Class is officially over, but....

A most interesting thing happened today. Propelling Lukas along thru packing for college, we had to explore the RIT site for housing info - room assignments, basic room floor plan, types of dorm room accommodations ( bed - of course; desk? dresser? closet? etc.) My daughter, Liv, was sitting nearby, doing research online for her translating job. ( Translating Latin for a professor who's writing a book.) We found his room assignment (a quad room with 3 other guys- all from NY) but still did not know what the basic room setup was for packing. Lukas said, after looking for about 5 min. that there was no more info on dorm rooms, and started looking at his favorite online comics.


Liv looked at me and began talking about something that really surprised me - coming from her( age.) She said that kids her generation and younger expected to find exactly the info they were searching for online immediately - that is within the first search. Generally speaking, they didn't know how to find the info if they couldn't find their answer right away - but quit/shut down or say that info wasn't on the web. Apparently, one of her roommates last semester was student teaching and created some Web quests. The answer was included in the given link, but not necessarily obvious, therefore requiring a bit of exploration at each link. My guess is that most most web quests are that way since you want the students to sort thru info, find the pertinent stuff, report back or build on it, etc. Liv and Bri spent many a night discussing this learning issue that Bri had stumbled upon and wrestled with as a young teacher in training. Lukas, my own kid, was exhibiting the same problems, with a basic search for info. (Yikes - my own kid should know how to keep digging for an answer!!!!) The best part was that Liv pointed it out to me - not the reverse. I'd seen this before with my kids and wondered about it. Now one of these same kids was aware of and talking about it, to me!

So, what to be learned? We still have to teach kids that the laptop is not just an answer box, and that the knowledge we seek is not always a simple-one-click away. Research and discovery is, to some degree, trial and error, seeking out in the main ways and the by ways - boulevards large and alleys small to find the best answer/ the right answer.

I want to help/teach my students to be willing to spend the time to explore in order to discover the best information available.

Kudos to Sandy

Many thanks to Sandy for creating this fun course. It's been helpful to explore teaching tools offered online. This has been a good class for helping me to focus on exploring various types of tools!! Many thanks!!!

PLN

Personal Learning Network... mine's huge. So huge that there are areas that are left unvisited for days, months. However, I love having all those resources at my fingertips. We did not explore listservs, but my guess is that's really old school, these days. Comfortable for me, tho. Similar but more current would probably be Ning or even Facebook. Hmmm wonder what's on Facebook for art teachers? Ultimately, lots has to do with my time, my needs, and my abilities to navigate the site. Likewise for all these types of tools we've explored on the web with the last 9 lessons. When it all boils down to it, I am still teaching art - visual art, and I need to weigh the opportunities online with the hands-on opportunities in my classroom.

If only I had each child in LD for an hour every day......

Task 10

Finally, the end, and to some degree, some of the best info yet. Itunes U looks fun - just checked and discovered some info my daughter ( studying for masters in Theology and Art) will love - Intro to Biblical Hebrew! Who'da thought?

I'm guessing these classes could be downloaded to Ipod or laptop and further my own education. Coolness. Not sure how much there is for us down in Lower Division, however. Some exploration just showed a few things for Elementary classes in general.

Man, I am struggling to get back to Itunes U - they dont make it easy!!! agggggggggggggghhhhh.

Presentation Tools ( T9)

Ahhh, now we are getting somewhere. Liked the Slideshare - I've joined a powerpoint sharing group before - I should see if I can find that site, too. So we could create a pp here and then link it to our class web page for students and parents to access, right?

280 Slides is also cool. Wonder why you'd use this instead of Powerpoint? Yes, options are more limited than Power point. Or maybe it's for folks who don't have Power Point installed on their laptops ! ? Here's Sandy's tutorial for 280 Slides. ( Thanks, Sandy!)

We've explored so many different things in this class already, and I am not sure how much I will actually integrate into my classroom, partly 'cause I'm overwhelmed by the variety of tools, and not sure how they will apply in the art room. Guess I have to do some creative reflection on this class when we are finished.

glogster question

Last night I was thinking about glogster and wondered if the creator of a glog can return and edit it? I wanted to save it in the middle of the work, but it was difficult to tell if that was possible, so I left the whole thing up on my screen to finish later. Now I'd like to work on it again. Anyone know?

Glogster

All day it took, mostly 'cause I couldn't decide what to do. Here it is http://hillmjan.glogster.com/Artists-Birthdays/ . Yes, lots of ways to use this. Googled glogster lesson plans and saw a really cute one - a whole class had written poetry and each created a glog of their poem. They were linked to a class glog showing each child's face and first name. Very cute. This could be an easy way to create a quick discussion on an artist - without creating a power point - all the images on one page.

