel like it is very easy for photography to all look the same, but these pictures capture creativity.

Learning and Leading

The four dimensions that J.P. Guilford uses to describe creativity are fluency, flexibility, originality, and  elaboration.  I struggle with originality the most.  I love to paint, but whenever I do I have to get my idea from someone or something else.  I usually get my idea from Pinterest.  I am also not a very good ctitical thinker, so coming up with things on my own that are unique is very difficult for me to do.  I feel like Wallwisher is a good tool that would help with elaboration and originality. Wallwisher would be a good way for people to display their ideas for others to see, and then others would be able to comment on these ideas and add things to it.  That would be originality and elaboration.  I think that Wordle would be a good tool to be used for creativity in a speech therapist's office.  Many students learn better through technology, and kids could look at the word cloud and read what they say.  Creativity is something that some people have more than others, but I think technology can help with creativity if the right tools are used.

Creative from Home

I actually did take a nap on Monday, and when I woke up I decided to paint this.  Painting relieves stress for me, and I find a lot of enjoyment in it.  I got the idea for the painting off of Pinterest, which I did my commercial on, and I just changed the colors to match my room.  There are many ways to be creative, but thinking critically is not something that I do very well.  For that reason, I often times get ideas from other people and morph it into my own.  I wish I was more creative than I am, but I am thankful that I can create things like this painting.