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.