Final post

Through taking this course I've found that my views on technology have shifted considerably! I have been introduced to so many new cool new resources, from text alerts, to QR codes, to weebly.com,vocaroo and story bird. At first I saw technology as something that could get in the way in a visual arts classroom, but now  I see it as something that can be integrated smoothly and enhance student learning and work. Some concepts that I enjoyed learning about this quarter was video production! I had never worked with imovie before so it was great to get some practice using it in this class. It is such a simple and streamlined application, I can certainly see integrating it into my art classroom. I would love to have students make videos showing the process fo their work, or them acting out the lives of famous artists. Videos are such a  fresh new medium, I think that they can really save a lot of classroom presentations from becoming boring power point marathons. 

One obvious barrier I foresee when it comes to integrating technology is having regular access to computers and cameras. I know that not all school districts have a blossoming tech department so it may be a challenge to find a school that has the ideal 1:1 ratio of students to computers. I think a few ways I can try to combat issues like these is by using technology in group work. I think it would be preferable for assignments such as videos to have students work in groups of 2-4. I would also consider looking into grant writing to afford my school more technology resources. 

Something I am exited about in regard to technology integration is having a  chance to play around with programs like Photoshop and indeisgn. I think these programs are where they future of visual arts lie, and it will be a huge benefit for me to become more familiarized with them. I think that having a grasp on these programs will open huge doors for students, allowing them to create and design physical publications and anthologies of their work.

Mystery Skype

           Last week we had the unusual and exciting opportunity to set up a mystery Skype call with another class of students! Mystery Skype is unlike anything I've experienced before, it is a real life game of twenty questions between two classrooms in different parts of the world! We were fortunate enough to have some very adorable opponents, a class of 4th graders in Australia! While the purpose of a mystery Skype is to discover and learn about where your opponent is from, their thick accents gave them away almost immediately. Luckily, our somewhat plain voices posed a challenge for them and kept the fun of the game alive. My favorite part of our mystery Skype was when the students offered us advice on what it takes to be a good teacher, I always get a kick out of what kids have to say! I learned about what a neat tool Skype is for teaching geography, this is something I never would have thought of before this experience. I would be very interested in using Skype with my classroom to talk with artists or museum staff, I think this could be really fun and useful for secondary art students to learn more about professional artists. 

Education.sykpe.com is an awesome resource I just discovered through this class. A few lessons I discovered through this source were

So, You're An Artist!: Meet Julie Chibbaro and JM Superville Sovak, authors of INTO THE DANGEROUS WORLD 
This lesson shows students the creative process of a professional author and illustrator. Through this lessons students will learn some new drawing techniques, how to shape a story, and how to borrow from other artists and authors. This would be an awesome project that covers a lot of ground in terms of art and literacy. 

4 Shading Techniques to Improve Your Artwork
This lesson covers the basics of:  

• making a value scale
• transferring shading techniques to a final drawing
• blending, hatching, crosshatching, and stippling techniques

This would be an interesting lesson for me to incorporate because, I'm afraid to admit, I really hate teaching shading! Its a lesson I feel is often pretty boring and dry, so having someone who enjoys teaching it more than I do would be beneficial to my students! 

Peer Reviewed Journal Summary: A Learning Ecology Perspective: School Systems Sustaining Art Teaching with Technology

Summary of:  A Learning Ecology Perspective: School Systems Sustaining Art Teaching with Technology.

            This article outlined how art is an integrated subject, and therefore can be a perfect platform to introduce people to new forms of media. Art is a subject that lends itself to many other disciplines, and in this article they found that technology integration through arts has three main implications:  

1.Ecological Attention to Technology Integration  

2. Human Infrastructure for Supporting Art Teachers' Technological Engagement

3. The Art Teacher as a School Technology Leader.

            Essentially the first implication means that technology use in the art classroom can help a school achieve technology integration, if technology exists in the art room, other teachers will feel inspired to collaborate lessons. 

