New Drawing Tablet

I am using a drawing tablet for the first time. It is so cool, but I have so much to figure out. I am using Gimp for the first time too. I found out that I love the airbrushing and soft lighten options. Using a tablet to draw is so much easier than using a mouse and my computer seems to put up with these programs a lot more easily.
P.S. Here is my first tablet drawing ever and it is a very very creepy green eye.

Are Interactive Whiteboards Worth It?

                                                                             

The use of smart boards depends on the type of subject since you would not need a smartboard to make pottery or demonstrate oil painting. I do think the interactive whiteboard would be a good addition to subjects like math, science, or history. At the same time I think that being able to use a smartboard will not be a major technology skill for a students since the smartboard is often just used in education. I suppose it would be wise to have one around to do a couple of activities with and show videos, though it would not be worth it if you were teaching a hands on course. The problem is that the majority of educators do not know how to use them properly or just forget about them. I think the education department should concentrate more on the use of computers first, depending on the type of classroom.

Critical friend rubric

Criteria	Accomplished (3)	Developing (2)	Beginning (1)	Score & Comments
Introduction Scores have stars!	**Engagingly describes a compelling question or problem.	A question or problem is described.	The purpose of the WebQuest is unclear.	Yes, their intro does compel me to read it. Very personal.
Task	**Task is doable and engaging, and is connected to learning in the real world. It elicits thinking that goes beyond rote comprehension.	The task is doable and elicits higher order thinking but is not relevant to students lives.	Task requires simply comprehending or retelling of information found on web pages and answering factual questions.	Creative and fun personal activity using technology needed in the real world.
Process Checklist	**Every step is clearly stated. Most students would know exactly where they are at each step of the process and know what to do next.	Some directions are given, but there is missing information. Students might be confused.	Every step is clearly stated. Most students would know exactly where they are at each step of the process and know what to do next.	Every step is clearly stated and interestingly so.
Resources	**There is a clear and meaningful connection between all the resources and the information needed for students to accomplish the task.	There is some connection between the resources and the information needed for students to accomplish the task. Some resources don't add anything new.	Resources provided are not sufficient for students to accomplish the task.	Clear resources for the task.
Evaluation	**Criteria for success are clearly stated in the form of a rubric. Criteria include qualitative as well as quantitative descriptors.	Criteria for success are clearly stated in the form of a rubric. Criteria include qualitative as well as quantitative descriptors.	Criteria for success are not described.	Yes to all of those questions, but I hope the teachers using her webquest will allow the students some freedom while completing the name portrait collage.
Visual Appeal	**Appropriate and thematic graphic elements are used to make visual connections that contribute to the understanding of concepts, ideas and relationships.	Graphic elements sometimes, but not always, contribute to the understanding of concepts, ideas and relationships.	Color is garish and/or typographic variations are overused and legibility suffers. Background interferes with the readability.	Appropriate
Navigation	**Navigation is seamless. It is always clear to the learner what all the pieces are and how to get to them.	There are a few places where the learner can get lost and not know where to go next.	There are more than 5 broken links, misplaced or missing images, badly sized tables, misspellings and/or grammatical errors.	Navigation was quick and easy. *Definitely an A project. : ) *

Webquest Blog Link

Webquest link

Webquest final evaluation

Best Webquests: World of Shakespeare and Anti-Earthquake (click on links)
Best means having thought put into work, being creative and having comprehension with good cohesion. Organization of the material is also very important so students do not have to go on a treasure hunt.
Worst Webquests: Foreign Country Presentation and Waves and Sound
Worst means confusing examples or no examples at all. No collaboration and teamwork are used and the task and benefits from the activity are unclear in some instances.

Webquest evaluation as the efficiency expert

"Saving the Gorillas": Good links, presentation, and clear and concise project, but the relevancy to education is lacking since most students will not decide to be zoologists or have a job working with exotic animals.
"World of Shakespeare": Strong in relevancy to education and college material. The links are to good informational sites and the project is multimedia. The problems I see arising come from the performance or skit due to lack of enthusiasm or trouble with Shakespearean language.
"Anti-Earthquake Designer": has good use of groupwork and collaborative learning. This is very much a field specific project though. To make the project shown in the example would take a lot of time, valuable time for education.
"Foreign Country Presentation": This project has the least examples and even the Teacher Process page is blank. The idea of introducing students to different countries is a good learning experience, but the organization is a bit too concise.
"Waves and Sound": The strength of this project is that the process is detailed with specific questions to answer, but the links were a bit confusing. The standards are not related to teacher education standards and the introduction and task are abrupt. What the teacher wants the students to learn from this is unclear. This is a worksheet in webquest format.

