Using a podcast in the classroom

Podcasts are so useful in th elcassroom. In the world of art videos there are so many that are old, and unfortunelty, boring. It is really great to find a resource that can provide podcasts and vidcasts that can show and tell students how to do a specific procedure. The podcast that i found is based o na vermeer painting it is produced by the National Gallery of Art. The vidcast show how Vermeer used a paint layering technique to gain depth and color concentration in his painting "Girl with the Red Hat". The narrator along with the video show exactly how he accomplished the final effect of a lovely girl with a blazing red hat.

This specific vidcast is extremely useful in the classroom because in order to show paint layering techniques you either have to layer wet paint on wet paint or you have to wait a day in-between each layer. Now as a teacher I would be showing a live example no matter what but having a video that shows the entire process at once shows the students the final product. Vermeer and the girl with the red hat

Using interactive tools for Global Communication

Working from both Mod 7 and 8 would be quite easy when designing a lesson for global cooperation. Lets say I want my students to organize a global effort to clean up their community. I would have my students create a video that would lay out all the concepts for the project.
The students would write scripts and create a video that would then be published using teacher tube and they would also post an audio file along with some pictures on voicethread so that students around the globe could chime in with ideas or suggestions.

The idea of the lesson would be for students to organize a massive clean up of all the garbage and debree in the area and lay it out in the center of town for everyone to see. {eventually getting rid of it} my idea for the project is to not only clean up the town but to expose the "refuge" that no one wants to think about once they drop it on the ground. I would have students collect then "display" the trash so that it cannot be ignored. The community would need to see what they have been adding to their town/city. The global effort would come in the form of an organized time, or day that each participating class would perform this clean-up/exposure. The entire event would be documented and posted in video format or pictures on flickr. Students would then be responsible for talking to each other and listening to what happened in each site of participation, and sharing thoughts with the class.

Websites for Global Communication

The first site that I checked out was Kidlink, I really think this website woudl be wonderful exposure for students since there are children from all over the world logging on everyday. I could easily have students log on and search the site for another shild that seems to have similar interests and talk to them about a project they did. We could come back together as a class and compare what students from around the world have done with the same topics as they are studying. I'm sure kids in Greece are learning about different plant life than we woudl be here in America.
The other website that I found interesting is Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration (CILC) Collaboration Center . I went through multiple aspects of this website and it seems very professional and reliable. I could see this site benefitting students and teachers because the projects that are being collaborated on are on a larger scale and involve issues that effect daily life. The success of the CICL is also an important aspect. MAny of the projects that the organization work on collaborate with specific results. One project was based on the traffic congestion in the city of Indianapolis. After one year the project included over 400 students around the country all connected by videoconferencing.

Each of these sites would be a great resource for the classroom not only to show that you can be involved with issues around the globe but that solutions are possible and working together using technology is easier than ever before. These sites are different in the sense that there is more adult involvement associated with CICL than with Kidlink. Kidlink seems to focus more on the interaction and CICL has specific agendas that are the highlight of the site.

Videos for the Classroom

I love the video of the two high school boys throwing on the ceramic wheel. I teach ceramics and it is fascinating right from the start but it would be great to play this video for my students and then do a live demonstration for them. The video about the one minute painting done with spray paint is great too. Allot of my kids are really interested in graffiti art and spray paint art so showing them easy ways to use templates and cut outs that they could make at home would be good for them.

Gabcast! My first Gabcast! #1 - First Gabcast

Just saying hello

Mini autobiographies

I wasn’t sure how I would really interact with the tweets that I would be following for this past week. I have trouble sometimes remembering to tweet because I don’t think that anyone would be interested in what I have to say in regard to my daily life. Well as I followed the twitters that I chose I realized that I is fascinating getting a small inside look into someone’s life. It’s not to intrusive and just intriguing enough to keep me interested.
I guess I would be interested in following a tweet of an actor or celebrity that I found interesting. I am going to look some people up and see what a week in their life is like. In a way it is like a mini autobiography but interactive. I would like to have read Julia Childs tweeter page as she worked out recipes or Kurt Vonnegut while he was editing a novel I know it sounds silly but I bet that they would have had a lot to say.

