Week 8 Thing 20

  I looked at the visual arts winners for the web 2.0 award winners.  I played with Color Blender an application that you can use to make colors and palettes.  I do not think it would be very useful though in a classroom, even the art classroom currently.  I also looked at visual complexity and the name is very descriptive of what it is.  They are very complex digital webs created by people.  There are just pictures though and not a tool that you can use to create them on the website.

   The Travel  IQ was fun to play.  I am wondering if there is an option to make a quiz so that you could quiz over places that you studied specially in your class.

Week 8 Thing 18, Thing 19

  Browsing slide share was interesting because there are so many things to look at.  I chose to find a slide share about printmaking since that was what I looked for in You Tube also.  Some of the SlideShares were over 100 slides long!  I chose one that had 15 slides with 15 examples of prinmaking in it.

KidsArt Gallery

Google Earth is a great tool to be used in the art classroom.  We constantly are learning about artwork from different countries so I like to start Google Earth from our school and go to the countries we are studying.  This has been a fun tool to play with.

Glass Fusing How To Video

Week 6--Thing 15 Week 7--Thing 17

I explored the storyboard tools first.  The one that would work best in my class would be the storyboard template that is available to print out because there are no computers in my room except my own.  I would rather have students plan out their work before taking them to the computer lab also.  I am wondering how much time should be allowed for students to film what they need to for videos.  I only see students for 50 minutes once a week so I feel that unless this project was in collaboration with other teachers this would take a big chunk of the semester to work on.  I think that it would be a positive learning experience for students to create a video along with you(the teacher) as well before they work on putting their own together because then they have some practice and can feel more confident in their skills before they jump in.

   As I am working on the movie in movie maker I find that I am spending a lot of time editing the movie.  Maybe it would be good to limit how much footage students can shoot so that they really focus in on footage they need to shoot.  Hopefully this way they will have less to go through when editing.  It was also kind of difficult deciding what to keep and what to cut.  I am planning on using the video I made for my Art before school group on Monday though so we will see how it goes.

   I used Audacity to go in and edit the music that I was adding to my movie.  This past week at school we used Audacity in the classroom to work on fluency also.  We recorded students as they were reading and they could go back and listen to how their fluency sounded this way students could hear where they were stumbling.  Then we brainstormed together about what could help them to read more fluently.

  I am currently having trouble getting my video to load.  I think it is because of my Internet connection so I will try again at a later time.

Week 7-- Thing 16 You Tube

   I am fairly familiar with yYou Tube and have even used videos from it in my lessons.    I looked through some of the examples posted on the Wiki to start with.  We have been doing a lot of printmaking this year in Art so that is what I looked for on YouTube.  I found several videos of Collagraph Printmaking.

There we 2 that went together that would work well although they were a little bit long to use in the classroom, they were each around 7-8 minutes but there was a lot of down time it seemed like in those videos.

Printing a Collagraph Part 1

Printing a Collagraph Part 2

Week 6 Thing 14--Voicethread

  Signing up for voicethread was easy, as well as uploading my Avatar to it.  I looked through a lot of different voicethreads when exploring this website.  It is neat that you an draw on the picture as you are talking because that is a great way to draw attention to what you are discussing.  The one that I found most useful and adaptable for my art room was WCHS Online Art Exhibit(this is also the one I commented on).  I think this would be useful in my class because student artwork from a class could all be posted together and students could have conversations about the art through this website and it would be using 21st century skills.  Typically critiques seem long and boring so this would really keep student's interest also because they can interact more quickly.

Week 5 Thing #12 & Thing # 13

  Wiki 

  Looking at some of the examples of wikis one of the things I liked was that teachers posted assignments on the wiki.  I think this would be useful because in the art room we typically go over a project during one class but continue to work on it for more than one class.  It would be useful to give students the oppotunity to on and look at the assignment during their worktime  when they are ready instead of re-explaining the assignment every class time because it uses up a lot of time that students could spend working. Students would also be able to interact and ask questions using the wiki.  I think it would also be a useful tool to share assignments with parents. 
  
     Wikis are also a great tool for professional collaboration.  I am currently involved in a wiki that other art teachers I went to school with collaborate on.  We can share lessons and ideas using this tool.  It is great to have other perspectives because other teachers may think of obstacles or extensions that I may not have.

Google Docs

This application is interesting because it is basically an online document.  It has many of the same tools that Microsoft Word has.  There are multiple types of documents that you can work in also which is nice such as word documents, spreadsheets, even drawings.  It is also interesting to work in collaboration on the word documents.  It is similar to a wiki in that more than one person can edit on your work if you allow it, so you could create something collaboratively or even have someone edit things in your document for you.