DEVELOP TEACHERS' CREATIVITY WHILE WORKING IN A BUILDING-BLOCK VISUAL PROGRAMMING ENVIRONMENT

The purpose of the paper is to describe a model for developing teachers’ creativity during the design of their own educational resources in a building-block visual programming environment. The aim is to provide a rich description of creativity complex dynamics at stake during the design of didactical resources. The study attempts to propose an innovative model for using Scratch as a creative teaching and learning strategy.

Introduction:
Rapid technological advances and deep changes in many aspects of human activity marked last few years. Such changes have stimulated much discussion about the role and processes of education, and about the role of information and communication technology (ICT) in teaching and learning.

The new standards identify several higher-order thinking skills and digital citizenship as critical for students to learn effectively for a lifetime and live productively. These areas include the ability:
• To demonstrate creativity and innovation;
• To communicate and collaborate;
• To plan strategies to guide inquiry, make research, locate, organize, analyze, evaluate, synthesize and ethically use information from a variety of sources and media;
• To think critically, solve complex, multidisciplinary, open-ended problems, and take decisions;
• To use technology effectively and productively;
• To evaluate and select information sources and digital tools based on the appropriateness to specific tasks;
• To make innovative use of knowledge, information and opportunities to create new products.

Authors such as Rhodes (1961) and Torrance (1963) stressed the importance and urgency for teachers to be creative.
In order to understand the place of creativity in education, as well as to identify the teaching strategies, which can best foster teachers’ creativity, it is first necessary to define and understand the concept of creativity itself.

The definition and characterizations of creativity vary from one researcher to another. “Creativity is a state of mind in which all of our intelligence is working together. It involves seeing, thinking and innovating”. This statement demonstrates that creativity is the combination of many intellects and is not its own independent intelligence. While the mental process of creativity is hard to identify, “we know creativity when we see it”.

Rhodes (1987) suggested that definitions relate to four different potential research areas:
1) the person who creates,
2) the cognitive processes involved in the creation of ideas,
3) the environment in which creativity occurs or environmental influences,
4) the product that results from creative activity.