#15 Post of choice - organization part two

So I really went over my organization today - I thought about it when I started modules five and six and wrote my original blog posts, but I focused on how disorganized my email was, and not how organized everything else was. My email may be a well managed disaster, but my website, blog and files are a dream. I am not sure why I love folders everywhere by my inbox, but I am looking forward to taking what works about the rest of my organizational plan and putting it to work in my inbox.

#14 Excited about weaving !

I have been re-writing my middle school weaving unit for the last module, because my students strongly did not desire to do our traditional middle school weaving unit. I am getting so pumped - I have been pinning like a mad woman, and I am excited to get my students pinning. I use pinterest all the time ( I love it as much as google) but I was looking for new ECE weaving ideas, when I came across tons and tons and tons of good stuff for older students. It is such a great way to introduce bookmarking tools and I should be able to get a huge variety of projects that the students are really excited about. I know that I can barely wait, and we have at least two weeks till we are ready to start. Pumped for student focused differentiated learning and research to start!!

#8 Screen Cast

Screen Cast to come, it is slowly loading on to youtube as we speak. Once I started playing around with the quick time player, I decided I really liked it. I look forward to using it for screen casts in the future. Great sound recording, easy to use, clean looking, and nice playback - the only downside is that it takes forever to load with our current connectivity.

http://youtu.be/hdPkqCumm6k

#13 Email organization.

My email is a disaster. I totally rely on the ease of the search functions to find what I am looking for. However, right now, with about 8 million emails pouring in for online learning - I wish I had a system. I'm not sure how I want to organize my email, so I just don't. My personal email had folders and I use gmails' tagging system. With my work email I just don't. I am not sure why. I think student folders by class and parent folders would be a good place to start. We shall see.

#12 Shared Materials

Right now we have two places where students and staff can share materials. It can be confusing at times. We switched from having just the Tdrive to still having the tdrive and also having google drive. I use both, and I think we are not quite ready to switch to one. I love google drive but it does have limited formatting options, so I still use the T drive. I also use the t-drive for organizing and storing lessons and materials, so it would be hard to give it up. It might be good to transition to all sharing being done on google drive, and file storage left up to the individual user. This is a tough one, because each person has a system that works for them. I would not want to be forced to use a system if it didn't work for me.

#5 BONUS Google Awesomeness

http://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/project/art-project


So, bonus Google awesomeness that I happened to stumble upon while searching pinterest for color theory reviews. This Google cultural institute is a gold mine of high quality art images with slide id information, and you can create your own gallery - this is like a combination of exactly what I want my high school students to do for their ISP using a bookmarking tool and more focused web searches. So excited to have wandered upon something so amazing!!!

#10 Past and present presentations

I am very aware of my presentation weakness. I keep adding a little more, and a little more, and a little more to each slide, and then magically the neat, fast, easy to read and comprehend bullet points have become a 10 pt. font paragraph. Those presentations, have been and continue to be unsuccessful. I have done a great job keeping the formatting, fonts and colors clean and simple. The formatting definitely has improved my presentations, but I do have to continue to make sure I edit the content, again and again.

#9 What make a presentation good?

Clear and concise. I may in the minority, but I would have a presentation be quick and informative instead of exciting but longer. I like presentations to give me the information I need, and then I like to move on. If the information isn't coming fast, and the pace seems lengthy, I tune out, and fast ( by about the second slide). I also think the visual appeal is important to the delivery of the information. If the font and colors skip around, the background is too busy, or if the special effects are too flashy, it all becomes distracting and I as a viewer become frustrated. I think presentations can be a great way to share information, but the formatting and delivery is key.

#11 Presentation

So I needed to revamp my HS independent study introduction presentation, so I thought this would be a great time to do so. My target audience is my High School visual arts class. The guidelines and assignment sheets that go with this project are weighty, wordy and long - it is a lot of information. So this presentation might never be exciting, but I want to make sure that it was clear, concise, and students are going to get a good base idea before we get started. My goal was to cut the wordiness out a and really focus on key points. I decided to try out Zoho show, because I have not used it before. It is nice because you can share and collaborate online, and had great, clean themes. However, it was a little slow, and got stuck occasionally. It also loads rather slowly as well. I like the functions and options available, but with our current connectivity, it would be better to use a different tool. (Also - I love being able to embed the presentation - that way my HS students can't miss it- but it appears you can't change the size - which I don't love, see below)

#7 Deep Web

So I wasn't very excited about deep web searches, they seemed so irrelevant to what I use, but I happened to go back to the first list of resources, to see if maybe I missed something, and I clicked on this one http://highwire.stanford.edu/ - and I could use this! It would have been especially great during out last class looking for articles - I found more and better articles, full text, easily searched, in about 3 seconds, than I found using the data bases that our school pays for or you can find on Google scholar. I will be using high wire for personal research, and I am very excited about having a this new tool to use.