Twitter in the classroom

I have been thinking about ways that twitter would be useful in my classroom, and I think that some reasons are obvious. Students can tweet about assignment and questions they may have as they work on them. But also they can run ideas past each other in a very direct forum. The advantage of twitter is that it is very assessable from your phone. Text messaging is becoming ubiquitous with students these days and twittering is a great way for them to be in contact with one another. They could ask a specific question in relation to an aspect of an assignment they are working on. They can post events that are happening in their lives personal or otherwise.
As their teacher I could assign specific twitters that they could follow, maybe in current events and then we could discuss the tweets in class. Maybe for an art project we could print out all the tweets from the week from all the class members and put them into a collage that would make a statement about our public/private lives?

My Bloglines

I guess I wasn't sure how bloglines would really be useful to me until I got my first installment of new feeds. I can now see that if I was teaching, I could check in with my trusted educational blogs through my bloglines to see what is new as apposed to searching through each blog. The time saved would be huge, no more individual searches, everything is right there.

But bloglines are still useful whether I'm teaching or not. I have recently started reading the New York Times online and i added that to my feeds. It's so quick and easy to see only what I want to see.

Art Education 2.0

This network seemed especially wonderful to me. It is a social network for art educators and there are so many things available on this site. There are forums for exhibitions, places for students to go to learn about animation software, there are ideas for projects and examples given of projects that have been done successfully. I will be exploring this network in detail asap.

Hyperdrive Knowledge Comsumption

A learner is like a kite, it needs cooperation from the elements around it to sore, and once it is up and moving it cannot help but be noticed by those that take the time to see it and recognize its feat, and therefore effect their perception of the world.
I thought a lot about what sort of analogy I would like to write and the idea of a kite seemed relevant to me. After listening to a couple videos and reading the article by George Siemens I decided that the image of a kite represents the interconnectedness that is necessary to learn and quire knowledge. A kite is a wonderful concept, but unless it is up and flying it does not live up to its true potential. Just like a learner, who does not continuously acquire knowledge in order to flourish they too would just be a “nice concept” but pretty useless.

I found Siemens statement in The Changing Nature of Knowledge compelling and encompassing, he said, “The network that learners create becomes the learning” This was a semi new thought for me. I guess when you think about it, it makes perfect sense, we are all gaining knowledge from one another and each experience that we have, when shared, affects those around us. Technology has moved us into a speedier exchange of knowledge. Now instead of just books, that take a long time to be published and then read, and classes, which can be costly, we can access free information on the web. The age of hyper drive knowledge consumption is here. Karen Stephenson states

With in Siemens article Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age” he sites Karen Stephenson who writes "Experience has long been considered the best teacher of knowledge. Since we cannot experience everything, other people’s experiences, and hence other people, become the surrogate for knowledge. ‘I store my knowledge in my friends’ is an axiom for collecting knowledge through collecting people (undated).

This seems to sum it up we have to learn to depend on each other to an extent. We need to be aware of social sharing networks and immerse ourselves in new ways of exchanging knowledge.

Blogs in the classroom

When I think about students and how they use the Internet I immediately think of facebook, myspace, websites where you can download music, youtube.

If those are the sites that kids are visiting then I need to figure out a way to get them to pull useful information from these sites and link them to what is happening around them and in the classroom.

Aesthetic learning is something that I hope to incorporate into my teaching and something that I believe all teachers should be thinking about when they design a lesson.

Aesthetic learning is a "critical reflection on art, culture and nature" and I believe that viewing learning through an aesthetic lens is crucial to helping students become well rounded and inquisitive inside the classroom and out.

Providing a blog space where there is access to the sites that students are visiting as well as sites that I feel are important for them visit keeps them in the same place. They don’t need to leave my blog to search for a friend or post a question about class or put up a homework assignment.

I am not currently teaching but this would be a great start to a website that could become more my students than my own. Giving them daily links to visit that talk about upcoming shows, or new art, artists things that went on in class or a continuation of a discussion is what will hopefully keep them coming back.

Once the blog environment was established with the students, I could start to interact with them on a deeper level by asking questions in response to their posts and figuring out their interests, hopefully expanding upon what they are writing by providing sites for them to explore and ideas to think about.

So basically to sum this all up, I believe that blogs in my classroom woudl be useful for
1. Keeping my students connected with the latest "happenings in the art world and beyond"
2. Allowing them to talk to one another about what they read and see and listen to
3. Allow then easy access to classroom material and a place to ask questions and post assignments