The Creative Classroom with John Spencer
Jun 18, 2026 · 0 min · 7 segments
For years, educational technology has promised to make learning faster, more personalized, and more efficient. On some respect, it has delivered on those promises. But as concerns about screen time…
There's a quiet buzz permeating the room as students jot down ideas, sketch out diagrams of concepts, and get lost in the articles that they're reading.
One girl carefully cuts out a paragraph from a magazine article, and she places it on this continuum she's made, showing the difference between, um, differing views on environmental impact of AI.
Another draws an arrow by an infographic and jots down his thoughts on its accuracy.
Still, another student uses colored pencils to construct a flowchart connecting to an article he has just read.
But then I notice certain students have typed up articles or created infographics using Canva.
Many of the articles were printed off the internet, though most are actually physical copies from magazines.
The students are working on their ongoing choice-based commonplace book project.
For centuries, people kept commonplace books as a way to collect quotes and ideas and questions and observations, all in this, like, hub that was a book.
Rather than organizing information into cute, neat little categories, I guess they would never be cute, but neat little categories.
People would capture whatever resonated with them and would often make connections between ideas.
In many ways, commonplace books were less about storing information and more about cultivating deeper thinking as patterns and insights and, and new ideas emerged through reflection.
So this teacher has taken a really old idea and brought it back to life in the classroom.
She'd read about it on Reddit, and she was like, "I'm gonna make my own commonplace books," because that's what we do when we're teachers.
If you're picturing an interactive notebook, that's close, but it's not quite it.
There's a quiet buzz permeating the room as students jot down ideas, sketch out diagrams of concepts, and get lost in the articles that they're reading.
One girl carefully cuts out a paragraph from a magazine article, and she places it on this continuum she's made, showing the difference between, um, differing views on environmental impact of AI.
Another draws an arrow by an infographic and jots down his thoughts on its accuracy.
Still, another student uses colored pencils to construct a flowchart connecting to an article he has just read.
But then I notice certain students have typed up articles or created infographics using Canva.
Many of the articles were printed off the internet, though most are actually physical copies from magazines.
The students are working on their ongoing choice-based commonplace book project.
For centuries, people kept commonplace books as a way to collect quotes and ideas and questions and observations, all in this, like, hub that was a book.
Rather than organizing information into cute, neat little categories, I guess they would never be cute, but neat little categories.
People would capture whatever resonated with them and would often make connections between ideas.
In many ways, commonplace books were less about storing information and more about cultivating deeper thinking as patterns and insights and, and new ideas emerged through reflection.
So this teacher has taken a really old idea and brought it back to life in the classroom.
She'd read about it on Reddit, and she was like, "I'm gonna make my own commonplace books," because that's what we do when we're teachers.
If you're picturing an interactive notebook, that's close, but it's not quite it.
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