#6 Search Engines

So I tried out searching myself on several search engines and I still come back to Google. A huge part of it I have to admit is purely visual, I like how clean, organized and visually appealing the results are. Dogpile and Mahalo supposedly should have had better quality results, but I found them to be about the same or even worse than Google, and visually unappealing. I also am very comfortable with Google, so it is really easy for me to find what I am looking for and refine my searches. On the list of ten, I found duck duck go to be the most appealing besides Google, however not different or more advantageous enough to switch. Part of it is definitely that I know and love Google, but I think I know and love Google because it works so well, and is frequently updating and improving its options.

# 5 Google search features

So most of you know I love Google. I love Google drive, I love picasa web albums, I love how it all syncs seamlessly. I could pass on Google +, but I'll keep sites and blogger, thanks! I use Google news, scholar, earth (Lego awesomeness) and I could take or leave the blog search. The tools I use most are the conversion searches the ~ search, the related to search, and of course images.  I think what I need to be more proactive and aware of is not necessarily using new tools, but really sharing and using the tools I use with my students. I think I would like to do more search a-louds, I could use the screen cast, but I think more face to face demonstrations would really be key to my student being better web searchers.

#3 What resources did I use?

High School Independent Study Unit & Artist statements 

I chose to incorporate two types of resource. First I will be asking students to use a bookmarking tool, Google presentation or blog to share images. I want students to be able to choose what works for them - they can go simple and stick with Google presentations which they already have set up, or they can try a new tool. The most important thing is that they are able to share their resources with each other quickly and easily. 

The second resource/tool I am asking students to use is the idea of a digital or alternative artist statement. Pulling from my searches, I have several articles for students to read so they can get different perspectives on artists statements. I also will be stealing the idea from a writing prompt app, and asking students to write from a prompt I tweet each day. These quick writes should be shared via google docs, a blog, or an alternative digital manner, and I am going to ask students to comment much as we have been doing here. In the end they can choose to create a tech based or traditional statement, but having all their work already online and peer reviewed should have an impact on what and how they write even if they go for a traditional piece. 

The goal is for students to use technology to work for them, to make a choice about what tool they want to use - because this is their culminating unit, and they will have to account for and explain all of their project based choices, they should do the same for tech. Some of the tools and resources are new, but most we have tried out, so they can work in their comfort zone or challenge themselves. This unit lends itself to all learning modalities, but the digital or alternative artist statements help to move the statement from just a read/write modality to encompassing all modalities depending on the choice each student makes.  

#2 Boolean Basics

Boolean Search methods help filter through the vast amount of information currently available. It is definitely a method of searching that our students are not familiar with, and I would like to incorporate. I remember first being introduced to it when learning how to search through journal databases. I have my high school students research artists or works similar to the artist, movement or style that am teaching with the project. At the beginning of the year I had to push them to not pick the first image on google, then I had them work through choosing artists by first searching major museums and galleries and then searching the gallery or museum collections. Now would be a great time to introduce them to Boolean logic. For our current unit I introduced them to Margaret Burroughs, and influential artist, activist, poet and educator who had a huge impact on art in Chicago. Her style of printmaking is very bold, graphic, and part of a larger movement. I asked of them to find pieces that were stylistically similar to hers. I have a strong feeling my students typed in -black linocut- and scrolled through images. Basic Boolean search tools would have made their search more efficient and probably produced better results.
Instead of starting with just linocuts they could have used (linocut or woodcut) and black
They could have also brought in the play on pattern and line by modifying further: (linocut or woodcut) and (line or pattern) and black

The search tools I personally use most are the "" because so many art concepts come in specific phrases and being able to eliminate unwanted results saves so much time.

I find the heart of of Boolean search basics to be using the method to specify your search and find more accurate results through filtering.

#1 Welcome to 601

This course is a time for my to take advantage of the professional development resources provided by our school as well as building my own Personal Learning Network and being a part of our teaching communities learning network. It is an opportunity to share tools and resources with co-workers and plan collaboratively.

Collaboration in progress