Anchoring Creativity

In her book, Leading and Managing a Differentiated Classroom, Carol Ann Tomlinson refers to "anchoring activities"as a "task or set of tasks to which students move when they complete an assignment."  One of the challenges in teaching with a Moodle course and digital devices after teaching in a literacy classroom for the last five years, was figuring out what those anchoring activities would be, how to manage them and establish routines for them, thus allowing differentiation practices to happen.

Tomlinson writes:
Characteristics of High Quality Anchor Activities:

• Activities are focused on essential learning goals (not trivial)
• Activities are engaging (not rote practice)
• Activities address a broad range of student interests and help make content relevant for students from a variety of backgrounds.
• Activities address a broad range of readiness needs and vary from concrete to abstract, structured to open-ended and simple to complex. 
• Activities allow for a variety of ways of taking in and expressing ideas that address a broad range of learning profile needs.
• Activities are presented with clear directions so students know what to do, what the final product should be, how they will know when they are finished and what to do with the work they generate.
• Activities incorporate a monitoring system to the teacher and students can recognize the level of quality produced and any need for adjustment. 

I would suggest that the Bloom's Taxonomy should also be included in the ways to engage students in learning, after the "assignments" have been completed.  Something I have kept in mind in designing the activities, is for sure the "what is going to engage them" but also the "Creating" part of Blooms.  What are ways that they can generate new and creative ways of thinking, products of ways of viewing things?  How can they plan, design, produce or invent a representation of their learning using the digital device?  We started with one at a time, and have gradually increased our repertoire of activities.  So, instead of "anchoring activities" I have been thinking of them as "anchoring creativity." These have been the things that they have WANTED to do, and asked to do.  Oh, and one project that I thought would be engaging was met with a great big FAIL.  Glogster.  Ugh.

Here are examples of some of the anchoring activities we have had during different units of study with the Moodle course:

First, students created a "Googlio" or a Google site used as an efolio.  One of the reflective practices is to have students write about their thinking using a Metacognitive Frame.

Or, students can create timelines to represent different time periods that we are studying.  Alternatively, they can create timelines about their own life for their "All About Me" page. Or, when working on ANY section of time, they can create a timeline about any unit of study. 

Also, once we learned how to make short Animoto videos, they can make different videos about any subject or section in time during our unit of study.