Collaboration tools ( task 7)

Checked out and joined Wiggio. Not sure I'll use it, but hey, it's cool to play with!

Skype is wonderful - I used just the audio when my daughter was in Greece two years ago. The sound of her voice was wonderful and we were able to chat often. Since then, technology has touched both of us via laptop cameras, so if she - or one of my sons- goes far away, we'll become steady users of skype. Lukas is headed to NY state for college and asked me to use Skype instead of my requested weekly phone call.

Skype would be really cool to use with a class from another state or country. Not sure how we'd do it with art unless we shared ideas or critiqued each other.

Task 6 Digital Storytelling

Digital Storytelling seems to offer much wider flexibility as a teaching tool, compared to the online writing tools we looked at previously. Kerpoof and Animoto seem to be much closer to the heart of creativity in writing - and illustrating.

I liked the layout of Digital Storytelling which also gave some helpful prompts and information for teachers like me who are not language arts specialists. Here's another site on Digital Storytelling which is similar. This second site is also brief, to the point, with various types of supportive information.

Kerpoof was limiting because of the precreated backgrounds and pictures. Guess the art teacher in me cannot be subdued. I ended up creating a drawing there, "Ahem." I'll try to create a link.

In Animoto, I made a short video of the quilted accordian book, The Mistaken Anole: An Underwater Odyssey I finished a few weeks ago. Animoto was pretty fun and easy to do, altho yes, no words are included in the story.

Still, after all this, I keep thinking of Flickr and Photostory ....

New Orleans - and back

Whew! My husband and I took 4 kids to theEvangelical Lutheran Church in America's National Youth Gathering in New Orleans.

What a wonderful time! All the kids (yep - 37,000) spent at least 1/2 a day working somewhere in the city on a service project. The total hours of work finally tallied equalled one person, working 4 hours a day, 7 days a week, for 90 + years! My group took a bus to Dr. Charles Richard Drew Elementary, a K-8 school in the 9th Ward, where we scraped and painted classrooms. Our evening gatherings took place in the Superdome, daytime activities took place at the Convention Center. Frankly, it was very moving to be in New Orleans even tho many signs of Katrina in tourist-traveled areas have been revitalized.

Something I'd like to discuss with this group was one popular (rampant) kind of social networking - texting. I have a new respect for the Middle and Upper Division teachers - how do you all control this during class? Talked with my college age daughter about it and she apologetically said that her peers were equally bad - texting others during conversations with her, for example. Clearly this is a case where technology has shot far ahead of current social 'rules.'

Task 5

Online writing. Not sure how I'm gonna use this.

-Tried the Fairy Tale one, and wrote a sentence for the princess's name. A sentence including the meaning of her name. - Oh yeah, and I named the King "King ___" so every time the story mentioned the king, it was "king King ____. " Guess you'd have to go thru the whole thing and discover all the glitches or twists and turns. Pretty prescriptive - not enough options.

-Loved the notion of the Bayeux Tapestry one, both for medieval exploration and the art, but struggled to get it to work. It's pretty cool. Sent this to my daughter (ready to enter grad school) who loves medieval art and she enjoyed building a story with it.
-The Story Creator is pretty cool - reminds me of the "escape the room" games my kids love.
-The Digital Story Kit looked interesting - a building of a video story.
and so on.

Most of these sites look good, but artistically they fall short for me. I wonder if there's a way to scan your own characters in and then build a story. The format of the Make Belief Comix is straightforward and simple to use - makes the story easier to share when building the illustrations are quick to master. Maybe after one or two uses it would become too simple?

So here's my simple comix. Already wanted more emotions than it gave me. Frustrating!

The Hoffman Challenge project is finished! That's what I've been doing these last days (weeks) - working on my entry. The HC is an annual quilting/sewing challenge, using a particular fabric as a part of the final work. It's my summer art 'assignment' for myself.

As I worked, I tried to incorporate Flickr into my process. A few things I learned quickly - to resize the pics so as not to use up all my space on just a few shots; and resizing pics takes an extra step (when time is valuable.) You might wonder why I take pics during the process - and it's not just documenting the process. The pics help get a perspective or distance in viewing the 'whole' in a way that one cannot do by hanging it up and looking at it from across the room. Before digital photography was so easy, I used a peep hole - you know - to peep thru a door to the other side. You peep thru it backwards, getting a huge distance to evaluate the composition of an artwork.

Here are more pics of my work on Flickr.

Tomorrow 8:00 a.m. will find my husband and me in a van headed to New Orleans with 4 kids from our church youth group. We will meet up with 36,994 other kids and assorted adults for the ELCA's National Youth Gathering. Yikes!!! We will return next Tues. At that point, I plan to live with my laptop to complete this class.

one more question

How can I alter the sequence of entries in my blog? I'd like the letter pics to be a visual title to Task 4. Tried changing the time entered as was suggested when I checked in 'help' but it didn't work.