The second implication suggests that if there is school wide support for introducing technology into the art room, than successful projects and practice will be put into place. This is because some of the main issues that hold back technology integration are lack of time, resources, and little support.

 Thirdly, the  Art Teacher as a school technology leader tells about how Art teachers who have experience in technology can act as tech facilitators for their school or district. Having an in school tech support will help the school develop professionally and stay relevant.

I chose this article because I wanted to read something that related directly to my content area, as well as to technology. It is nice for me to see concrete examples of how technology can be integrated into the art classroom. I believe that this article would be an interesting or useful read for other educators because it highlights how art educators can assume a fairly important leadership role within their schools and communities. By having art educators well versed in technology they can assume an elevated and important role within their school context.

Citation: Ching-Chiu, L. (2011). A Learning Ecology Perspective: School Systems Sustaining Art Teaching with Technology. Art Education, 64(4), 12-17. Retrieved May 10, 2015, from http://web.a.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.library.wwu.edu/ehost/detail/detail?sid=b166aa75-6bdc-4b20-88410520b43b2810@sessionmgr4003&vid=0&hid=4112&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ==#db=aft&AN=508440642

Today we are going to be talking about assistive learning technologies! Assistive learning technologies can be anything as simple as a pencil gripper, to something as complicated as speech recognition software. One form of an assistive learning technology I was impressed by was the SMART board (you can out find out more about them here!  http://education.smarttech.com/) that we saw in the EATRC. One feature of the SMART BOARD I really liked was the spot light effect, the spot light lets you highlight certain areas of the board. This would be great for learners who need help focusing and finding key information. Using a smart board to accompany your lesson is also a great way to help students who cant keep up with taking notes from a teachers voice alone.  The SMART board also has a feature called a curtain, where you can hide information from students, this would be great to keep certain parts of the lesson a surprise, I could also see this being used during a spelling test.  

Other cool uses for smart boards! 

Take a look at this downloadable app that helps you manage your classroom by visually showing your children when their volume level is too loud. What a neat class room management strategy!!
http://www.allstudentscanshine.com/2014/04/apps-for-classroom-management.html

Here is another app that lets your students know how much time they have left to work on an assignment!
http://mattbgomez.com/great-online-visual-timers-for-kids/ 

Supporting Readers and Writers with interactive websites

Oneword.com is a website dedicated to getting your students to start freewriting. When you first open the webpage you will be given a word at the top of the screen which you are instructed to write about for a full 60 seconds, it does not matter what you write, it just matter that you write. Once the 60 seconds is up you have the option to publish your freewrite. The best entries are posted on oneword's blog! This would be an awesome daily activity for students who have trouble getting the writing process started. Oneword is a low commitment, low stress way of integrating writing and technology into the classroom.

Popplet.com is an awesome resource for students who are visual learners and organizers. Popplet allows users to create unique mind maps that help them organize their ideas quickly, and colorfully. Popplet would be a great pre writing tool for short story projects, essays and other written assignments.

Vocabulary in the classroom

At first when I read this article I was having a hard time connecting it back to my content area of Art. I was puzzled by the shift in focus to vocabulary instruction in our ITT class, until I realized that the majority of my classmates are Elementary ED folks. They, unlike me, will be formally teaching vocabulary nearly every day!

With that in mind, this is what I took away from the article: Vocabulary instruction is HUGE when it comes to the success of students! It is important to teach vocabulary because vocabulary is directly tied to reading comprehension, and if we want our students to understand what we assign them, then we must be responsible for strengthening and building their vocabularies.

One method to do this that interested me was eVoc Strategy 10: Combining Vocabulary Learning with social service. This strategy detailed a website called freerice.com, free rice is an online game that shows students a word, and gives them four possible definitions. For each correct answer, freerice donates 10 grains of rice to a country in need! How cool is that? As the students continue with the game the word difficulty increases. This is a great tool that can help introduce new words to students with a low vocabulary in a fun an rewarding way. Similarly, it is also great for students with an excellent vocabulary, as the word difficulty increases the longer you play, introducing them to harder and harder words.

