Last Thursday some colleagues and I were treated to a day with the Apple Educators team at Ciragan Palace Hotel. The hotel is number 14 in the 15 most expensive hotels in the world. Luxury and History rolled into one. I admit - I was a little sceptical about the day - I was expecting to have Apple products promoted all day long. We were all given ipads to play with but apart from that there was little mention of Apple products. We were there to look at teaching and learning and that we did.
My favourite part of the day was with Ewan MacIntosh. He was talking about creativity and problem solving and how we can use some of the models for creative thinking on how to help our students become great inquirers. He has been working with schools to help them develop classrooms which create inquiry. One of the things he had them doing was to generate as many questions as they could right at the start of the Inquiry. They write them on post-it notes. Then they classify them as Googleable and nonGoogleable. The Googleable questions they then go and find out about directly from the Internet. They gather as much information as they can to become experts in their particular interests. Then they try to find experts in the fields to directly ask the questions. The students become problem finders and then problem solvers.
Ewan MacIntosh speaking about problems and problem solving on TEDx