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?