Week 3 Thing 9--Twitter

  I am a little unsure of how to use twitter in a classroom setting still.  I am sure after really looking through a lot of the teacher pages listed on the wiki, twiiter4teachers, that I may find a way.  The ones I have looked at so far under the art section have not been super useful so far but I am hoping to find some better ones once I dig a little bit deeper or even find some on my own. 
  I also found that you can go directly to a website and many of them have links to follow them on Twitter.  This way was a lot easier for me to find things because it was very clear what I was following.  I am having a hard time getting the search feature to work though.  I have been trying to find the Denver Art Museum on Twitter and the search does not even bring up any Denver Art related items, so I am not sure why it is not working.  My husband searched for it on his twitter account and found it right away.  There is quite a bit to sort through.
   This may be useful if you were having a class follow a particular artist, a museum or event.  I am not sure that you could follow a person 100% of the time though because they may not post things that would be acceptable for students to be viewing.  This is why a museum or professional association of some sort may be the best thing to follow.  It may also be neat to make up a user and pretend to be a character in a story that students can follow what is happening daily or even put thoughts the character may have throughout a story in the tweet.  It would allow a chance for students to connect with characters in the stories they are hearing.  I hope that makes sense.

Week 3 Thing 8--Comment

  I took this opportunity to comment on Pam's blog about the Trading Card Application.  She heard about an idea like this at a librarian meeting.  I have also heard of Artist Trading cards and have seen various examples of them in books and at conferences, they even sell blank card decks to create these cards.  This class was not the first place that I had heard of Trading Cards like this either.  Pam wanted to use the Trading Cards to have students write book summaries which is a great idea.  Having the visual as well as a description to go along with it is very beneficial for students. 
  I would like to use the Trading Card Application with students to create cards about artist's they have researched or about techniques that we are learning about.  I also think this can be a very effective tool to use with our students.

Week 3 Thing 7---RSS Feeds

  I watched a video on google reader and that reall simplified it for me.  Then  I watched tutorial 2 which was very easy to understand also.  When I started subscribing to feeds it was very very easy.  It makes finding information that I check on frequently easy to access.  I subscribed to feeds that I check frequently of at least once a week.  It's  nice to have all the information in one place without having to go to 5 different sites to check everything.  I have seen the symbol for RSS feeds so many times and even have it on my toolbar at home and I never knew what it was for.

Week 2 Thing 6--glogster

Looking at the examples of Glogs they really are a lot like scrapbooks.  I These would be useful as class pages where I could post pictures of student's work and progress for the week without posting names or faces.  It would be useful to have a page for each class and update it regularly because then parents and students could look up their student's class page to see what they are working on.  Students could show their families which picture is of their artwork.
   It is so fun playing with these tools that it is easy to get caught up working on one thing for awhile. This is the Glogster I started working on:  SomeScribbles.