Learning Log – End of Class!

Even though this class has been dramatic and exhausting for us all, I do think that we’ve all gotten valuable perspective and new tools in our arsenal over the past 8 weeks.  For me, I’m happy to say that I found educational purpose in most of the technology we’ve looked at in the class (obviously some more than others), and I do plan on implementing the collaborative and industrious spirit of the Standards of the 21st Century Learner.  The fact that I’ve found myself drawn to the AASL standards is particularly surprising to me  I think because I generally don’t think of myself as a “by the book” kind of person, but I find them more open-ended than most and actually kind of inspirational!  Ha!

Enjoy the rest of your summers, people!  It’s been a pleasure!

Learning Log – Wikis Revisited

I am pleased to say that my opinion of wiki sites has made an about-face.  Before working on our final deliverable for Mod 4, I had a pretty negative view of wikis in general–I thought they were totally limiting, generally unattractive, and not too promising for the classroom.  But after finishing the final, I actually have  a little bit of love for wikis.  I can definitely see how its collaborative capabilities would be a really great way to synthesize multiple people’s thoughts into one cohesive database–and the cross-linking that makes wikis really effective is a really attractive option.  I just think that someone should update the interface of wiki spaces so that it’s a little more attractive–less robotic.  Then it might draw in more casual users.

Learning Log – Wikis

After searching a bit, I had incredible difficulty finding a wide range of wikis designed by art teachers.  I did, however, find several of the same general type:  a sort of home base for students and parents to gather information about the class.  I had been hoping to find some wiki spaces that were predominantly constructed by the students–like in Vicki Davis’s class.

Mrs. Lee’s Art Classroom Webpage is a pretty straightforward wiki, it centralizes typical class paperwork like the syllabus and assignments, but also has a nice section to highlight a student of the week!

Custer Middle School has a pretty nice collection of wikispaces all linked to a main school page.  Mrs. Heiser’s Art Class wiki is pretty great though!  It has a whole bunch of links on the left side of the page that shows different unit material as well as some general resources like vocabulary and curriculum links.

AST’s Elementary Art wiki serves as a really great way to show parents what their students are up to, and also provides students an opportunity to see what older students are doing!

Finally, this wiki about a middle school’s Dragon Art unit is great because it does to a certain extent involve students in the process of constructing the content.  As the introduction states, the students themselves decided that they wanted to do a unit on dragon art, and their teacher assembled some links and materials.  Then the students began to work on their pieces, and updated their individual pages as they went–discussing not only their progress step by step, but also describing themselves and why their dragons looked the way they did.  This seems like the best use of wiki pages in an educational sense, but the others were good for the reasons they were built for.  I think, just like blogging, it’s important to be sure about who the audience is, and create content that’s appropriate.

Learning Log – A Digital Life

What has been particularly striking to me over the course of this class is the widespread dichotomy of attempting to embrace technology as both teachers and consumers, yet finding ourselves unsure of its usefulness in the classroom.  Presumably, the hope is that after experiencing these technologies firsthand and thinking extensively about their uses, that we will bring it upon ourselves to infuse education into the technology itself.  To me, that’s is the trick—infusing education into technology, and no I didn’t write that backwards.  The problem that many of us have expressed (some of us more than others) is that it seems in a way degrading or capricious or wasteful to spend our precious time trying to infuse our education with technology simply because: because the school boards say we should, or because kids these days blah blah blah.

I think the true insight in all of the reading we’ve done so far in the past 6 or so weeks, but particularly in the reading we’ve looked at in this mod is that everyone benefits from opening our perspectives to new possibilities.  The thing to remember is that technology’s only purpose is to make our lives easier and better.  If it doesn’t achieve that, then it doesn’t succeed.  If we keep that in mind, then it’s easy to see what is purposeful in the classroom and what isn’t.  Ten or fifteen years ago, some photographers accepted and embraced digital photography for the sake of being forward-thinking and frankly, just because.  In my opinion, their work is forgettable, and probably has been forgotten to everyone except historians because at the time, the technology of digital photography wasn’t better than film photography, and wasn’t that much easier for that matter.  But in the interim, technological advances have made photography more accessible to everyone, less expensive, easier, and better.  Now only the most die-hard truist film geeks and people who shoot film just because are left in the dark(room), and I ask, “is that better than embracing technology just for the sake of embracing technology?”  At some point, we all have to come to terms with the idea that with the advent of the internet, programmers and coders and other tech geeks are tirelessly working to make every aspect of our lives easier and better, and to ignore that fact is the equivalent of shutting ourselves in the dark(room) and refusing to see how our lives can be made more productive, more purposeful, and more connected.

The classroom should be no different—but keep in mind that the point is to use technology that’s meaningful in our lessons; technology that makes teaching and learning easier and better through (in the words of Universal Design) multiple representations and multiple expressions.  Don’t make your students use twitter just for the sake of using twitter.  Don’t make your students construct a wiki if it’s not fostering new knowledge!  No one gains anything if there’s not genuine interest and everyone’s just getting through it.  But if we can take the technology that’s appropriate for opening up our students’ capacities for learning, and infuse it with an educational experience, then that’s where we find technology’s purpose.

Learning Log – Social Media as a Collaboration Tool – Mod 3 Reflection

Many teachers and other adults in our students’ lives undoubtedly decry social media as a waste of time; personally, I think that that’s just the newest thread in the “adults just don’t understand” dialogue.  To me, social media as an enterprise can be reduced down to the concept of putting your connections to work.  Through our network, we exercise the potential of each other and reinforce the importance of the other people that make up our world.  What one person says, does, or makes can have a truly profound effect on a person across the world.  This, I would argue, is the expression of the fundamental purpose of social media.

