#6 school websites and the tech sandbox

The school website that I chose was Northside Christian, which is a k-12 school and each teacher on staff has a teacher website. All of the teachers had pretty similar tabs and information on their pages which included a welcome page, meet the teacher, wishlist, homework, classroom files, and classroom links. These pages were meant to keep both the students and parents up to date. The page that I looked at was in the elementary school for a third grade classroom.

Technology can be a very useful resource in classsroom, but it also helps you as a teacher with your professional responsibilities. I think that I will use DIIGO to help me organize important information that I find online in a logical way that could be beneficial for lesson plans or classroom management. I think I will also use spreadsheets to help organize student information and grades. I may also use a program like Evernote to record lesson plans but also provide notes and feedback to myself on those plans and allow those to be saved digitally which can prevent loss.

In the tech sandbox, the object that I think I would use most in my classroom would be the 3D printer. I had the opportunity to use one during my academic art career and this is an experience I really want to bring to my students. It felt so high tech and creative at the same time! I think this would be a great way to bring technology into a traditional art classroom. I would have them use a program like sketch up to design their projects and then convert file to the printer software.

#5.5 DIIGO part 2

Web 2.0 allows users to not just see content but to also interact and respond with information on the web. This technology would be very useful in a classroom environment, because it goes beyond simple information retention to students being able to share their own opinions and to create their own topic, all with specific relevancy to a lesson.

#5 Web 2.0

Web 2.0 websites are a second generation of websites that allow for sharing and interaction among users. Blogs, twitter, and DIIGO are all web 2.0 tools that would be helpful in the clasrrom for students as well as support teacher development. Blogs can be used by students to help share ideas with each other on given topics, and teachers can use this tool to promote idea interaction. Twitter is a great tool for both students and teachers. For students, twitter can allow them to directly interact with first hand information, such as a class tweeting to a museum or an author, and it would allow for great direct responses. Teachers can use twitter as a part of their PLN, to network with other professionals and gain ideas for their classroom. DIIGO would allow students to save websites for things such as projects while teachers can save valuable information for teaching ideas and professional development, with a tagging system that makes the information easy to find and recover.

Animoto (https://animoto.com/) is a web 2.0 tool that allows users to create videos and slideshows that would be great for a classroom. The website is very easy to navigate and is suited for presentations or video creation. A teacher could use this website to create class presentations while students could use it in a video project to splice together clips and add music.

I think that Augmented Reality is the technological tool that has the biggest potential for future education. Augmented Reality allows the user to be submersed into a computer generated world that transports the user from the real world through the control of ones senses. This type of technology could be used greatly in the classroom for students to get a type of first hand experience with things that maybe very unfamiliar to them. One example of this might be a teacher using this in a history lesson on China and then allowing the students to get a first hand look at the landscape of country and the location that actual historical events took place.

#4.5 DIGGO

I am so excited to get to use this in the future, and I think it will be really useful for my personal and work in the future. From using DIGGO,  I learned there is a lot more free educational content out there that is not simply pure drill and practice, which will allow to students to learn not only the course material but also technological skills.

#4 Twitter, Active Learning, and the Digital Divide

On twitter, I have been interacting with both my classmates as well as popular twitter accounts. I have been able to see, like, and reply to the tweets of my classmates and the #2040fsu has allowed me to see answers from multiple users regarding the EME's twitter weekly questions. I have also been able to follow people's twitters that I enjoy and retweet some of their content. I have found it to be really beneficial and enjoyable because it feels more real time then something like Facebook and it distills information down to short character counts. I think that this could be beneficial as a teacher because it would provide quick access to educational content as well as allow you to be up to date on current information and trends.

The digital divide is the gap between those who do and do not have access to technology. The digital divide creates disparity among students and the student with access to technology at home has a greater chance for success. Students who use technology within the school environment, taught and used by teachers, with supplements at home are better prepared for college or the work force. The digital divide can be caused by socioeconomic status, funding for technology within a school, and geographical access to the internet. As a teacher wanting to teach high school art classes, technology can be supplementary to my classroom teaching. Digital projects can be assigned during classroom time while homework can be focused on more traditional artistic methods. I can also teach my students in the classroom how to use digital artistic tools such as Photoshop or Illustrator so they would be prepared to use these if needed in their future work.

The software that I will probably be using the least as a high school art teacher would be productivity software. My class would not have many drills, word processing documents, educational games, or a need for an organization of a large amount of data since most of the student work is very hands on. The graphics software for active learning, including illustration and draw programs, would be my most used software. This type of software is directly related to my connect and would allow for students to move away from traditional artistic methods to newer digital technique development. I specifically would like to work with drawing programs or 3d programs with my students.

The material in the E-course can be really applicable to my work here as a student. I think that video conferencing tools and those that allow for live collaboration would be the most helpful because the issues that I find most common are often finding a meeting time and sending/saving work. As a teacher, the content can be used in the classroom environments. Saving work to the cloud will help prevent from losing student files and webinars might be a good option to use for a class with a guest lecturer. The importance of cloud storage resonated with me the most because I want to make sure I save all of my files off my computer because of fear of computer malfunction and the loss of large amounts of time and effort on school projects. I thought the activities were smooth and a good evaluation of the content. The only major issue that I faced was in the very last wrap up typed answers. I was trying to break up the information into paragraphs since there are multiple questions, and when I hit enter to do a line break, it automatically submitted it, not allowing me to finish my response.

Blog #3: ELA and "open" content

The ELA standard that I feel most comfortable with teaching would be the SL.2 Integrate and Evaluate. The standard states one should "integrate and evaluate information presented in diverse media and formats including visually, quantitatively, and orally". I have experience working with different forms of technology, especially in the arts, and I would be able to translate this wide use of media to my students.

The ELA standard that would require the most learning for me is W/WHST.2 Write to explain/inform. I tend to be more visual in my representation and I am a visual learner so I think I would need to work on organizing content and complex ideas in non visual ways using technology.

Studying art education allows me to work with students across any age range, from K-12, since it is a subject that is taught to all students. I would like to work with high school students, from ages 15-18, because it will allow me to work with more complex techniques as well as students who are more serious about art because this is often an elective.

Digital citizenship is becoming more relevant to students since technology is becoming more integrated into their daily lives. The concepts that I feel would be most relevant to my classroom are the awareness and obedience of copyright laws and the fostering a meaningful community and the advancing of topics and the community as a whole. I would like to use Photoshop and InDesign in my classroom and awareness of copyright laws would be useful with these programs since they use a lot of digital images.

The three major "open" terms in the podcast were open education, open content, and open source. Open education deals with the sharing of information for educational purposes that was traditionally bound by the classroom. The website, http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELi7061.pdf ,details the use of open education can come from a variety of sources that develop educational resources, which are electronic and are often under some form of creative commons license.  Open content refers to a work that others can adapt and/ or copy. The term often applies to software and are under an open content license rather than copyright. Open source is when code is available and readily modified. This allows for public modification by a multitude of users to improve the code.

The newsletter allowed me to refresh my skills in word. A new skill that I learned was how to format columns throughout a document. I knew of the column feature before and used it in papers, but I always struggled with having columns throughout the entire document and not at just one specific piece. I think it is really helpful to know you can switch the amount of columns throughout the document. I liked that I was able to explore the idea of a newsletter, something I may choose to do in my future career. In order to improve next time, I think that I can use better quality images that flow better in the newsletter. I think for my future career, I think learning how to put a functioning email link is really helpful because it can be used in any type of information that I send out to the parents of my students.