It's that learning curve thing...

OK. well, you guessed it - I found Flickr. Joined (previous to this summer.) Found some cool groups to join, an Art Journal group, and two of my favorites- Every Day Matters, which is related to Danny Gregory's site, and the best one - Smell -O-Vision! The SOV group features only pictures which are visually strong enough to suggest a corresponding smell/scent/odor. There are lovely flower pics as well as yummy food pics, along with less obvious but equally compelling visions which compel your scent memory into action. There were many other Art teacher/Art class sites for later perusal.

Then I explored the sights - ahem - sites for apps. Found a cool one. Tried to insert it into my blog. Unfortunately, the app. didn't allow for spaces between words, so Lukas showed me how to insert a break (this blog composer won't read the typed symbols "less than, b, r, greater than") in html code. That worked, and when previewing the inserted letters, it looked cool. However, the blog preview does not necessarily show you how it's really gonna look in your blog. Also saw a few apps inspired straight from the art world (how art informs our reality!) - the Warholizer and the Hockneyizer.

Two apps I'd like to use are the Trading Card app and the Bead Art app. The Bead Art app. is particularly cool for me, personally - similar to mosaics, but on a very small scale. Bead weaving! Didn't look that close, but I hope it includes specific bead colors or numbers. The TC app would work nicely in lots of situations - perhaps even to scan drawn portraits rather than photos. Last year I had some kids making trading cards of cars and another group designing new and different creatures similar to Pokemon, or Bakugan. It would be cool to scan in their drawings or even help them do some cool stuff via scanning and working on the art thru one of the art programs ( PSElements/Gimp/ArtRage.)

Will get to the snip tool eventually.

I do have questions, tho.

1. Does the Flickr site have a place for each member to link to specific apps that they'd want to use? It seems to me that I'd forget about some apps otherwise.
2. How do I adjust picture sizes to insert into my blog? The letters from Flickr would be so much nicer smaller, reading horizontally.

Flickr

Ha ha - Joke's on me. Apparently I signed up with Flickr sometime in unremembered past, but not a single pic to memorialize that point in time. Too bad signing up doesn't osmose all the user info into your brain immediately!

More on Wordle

Flipping through the latest issue (Summer 09) of Fresh Paint, the Florida Art Education Association's quarterly magazine, I noticed an article submitted by J. Marshall Adams, Director of Education at the Vero Beach Museum of Art. The title, "Experiment with New Toys: Wordle.net" caught my eye since Wordle's one of the apps we've been learning about.

Hoping for artistic insight and ideas on stretching Wordle in the art room, I read on. While the article was interesting, there wasn't much in terms of pushing the envelope with Wordle. One idea Adams suggests is interpreting poetry by typing in important words (repeatedly) to alter the results - pretty straightforward, altho word choice could be emphasized here. The idea of using Wordle to analyze advertising text was cool, but again, a straightforward idea. Other, more common uses were also mentioned.

Even tho Wordle is cool, it's more of an analytical tool than a creative, open ended tool. A fun stepping stone towards higher order thinking ....

Today I tackled VoiceThread again- I'd used it in an online art class I took last year thru the Metropolitan Museum of Art . That class was great and we used a number of different forms of online communication - the teacher had a blog, our class used a few wikis in order to collect info for group assignments, all thru Elluminate. We also used Voice Thread to discuss various works of art and how they related to our theme ( Landscapes.) We had a few classes where we met online in real time, as we were scattered across the US. It was fun 'cause we used microphones, had the ability to 'raise our hands,' vote yes or no, and there was also a way to have a written conversation with classmates and teachers at the same time. The art slides were on the screen, with our teacher asking us to draw or write on certain areas to identify or change the artwork, based on our discussion. If I recall correctly, there was also a camera focused on the group with the teacher at the museum since those sessions took place concurrently with a workshop at the museum. That was fun. I'd like to take that class again next summer.

So Voice Thread could, as I previously mentioned, be used for an art commentary - whether it's a famous artist or our very own Berkeley student artists. It could also be used to create a step by step demonstration - similar to a power point. Guess the difference would be the sound - that is the instructor's voice in the Voice Thread it's like a talking PowerPoint. A student could use VT to talk about their own work, whether it's one piece or many. Hmm maybe it could be a comic strip with sound? similar to Smilebox. Guess Smilebox has easy add ins to make it pretty, but is missing the opportunity for many folks to comment.

After reading in Kelly's blog about MindMeister, I thought I'd try it and I am completely frustrated. As far as I can tell, my clicking seems to have random effects on the map so I get some commands to work and then others don't. Since I was in Explorer, later, when my patience has returned, I'll try it via Mozilla.