Like any other skill or bit of knowledge, it is up to us as teachers to show students how to use it.  Most teachers would agree that it’s not enough to teach students the events of the past as if they exist in an intellectual vacuum—that the purpose of teaching students about our collective history is to illuminate the factors that contributed to events in the past, and to challenge them to see how those events inform our present and our future.  The same is true of literature, science, engineering, and ultimately technology.  It is up to the teacher in today’s classroom to show students the purpose of the technology they’re already entrenched in, and to show them the true potential in it.  Social media helps students connect with their peers down the street as well as across the globe; we should show them how to contribute effectively to that dialogue, how to get the most out of it, and how to promote it to its most purposeful form.

On Social and Collaborative Media – VoiceThread

http://voicethread.com/book.swf?b=2143797

 

My voicethread discusses the influence Google’s various products have on our students’ learning and information processing, and introduces Google’s newest product, Google+.  As Google’s newest and most comprehensive attempt at social media, Google+ is an exciting amalgamation of the best collaborative and communicative features of Google’s other products.  In time, I would imagine the Google+ could attract a huge following, and eclipse more narrow social media tools like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare, by virtue of its wider inclusion of communication tools:  photo, video, link sharing, text chat, webcam chat (with up to 10 users), location stamping.  Because users can organize their contacts into categories, it would make an exciting tool to use to support classroom instruction by encouraging closed-circuit discussion and sharing.  Google+ is still in beta testing, but once it is released publicly, I think it will have a resounding effect on students, and therefore we as teachers should encourage productive learning applications therein.

Learning Log – Goodreads

It looks like embedding a widget from Goodreads isn’t going to happen, since they’re all either flash or javascript based; and to my knowledge, WordPress doesn’t allow either for fear of malicious codes being uploaded onto their servers.  So I’m linking my bookshelf for everyone to see!

My bookshelf is a collection of map and cartography books, which is meant to accompany a personal map-making unit I intend to teach to my students.  I think maps have the inherent ability to tell a detailed and nuanced story, especially if a person draws it himself/herself.  Whether it’s a map from home to school or a map of the world as he/she sees it, a student implicitly places himself/herself at the center of a map, so it therefore is a self-portrait of sorts–one in which the artist shows the viewer how he/she relates to the world around him/her.  I expect that this idea might be quite challenging, so I think having a collection of books about maps and personally-drawn maps, and even stories about the history of maps would be an excellent supportive resource for the unit!

Obviously these reads serve as optional reading for the truly invested students, and since they’re hosted online 24/7, if a student was especially interested, he/she could check out some of the titles over the summer!  But in a personal sense, they act as a wish list, for the future, when I win the lottery and can work on my personal library.  I can’t exactly think of another way that Goodreads could be used, other than to set up a collection of book resources to supplement a lesson…maybe if I was an elementary school teacher and I wanted to embed a widget in an email to parents, including the summer reading list…but other than that, it seems like Goodreads is good for just one thing!

On iGoogle

I had previously tried iGoogle on my personal google account, but ended up not liking it, and I can’t remember why!  They must have changed something about it, because I love it now.  What a great way to save time.  I haven’t been able to find an official twitter widget yet or I’d put that one on there too!  I think in terms of teaching, iGoogle would be an excellent way to keep everything organized–just by quickly glancing at the homepage between classes, I could see if there was any new correspondence or a news item to keep me updated for my classes!  On the student’s level, the same could be true!  If everyone added each other to the chat feature, the class could maintain a collaborative discussion from their iGoogle homepages while working on a Google document or watch a youtube video and discuss!

On Google Forms: A Student Survey

Last semester was my first in my graduate degree plan, and I had decided to ask my practicum students to evaluate my teaching–not only because I was curious whether I came off as flustered as I felt, but also because it was a great opportunity for an INTASC portfolio piece!  I had gone the traditional route (sort of, I actually designed a real fancy form in Adobe Illustrator, so maybe that’s not that traditional) of half-sheet paper evaluations, but now that I know about Google Docs, I’m sure it would be much easier to email them to the students to complete at home!  And that’s not to mention the fact that Google Forms aggregates the data and analyzes it–providing a summary of the responses!  Awesome.

Learning Log – Social Engagement

In my opinion, this mod poses some of the more interesting and controversial content for application in the classroom; by virtue of that discomfort, I am naturally fascinated.  What makes us question the validity of this particular avenue in the quest for knowledge and inform-ation?  I think certainly there is a lot of white noise to sift through in the social arena, but isn’t it valuable to guide our students through the process of culling only the most applicable information in the sea of the internet, and synthesize those bits into something better, wholer?  NETS-S standard 3.c indicates that when students are gathering information, that they should “evaluate and select information sources and digital tools based on the appropriateness to specific tasks,” and 21st Century Learners Standard 1 (particularly 1.1.5) speaks to exactly the same sentiment!  If we as teachers are unwilling to envision the instructional opportunities in media that our students are already investing their time in, where does that place us on the relevance scale in our students’ minds?

I look forward to analyzing the role of social engagement (with both our students and other teaching professionals) over the course of mod 3.  It seems to me that it poses great potential for the instruction and engagement of our students, as well as a casual way to further our own professional development–from our office chairs or lazyboys.