Blog Prompt 11/13

This activity, link is here, is not something would have experienced in my K-12 education. Some of my teachers were  more interested in using book research instead of web research. We often did not do group work, presumably because noise levels, or we had trouble concentrating on the task at hand. My learning style is addressed in this project a lot. Seeing all those worksheets made me cringe though. Three or four are more understandable, but perhaps the teacher did this activity over a long period of time.

I am not surprised that textbooks were not used in this activity, because the librarians at my schools did not use textbooks to help us with our research projects. Scholastic was also a popular resource when a textbook was not used, though textbooks do tend to have activity ideas like this in teacher editions. The wiki page was a surprise though. I am unsure if I shall teach this way because of my subject matter. Art is sometimes best when not quite so structured and done with more demonstrations, depending on the age of the students. I remember enjoying this particular freedom as a student and I would like to offer some to my future students. Barriers on this activity would include time constraints, absences, lack of student interest, and unproductive group work.

Blog Prompt 11/10

I like keeping a blog for this course because it is simple to do homework, just find a computer and write a paragraph or two and the teacher will see it. It feels creative to make your own blog, but not creative enough to me for some reason. Keeping a blog will become useful later because I may decide to keep my own teaching blog that students can check out and see useful resources I find on the internet or get to know class expectations. I might not post to my blog after this class though, I am horribly behind on writing in my own diary as it is. Hmmm. I do not really know if I will, sometimes I become fascinated by something I normally would not consider and work on it for a long time.

This blog is an example of appropriation because I sample and mix things like graphs from surveys and Bob's watercolor videos (see earlier posts) Collective Intelligence exists in all of the blog projects because we can check out each others' blogs, a good concrete example of that is the fact that a fellow classmate is following my blog and another university student talks with me about the updates I make.

Blog Prompt 11/8

In taking the learning style test I learned several things about myself. One of them includes that I tend to resort to routine procedures when solving a problem. I would draw a map when giving someone difficult directions because it includes the familiar act of drawing. What I found surprising was that I had zero preference for audio learning. I've taken a similar test before and my results showed that I was a visual and a reading/writing learner. This test confirmed I had a preference for reading/writing. According to the test I should write down what I am studying and read material a couple of times to memorize it; which works out well since I already use those techniques. This test is fairly accurate, but I felt the questions should have been worded so that routine would not influence the answer.

I guess my Picasso portrait is a bit too serious for the assignment, but the drawing just looked empty without some realism. Besides, Picasso didn't use digital media for his paintings...

Blog Prompt 11/5

Questions about Twitter
The limit of 140 character does not bother me, but using textspeak is a bit aggravating. It is sometimes so hard to decipher that I end up staring at the screen a long time, trying to piece together what is being said. I did not change anything based on the length, but I did change what I would say after knowing that all of my peers could see my messages.
I do not think that texting and twittering will have any impact on the way I write. I cannot think of any ways it could possibly effect how I write things, recreational or otherwise.

Twitter Prompt "Poem"

"Poem" Made from a Twitter activity:

Do not sing at the table, it is bad luck.
Do not cross your eyes or they will get stuck like that. 

Do not talk to strangers.

Do not sit too close to the TV or your eyes will cross.

Do treat others how you would want to be treated.

Blogging Prompt 10/29

Reading literacy is higher with women compared to men. But literacy in males has grown 11% between 2002 to 2008. These statistics were from this site: Link is here. I think it is a good thing that literacy is being emphasized in schools. Reading was seldom taught in one of my grade schools, though sentence structure and spelling often was. It is harder to teach and grade reading than grammar. I think that it does need to be taught, especially to boys. Boys do have a higher chance of developing learning disabilities and other problems sometimes brought about prenatally.

Presentation1

View more presentations from painterartist.

Web Page Evaluation Project

This article: Feline Reactions to Bearded Men was created by a group of indiviuals teaching at several universities, or at least appear to be with no mention of their subjects. Many of the studies were inconclusive and I found a university site claiming that this article is a spoof Link to the article here. There is no email address for viewers to contact any of the authors. I think this is an article likely to be a false trail for researchers. Even the statements about the research sound very silly: "The test subjects were female cats, all between the ages of four and six. 214 cats participated in the study. Three cats died during the study, due to causes unrelated to the bearded men. Fifteen cats gave birth while viewing the photographs." There are no peer reviews listed. The language used does not even seem professional compared to the usual language in psychology articles or other such kinds of research.