Have I mentioned how much I hate the learning curve?

Wow! I finally get back (road trip to Chicago,) begin assignment #2 and get sidetracked! This site http://www.sublackwell.co.uk/ is so beautiful. Altered books!!! heh heh - love 'em!

Ok.
I found info on how to use Wordle and I have to try it. I'm trying to figure out how to stretch this app towards the art room. No brainer - using an artist's bio, or using info about TAB (Teaching for Artistic Behavior - the approach I've been using in my classroom the last few years. ) But what more? Will let this 'brew' for a while.

Here's O'Keeffe on Wordle. http://www.wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/975400/Georgia_O
Is it a copyright offense to copy and paste someone else's text into wordle without giving credit?
Is it possible to 'reverse' Wordle - take a word cloud and return it to text? My guess is probably not.

Here's how the Wordle based on O'Keeffe's bio looks.

Now if I could just get some of the settings to work the way I want to.
bleh.

Wow - as always, I get so impatient with my learning curve on new technology stuff. It's taken me WAYY too long to get this post up. So, for the future, I should really be relaxed but more focused about this kind of stuff. Save procrastination for another day .

So, first, an overview:

How would you define web 2.0?
The web now is growing up - evolving, changing. while it's still a great place to find information, it's become a place to share, discuss, and evolve information. The ability to do this with other like-minded folks has increased along with the types of ways to share, discuss and evolve information. What's really cool and requires the closest to a paradigm shift for me is the opportunity and eventual expectation that each person can and does add to the group information learning and exploring. Downside? I wonder if the concept of copyright can get blurred by this sharing of info, and, in part, loss of the original author. The owning of information and 'core' of an idea will, no doubt, change along with the growth of web 2.0


What three important things have you found out about 21st Century learners?
I love the fact that brain neurology confirms that students think and learn very differently than we did/do. How we teach has got to keep up with the changes in how the students learn.
As technology looms larger than ever in our lives, our students need skills that use the technology to their (learning) advantage. Learning how to access information, and then evaluate the quality of that information is important. Then, using that information in a new way(creativity), with other folks ( collaboration) . Folding technology skills into Blooms Revised Taxonomy ( which SO supports the arts!! Hooray!) is an exciting approach to teaching the 21st Century learner.

Name some 21st Century skills and which ones do you think are most important?

Basically, the skill sets seem to be divided into the following groups, :

• Using technology -basic literacy in approaching various fields of knowledge
• Creative and critical thinking - using the information in new and innovative ways
• Communication - working with others to utilize knowledge and share that resulting knowledge clearly with others
• High quality results - the final project/product/ results indicate thoughtfulness beyond simply regurgitating information.

The article found on 21st Century skills found here http://tiny.cc/s36sF , organizes the skills a bit differently -

• Creativity and Innovation
• Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
• Communication and Collaboration

While all of these aspects are important, my particular loves are in the creative and critical thinking. Seeing and sharing the world with originality are at the core of creating. I want my students to take information - either ideas or art supplies, and step out into new worlds of thinking and ideas.

This takes some internal strength and audacity - but folding, stretching and pulling ideas in new directions is the core of moving forward in our world. This is where the critical thinking and problem solving jump in.

Hand in hand with that vision and problem solving is the ability to communicate ideas, particularly new and unusual ideas, since the idea is nothing if no one understands it.

It's difficult to pry these skills apart - they work together for maximum effectiveness. So yeah, we need all of these, but my favorite are the creative problem solving skills.

Read this article and think about the assignments and assessment tools you have been using? Are you assessing 21st century skills? If so, what has worked well for you in this area? If not, what unit could you most easily change to begin to move your learners to acquiring information that will be remembered long after the test is over.

Wow. This affirms a curricular change I made two years ago. I went from presenting lessons where all the students created similar artworks based on a specific skill set. Now students choose between studios designated loosely by supplies. They define their direction; they push themselves. There's lots of exploration and problem solving happening both in groups and individually. While my preference is that each student primarily work independently, it's surprising to me to see the numbers and frequency with which students work in groups, spontaneously created for various reasons. Each time the class visits, I present a new technique to be added to one or more of the studios. Immediate use of this demo is optional for the students; still, they are exposed to yet another idea or technique, which sometime later they might choose to utilize. The assessment of this style of teaching is something I struggle with since it's difficult to assign a system of objective growth measurement to a class of 20 individuals, many of whom are creating projects unique to the classroom.






I'll tackle these in the next few hours-min's- days, and probably years.

Summer as always puts on winged feet - the days pass so quickly, perhaps because they are so valuable. So this Web 2.0 class works for me since it can happen at my leisure and during quiet moments.