One thing I love about sharing resources is that people find their own ways to use them. I originally created our voting wheels to bring some interactivity to a consultation. I was running focus group sessions with both young people and adults and wanted a tool where participants could share an opinion anonymously and create immediate visual feedback. It worked really well – people found them fun to use; we could all see any consensus of opinion in the room and it was a good way of opening up discussion.
It was great then to witness them being used as part of a presentation to about 50 people. The presenter used them to check in with the audience; whether they had agreed or not with the points he was making and when to move on to the next part of the presentation. This sums up the edupunk ethos, DIY resources can be a better fit for your purpose than a fancy education tool. And ultimately you and your group will work out how you want them to work for you.
With that in mind, I have been designing a new tool to support reflective practice based on flipbook mini-comics. The idea is that you can choose your path of reflection by flipping the book in different directions revealing new prompt questions to support your reflection. Again, it’s a DIY resource; you can tailor the questions to suit you and then work out how you want to work through it. And, if you’re a literal thinker, it will drive you mad and you’ll just want to unfold the paper until it’s no longer a flipbook at all! If you’re curious enough to find out more, packs of five different flipbooks to support creative practice are now available in the shop and you can watch a quick show and tell video.
If you have a go at making either of these resources yourself or buying them in the shop, do let me know how you’ve been using and adapting them. It’s great to learn from others.