Activity
Ongoing engagement

Daily Creates

Mia Zamora

Mia Zamora

Provides a space for regular practice of spontaneous creativity through mini challenges published every day.

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ACTIVITY PURPOSE

The Daily Create (also sometimes know as ‘Daily Digital Alchemy’ or #DDAs in the context of #NetNarr) provides a space for regular practice of spontaneous creativity through ‘mini’ challenges published every day.

USEFUL FOR

Encouraging fun, playful and creative approaches while building a sense of community in a learning environment. There are no registrations, no evaluations, no prizes, just a community of people producing art daily together.

PREPARATION

Developed as part of the ds106 open course on digital storytelling, the Daily Create is open to anyone who wants a regular dose of creative exercises. The assignments are designed to be quick to do. Link to explore is at https://daily.ds106.us/. New assignments are regularly posted, and there is a vast amount archived and ready for use at any time. Each assignment should not take anyone more than 15-20 minutes. Many take less time.

INSTRUCTIONS

If you want to explore Daily Creates without using the networked context of twitter, simply link to https://daily.ds106.us/. The assignments vary in mode photography, drawing, audio, video, writing, and maybe an oddball one now and then. You can select the Daily Creates you want to do with your students, and have them post their work in a common digital space of your choosing, or on their own blogs. It is up to you to manage where you want students to share their Daily Create work.

Or, you can Follow @ds106dc on Twitter. If you are doing the daily creates in the networked (Twitter) context, once you’ve completed your assignment, follow the instructions on the Daily Create to reply via Twitter. For your response to show up on the Daily Create site you must include @ds106dc in your tweet as well as the tag specific for that day, e.g. #tdc1666. That’s it! It may take up to an hour for your response to show up here.

NOTE: Your tweets will not show up if your account is protected; the API cannot access them.

DURATION

The archive for the Daily Creates is so vast, and there are so many to choose from. It will only take a few minutes to select the Daily Create you would like to use with your students. It is as simple as sharing the link for the Daily Create that you have selected on a common forum you are using with your students. Make sure you are clear about where your want them to post their Daily Create work. It will take the students approximately 15 mins or less to complete a Daily Create and post it.

ADAPTATIONS AND EXAMPLES

  • You can do a Daily Create each day of instruction (hence the ‘daily’ practice), or you can select these prompts here and there as you see fit to get the creative juices following for your students.
  • You share a daily create to do once a week. No matter the regularity, the choice is up to you.
  • You can have the students do this in a more ‘closed’ environment (meant only for you and their classmates) or you can have them do this work in an open networked context (following the instructions to post on twitter).
  • You might also encourage students to remix or riff on their peers Daily Create work, essentially playing off of what their peers have made. Playful remix of peer Daily Creates is especially powerful in growing creative connections between people, and it makes a difference in community building efforts.
  • Reusing Daily Creates: You are more than welcome to make use of our Daily Creates for any kind of prompts for educational or creative activities. Many of them are borrowed or adapted from elsewhere, others have no indicated author. All Daily Creates are openly sharable under a Creative Commons CC0 license (attribution is still nice). If you wish to give attribution, please just give created to the DS106 Daily Create and provide a link to the one you are using. Or add a comment to the bottom of a Daily Create to let us know where you used it. It tickles our little egos.

TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS

The place where you have students post their Daily creates is up to you to determine. A common space (where they can all see their peers work) is most effective.

USEFUL RESOURCES

Watch Video

ABOUT

  • Educator prep: None
  • Student prep: None
  • Asynchronous
  • Shared online space
  • Duration: 5-30 mins

This activity is one of a series of activities from Equity Unbound, focused on equitable online community building. 

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