There was an unfinished study done in November 2001 not even researched by the same individuals with a manipulated photograph as the illustration. Improbable Research is a site that does not prove the information given is true, it is just a website for humor and way to get people to think.

Blogging Prompt 10/20

An activity that promoted different kinds of literacy was designing a magazine cover. To create the magazine cover you would have to know how to use several different technologies: how to use a camera, how to create and manipulate material using photoshop, and how to upload images to communities. In a traditional way, you have to use phrases and captions to grab attention and write to appeal to your audience. One also learns visual interpretation and creative skills as a bit of a bonus in this activity. The magazine cover activity filled many of the standards in the National Technology Standards for Teachers, but the one standard I most enjoyed fillng was 1. Facilitate and inspire student learning and creativity.

Edmodo survey answer

Fifth graders did change their attitude towards writing by using Edmodo. Before the digital story activity only 5 students liked to share their stories a lot but after the story activities 8 liked using Edmodo for the feedback as seen on the graph.

Blogging Prompt 10/8

Edmodo is a great way to support literacy instruction in school. I learned a fair bit about posting, commenting, and student psychology from something so simple.
The student I monitored had excellent writing skills for their age, though the class had different levels of skills. I would consider using Edmodo to

connect with other classrooms, like college classrooms to get a heads up along with my students about current techniques and expectations. I found that the students had good speaking skills and easily followed directions.

Student feedback on 21st century question.

Many people agree that students should do better quality teamwork and more of it in school. My peers think we should do more group activities to better prepare students for the workforce. I think there needs to be better rules set for the activity and one of the responses supports that idea of a structured group, not just one thrown together, which has a bad effect in some cases.
Doing this activity made me feel less tense about my writing and more casual and truthful. No comments were off the wall, all were rather related, perhaps a little too much. It was easier to react constantly rapidly, not just the second time. Writing in isolation is much harder when you do not know what your audience is like.

Photography interpretation blogging activity

This photograph of Obama is a head and shoulders portrait. He is not smiling and his head is tilted as if in concern. He is not wearing a suit, only what looks like daily wear for a middle class citizen, making him more relatable to his audience. The image is in such high focus you can see every gray hair and every line on his skin as if the cameraman wanted him to look aged and a little weary. The detail could just be another indicator of his importance. The background is faded out, so he is the focus of the picture. The lighting is dramatic, making his expression look even more somber and the camera is directly in front of him.

This picture has much more going on in it. The president is surrounded by people, though he remains in the center like in the last photo. He is smiling in this shot and his body language is casual, with his arms dangling as he walks and his shoulders are relaxed. The background has what looks like a small guarded tower near or on a ferry. The American flag is visible. They are walking from the ferry and talking, looking like a united group with the president at its center. The president is in the midst of white middle age males with a man that looks like he has Asian ethnicity in the background, though I cannot be entirely sure. The men are in work uniforms and the guards at the lookout are standing alert.

Blogging Prompt 10/1

Media literacy skills involve more judgements about sources of media, but both media material and traditional material can contain bias. There is less advertising in most traditional material. Both kinds of literacy require factual knowledge to use the material in an effective manner.

This lesson plan (link is here) would be a good activity for a wide age range. In the lesson you create a Venn Diagram comparing the design of a web article to an article in a magazine. This would draw students' attention to advertisements, the url, and the language of the author depending on which articles you choose. This is a good visual exercise for the beginning of critical media literacy skills.

Fake Magazine Cover

Photostory Art Teaching Quote

Here is a photostory I created with one of my pieces of artwork on the last slide to illustrate the quote.

9/22 Blogging Prompt

I think that a digital story could substitute for some large research papers, but not for all of them. The digital story would have to list references used somehow. One would have to make some strict digital story guidelines, but it could be done. It has a nice visual medium that many written reports do not have.

The educational benchmark that would be most prominent in the creation of a digital story is the technology operations and concepts tier. It actually fits into catagories of all the standards.

