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!