Teachers can inspire student creativity via Internet and digitally-based lessons. That's one of the messages behind journalist Jonah Lehrer's new book Imagine: How Creativity Works (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

Diverse urban cityscapes and classrooms model the Internet's potential to motivate creativity, a pivotal task for teacher's charged with cultivating creative mindsets needed for a diverse, global future. Creative minds, Harvard's Howard Gardner (2010) reminds us, are at a premium in a virtual world. And group interaction and collaboration play a major role in creative innovation.

"Instead of sharing links with just our friends, or commenting anonymously on blogs," Lehrer writes, "we must engage with strangers and strange ideas. The Internet has such creative potential; it's so ripe with . . .  originality, so full of people eager to share their work and ideas."

What does this mean for the classroom, along with PVHS' own iPad challenge?

Educators invested in advancing classroom technology are charged with sharing ideas and practices both school wide and within the community. Good teaching, found in constructivist, collaborative, talk-centered classrooms, not only inspires creativity, but also, when coupled with digitally based lessons, has infinite potential to transform students' lives locally and globally.