Blog Prompt 9/15

This is a hard blogging prompt for me. I do not know too much about digital media and its effects on language. I think that when one sees spelling mistakes on the internet a lot, they may mistakenly use them. I may have done that myself. So I guess my opinion has not changed if I did not have one in the first place. As regards this article the link is here , I think it is certainly possible that digital media can enhance learning of language, since it is a form of communication one can practice with.
This article by Sara Bernard the link is here expresses a lot of different sides to the arguement, but her view on the increasing amount of communication with texting benefits relationship skills and the skill of communicating clearly, reflects mine.

Blogging Prompt 9/8

I believe being literate in the 21st century means that you are able to analyze and critically judge what you are reading. One needs such skills when an abundance of false and far fetched information is on TV, the internet, and some written articles and books. This been a topic of concern in some of my other classes.

I do believe that grammar and spelling are essential when creating material for the internet if one wishes to entice readers to view their work. My main concern about the use of language on the internet is the immature comments some readers put in comments that they may regret later. It is quite easy to swear and insult on the web rather than face to face. However, I am not sure if texting things like "LOL", "OMG", and "IDK"will harm grammar structure in the classroom.



I may not agree with all these opinions about literacy, but I do agree with some of them and the quotes about books.

Google survey

<Lars>

<This is blogging practice>

Profile

<I am an active college student and volunteer>

Education

<DMU>

<Art Education>

Skills

Creative Skills

<Teaches crafts to children, has had artwork exhibited, proficient in most mediums> 

Leadership

<Lead art after school programs and lead and planned activities for Girl Scouts>

 

Volunteer Work Experience

<7 years>

<Girl Scout Troop, Littletown>

• <Planning and overseeing many church activities for younger Girl Scouts and local children, such as Easter egg hunts, crafts, fashion shows, sleepovers, and many other activities.>
• <Doing community work like district cleanup projects and volunteer work for Try Again Homes.>

<2008>

<Art Department Work>

• <Organizing and participating in fundraisers>
• <Worked as a secretary for meetings>

<2007>

<

• <.....>
• <.....>
  

Activities

<2009>

<Volunteer Activity, Leadership Role>

<2008>

<Membership in Professional Association, Leadership Role>

<2007>

<Membership in Professional Association, Leadership Role>

References

Available upon request

 

Search Jobs

9/1 Blogging Prompt

Blogging benefits grammar, encourages out of class learning, and is interesting to do. I know I have to look some blogging words up if I do not know how to spell them. I like the fact that things you have looked up on the internet for fun can be easily shared.
Some concerns I have about students blogging are cyberbullying and internet predators. The latter only really becomes dangerous when one puts up too much personal information on the internet. I think blogging would have to be carefully monitored.This history teacher's blog the link is here is a good example of how to keep a blog suited to a certain purpose; this could be like keeping the blog template simple when the point of the blog is written work or opinions. This example could help students not to overload their blogs with too much imagery and help them add links to websites.

Here is a watercolor demonstration by Bob Davies (for experienced painters)

8/25 Blogging Prompt

It is hard to determine how much schools would save if they replaced textbooks with iPads. It depends on how much damage textbooks sustain versus iPads, but the iPads would at least have all the reading material on it. Personally, it is much easier on my eyes to read from a book.
As to if a textbook really improves student leaning, it depends on the subject and the textbook writer. For hands on subjects like chemistry, the arts, and physical education, a book becomes encumbersome and too wordy. Sometimes textbooks are more of an advertisement rather than a scholarly resource. "A Textbook Example of What's Wrong with Education" by Tamim Ansary Link to the article here is a good explanation of this publishing scheme.Like the article "No Books, No Problem: Teaching Without a Textbook" by Geoff Ruth Link to the article here, Tamim Ansary is complaining about the general data that is oversimplified and often useless in textbooks. I believe that iPads or some form of technology should be used in the classroom, but it does not hurt to have a few paper copies of literature books available for one's perusal.

Looking to become an art teacher...

Greetings. I wish to become an art teacher because I cannot get enough of art. I like teaching about materials and techniques, and keeping up to date with the art world. I think students learn more about art through demonstration and examples. I could give them digital presentations and show them how to do watercolor techniques or even how to work with clay. When I mean digital, I find that showing powerpoints of photographs of the work to appeal to students. This way you can present digital art if that was the current subject or showcase your own artwork if you wanted. I would prefer to teach high school because I am patient and eager enough for that stage in educating. I am a local at my university.

"A good teacher is like a candle - it consumes itself to light the way for others"