Personally, I would love to teach vocabulary with technology by creating short themed videos. The field of Art history comes with many terms, and I think it would be great to make videos showing images and footage of different sculptures and famous architectural elements. If I were to alter the vocabulary assignment we are working on in class currently, I would have my students create short videos defining a particular vocab word in many contexts, as well as acting it out in a quick scene. You can imagine it might be something similar to the 'letter of the day' skits on sesame street.

Other tools that intrigued me in regards to teaching vocabulary were online tools such as wordle, and visualthesaurs.com. I think that these are great resources to have when teaching vocabulary because they offer a more visual narrative of a text. Students can copy and paste an article into wordle, and see what the key words and ideas are of the text. This helps gives students a 'big picture' of what they are learning. Similarly, Visual Thesaurus helps students see the connection between words and their relation to other types of words.

Blog Review

Today I'd like to give all you art educators out there some  blog reccomendations!

First up, is my all time favorite,  Cassie Stephens from http://cassiestephens.blogspot.com/ .   She has an awesome blog detailing her experiences as a K-6 Art Educator! She does incredible things in her classroom to help students learn about Art from all over the world! She collects objects and artifacts from different cultures to help immerse her students in Art History lessons. Another thing that impressed me about her classroom is how she paints the windows of her room (not only to reduce distractions from the playground outside) to mimic scenes of Paris, Japan, and Egypt, this really transports her young students to far away places! Check out her blog, she posts many great lessons that can be used and altered in your own classroom! 

Another blog recommendation I have is http://www.theartofed.com/.  The Art of Ed is a great resource for educators, it has interviews with many real art teachers from all grade levels, as well as free lesson plans, advice, and classroom tip posts.

Finally, I would recommend you check out http://jamestownelementaryartblog.blogspot.com/ . This blog is run by two teachers, Ms. Worden and Mrs. Telsma. They work primarily with elementary age students, and they show case a variety of awesome art projects. What I like about this blog is how the teachers include their learning goals for the projects in their blog posts. This is really helpful for educators like me who are just starting out and getting the hang of lesson planning. One other great things about this blog is all the images they include in the posts, they show students at work, learning targets written on the board, project instructions, and final products held by proud kids!

Hi everyone! I am starting a new blog for my technology integration class! Here is our first assignment for the blog, enjoy! 

        As far as technology in the classroom goes I tend to have some wishy washy feelings. As a future Art Educator I think it is really important for my students to be creating work with their own two hands. I think that technology such as laptops and tablets can fit in greatly to other content area classrooms, but with art class it seems risky considering all the messy materials they may come into contact with. One form of technology I am interested in having in my classroom is a document camera, because I have found them to be extremely helpful when doing class demos, they allow a full classroom to remain seated and have a clear vision of what the teacher is demonstrating at the front of the room.

          I am interested in finding a way for my students to collect inspiration images that they can store online or on some form of technology, as this is how I usually create art works, by looking at images I’ve stored on my laptop. However this still raises problem of messy materials damaging laptops. While I may feel comfortable creating art with my MacBook near by, I'm not sure I would feel comfortable with a classroom of 7th graders looking at inspiration images with expensive technology in arms length. In this scenario the technology is not detrimental to student learning, but the students on their quest to be creative and messy may be detrimental to the technology itself.

           Another idea of how I would like to integrate technology into my Art classroom would be through the use of a classroom blog. I think it would such a fun and useful tool to document the progress my students make on their art projects. This would really foster some family engagement as well as allowing  parents to check in and see what is happening in the art room. An important part of creating art work is the sharing of that art work, and I believe it can be very empowering for students to have their work displayed. Having an online presence for the classroom would certainly create a venue for which student artwork could be shared to a large audience.