Thing 23

Great course. It was really good because it pushed me to step a little closer to the technology edge. This exposure to the digital topics makes me feel I will be able to connect better with my students as well understand the tech-speak they use. Makes me feel confident that I can stay current. I just got a smart board in my classroom as well! Hopefully I will be able to incorporate many of the new web2.0 apps I've learned about and enrich the learning students experience in my classroom. Thanks for the help, support and comments. :)

Thing 22

I would have my 8th grade students share comments about a favorite painting before they created their own painting. I could see the wiki page I created being used for each student to link to one image of a painting and writing what they liked best about it. When I have tried to I do this verbally the students often feel shy about sharing... this type of forum gives them a chance to state opinions without everyone in class looking at them. This has the same comfort level for them as texting. I will start this by providing a collection of web sites that would have visual resources of paintings from which they could pick to write about.

Here it is:
https://mkms-g8-painting.wikispaces.com/




I will certainly try to incorporate this type of a wiki this year. I think the students will like that they can respond to art through the computer. I really think this might help them express themselves more deeply than they would if they were responding in front of the class.

Thing 21

I have always wanted my 8th grade students the opportunity to share comments about a favorite painting with the class before they created their own. I could see a wiki being used for each student to link to one image of a painting and writing a comment about what they liked best about it. When I have tried to I do this verbally the students often feel shy about sharing... this type of forum gives them a chance to state opinions without everyone in class looking at them. This has the same comfort level for them as texting.
I could start this by providing a collection of sites that would have visual resources of paintings from which they could pick to comment on.

What hurdles might stand in the way of your using a wiki? First, have to be sure our server would allow school access to the wiki. I would then intro this in a computer lab. Because students do not work at the same pace, class time is short and computer lab space so tight,I would probably make this a 'take home' to finish assignment. Students could finish from home or during their AA time at school if library computers are available.

What would it take to remove the hurdles? I'd love to have a small bank of computers right in the art room.

Thing 20

I definitely feel more enlightened about the availability of ebooks. I was unaware that there was a site such as FriedBeef with its collection of links to ebook sites and that many titles are free. In the past, when I would stumble upon a good site, they would give excerpts for free, but you had to pay a price if you wanted the entire book. Obviously most of the free stuff has been in publication for a long time. New authors would not make much of a living if no one bought their books.
I checked out MANYBOOKS, Gutenburg Top 100, and BookYards.
I like that most of these sites have developed good user interface and a user is quickly able to find a book/publication by author, title or genre. It is also good to see that the downloads can be saved in so many different file formats (pdf, html, rtf, txt, etc.)so very important now because there are so many different display options.
The biggest learning benefit I see for this type of delivery is that many of these books have an audio component, so even if the book is a bit beyond the students reading level, they can listen as they read along, and eventually improve their reading ability. The drawbacks for me are that most of these sites are full of advertisements which I find annoying and distracting. I feel I would have to be very certain about what site I would recommend for middle school students to use outside of the NPS library system.
I could not get in to the NHS eBook collection, the username and password I wrote down in June, isn't working for me. But, I was able to access and see all the print books available at my school. I was not aware that I could do that from home.
There are art ebooks which students who are interested may read and explore art topics on their own. I would have to read them first myself, before I could recommend them. All I need is a lot of time.....

Thing 19

I liked the way screenr worked but was really unhappy that I needed a twitter account. I did wind up using ScreenCastle. Will I be able to use this at school? I went in to school a few days to try but my computer was all locked up in Admin mode. I guess they were still installing the new OS.
I could really use this type of instruction building software when I teach a vector computer art application to my students. I can't really create anything applicable yet because the new Windows 7 OS doesn't support the software I've been teaching for the past 3 years. I now have to learn new 'free' shareware. I am not going to do this until the computer labs have it installed and I know it works and is accessible. So I tried to attach a successful screencast that I created using CorelDraw in ScreenCastle which was easy to use and did display fine. Just can't get it to link and run in my blog.

Thing 18

For me, being able to listen to a current or past podcasts or watch a v-cast when it is convenient is the real plus of Podcasting. From looking at the overwhelming amount of sites, I would say that this is more of a singular tool, great for special personal interests, such as learning and refereshing a foreign language, following a health topic, getting gardening advice, keeping up with current news, etc. I did like it that I was able to find npr's All Things Considered, which is one of my favorite radio shows.

I tried many searches for potential sites that I could use specifically in my classroom, but didn't find any good fits (yet). Podcast.com has a site called For Arts Sake, but I found most of the topics to slow or adult to keep middle school students interested. I will keep looking.

Thing 17

Here was a slide show I would like to use a part of. I would want to download it and customize it to my 7th grade lecture on the styles of art. Is this ethical?

Art Movements2

View more presentations from Noreen Strehlow.

Zoho- my 2 slide presentation:


I found Zoho very easy to use... a great way to put up a presentation slide show of artwork from different museums for classroom use. Would like to, but I'm not sure I could use this for a gallery of student artwork for view by parents and students because this seems to be a very public tool. I'd have to work with it longer before I decide. It is nice how it links to Flickr and Picassa.