Winter Art Projects

Students in McDonogh's PrK, K, & First grade classes created winter art projects using paints and other materials, as seen on the examples here.

A school day...

The prior blog post is a clip that shows a fun day in the lives of teachers and elementary students.

I used an embed code for a movie found on the internet to work with quicktime movies. The original embed was so big it covered the whole profile window with the bunny photo, so I tried to reduce the window.

I fiddled with the width and height numbers in the embed code and was only able to reduce the size of the window enough to show the majority of the presentation and not crop out the words on the edges. It still extends outside of the blog column, but I couldn't figure out how to change the template size of the window. oh well...enjoy the clip.....

museum trip Pr1st

BP10_2009103_SecondReflectiveMediaAsset

BP9_2009103_TagGalaxy_Web2.0Tool

Tag Galaxy is a visual arts teacher’s dream-come-true for gaining access to thousands of photographs. Users go into the site and enter a word into a box. Photos have been gathered from around the world, and they are tagged with words that describe the photo. The word and related words pop up in a galaxy of planets. The biggest planet represents the original word that the user inserted, and smaller planets represent related words. More specific words that surround the animal galaxy include, zoo, pet, cat and nature for example. The user can then press on any planet and pictures float onto the screen for choosing.

Photos can be downloaded and the photographer is identified, as well as whether or not the photo is protected by copyright. Flickr is the host site that house the library of photos. A word such as animal has almost 2 million examples of animal pictures, while the smaller planet choices such as “pet” had just over 50,000 photographs.

The number of photographs available is constantly increasing as photographers can add their images on Flickr. Though Flickr is the source for the library of photos, a user can access the photos using TagGalaxy without having a Flickr account. A teacher might need a photo for a visual presentation of a topic, and TagGalaxy provides easy access to those needs.

Teachers that use a SmartBoard in their class will find using this visual library of photos to be a splendid source for projecting impactful images to their students.

Cat on the computer photo found on TagGalaxy. The photographer calls herself, "Tryingtolearn USA’s Photostream". Retreived from http://www.flickr.com/photos/carolmyra/362699219/

Smart Board and TagGalaxy retrieved from

http://smartboards.typepad.com/smartboard/2009/05/smartboards-and-tag-galaxy.html

TagGalaxy site

http://www.taggalaxy.com/

BP8_2009103_Skype_Web2.0Tool

Real-time communication is available with tools like Instant Messaging (IM) through Yahoo and Google. Text is the primary convention for communicating through IM, and it is done on the computer or a mobile device. The IM web tool has advanced to the point that people can attach videos, photos and other files as well as text. There are so many Web 2.0 tools available; it is hard to comment on just one. Skype is an additional real-time communication tools that I am familiar with. It allows Internet telephony, where voices are carried over the Internet in real-time. It is a service that is readily available for free or at very little cost. More than one hundred million people around the world are using Skype to converse in real-time. Skype is set up to provide video conferencing as well. (Schrum, p69)

As I investigated real-time web 2.0 tools for communications that carry voices using Internet Protocol, there were others. These included Talkety, tringme, flashphone, and jaduka, and they can be further investigated at (http://www.go2web20.net/#telephony). Some of these lesser known tools need head phones or other equipment to work, which may be why Skype has become more commonly known.

As the use of these tools becomes more common, students who need to work on projects out of class could use real-time communication tools to do assignments with classmates while at home. Our online course at Full Sail is conducive to this kind of communication, since classmates are spread across the country and need to collaborate and talk regularly. In some cases I have used Skype and ichat to conference conversations among three or four classmates simultaneously.

So long as students can afford a computer at home, and they have the proper connections to the Internet, Skype and other real-time communication tools could be something teachers turn to as a tool to accompany long-term group assignments. However the chance that computers will be found in every student’s home does not yet seem to be anywhere close to a reality. A census report in 2007 showed that home access to computers was inequitable across student population. “Fewer than 40% of American-Indian, Hispanic, and African American children had both computers and Internet access at home” (Schrum, p166). Until the vast majority of students have the tools at home to go with assignments, Skype and other real-time tools will have to find their way into the educational systems in bits and pieces. In Michael Wesch's video, Wesch referred to Ray Kurzweil's comments that we are living in exponetial times. The landscape of technology is changing exponentially in terms of the rapid speed at which Technology, Internet, Bandwidth, information processing and applications are moving and growing. With that I hold onto hope that we will find ways to equip homes of all economic backgrounds sooner than we can imagine.

References:

Real-time Web tools information retrieved from

http://www.go2web20.net/#telephony

Schrum, L. & Solomon, G. (2007). Web 2.0: New Tools, New Schools. Washington D.C. ISTE.

Telephone image with computer created on Power Point using clip art manipulated by Beckie Lamborn, 2009.

Wesch, M. (2009). Video retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4yApagnr0s

BP8_2009103_CommentClassmate_Web2.0Tool

BP9_2009103_Reflective Post 1

The Web 2.0 tool I have used most is the National Gallery of Art's The Art Zone, with it's interactive activities for students to create their own masterpieces with Virtual paint, clips, or other digital tools for making their own art works.From first grade through 6th grade, my students have enjoyed this site. Watch out for the ink supply in your printer, because students love to print their compositions to share.