Artistic Quotes to Live By...

"I must see new things and investigate them. I want to taste dark
water and see crackling trees and wild winds."- Egon Schiele

26 January 2012

The Best of Blogs

The best part, in my opinion, of education blogs and the internet in general, for teachers, are the many chances of networking with people across the nation.  I think that one of the more important things to keep you blog interesting, especially for art blogs, is posting plenty of pictures and interesting links. This becomes easier when you become a teacher because you can take student work and post it on you blog for other educators to learn from and for them and their parents to see what's going on in class. 

I really like Dick Blick's lesson plan website.  It allows you to search lesson plans for grade level, and from there you can narrow your search to many of the art mediums. Especially when you are teaching students repetitively (over a number of semesters), I think it is a mark of a good teacher is they mix up their assignments so students get as much exposure as possible.  It is websites like this and education blogs that allows you to spruce up your curriculum easily with good, thought out lessons! 

Every human is an artist. The dream of your life is to make beautiful art.  -Miguel Angel Ruiz





21 January 2012

One Million Bones

As a teacher, I think that it is important not only for my students to learn about the history (or current news) of the world, it is also necessary for them to have a deep understanding about events that they will likely never experience for themselves because of the time and place they live.  When I was in sixth grade (where I went to school, this was still elementary), I had a teacher that was passionate about Russia and the Holocaust.  Through out the year, my class learned to speak basic Russian and because aware of the atrocities that took place in World War II in Europe.

To this day, I still have a deep interest in the Holocaust because it never cease to astonish me how these types of horrific acts could have occurred just 70 years ago.  The project, One Million Bones, is an artistic movement to create one million handmade bones out of clay to create awareness of the millions of victims that have fallen due to genocide.  This is a way that you could get your students involved in a national movement with a world wide message. I believe this would be a lesson that would resonate with the students who participate for a very long time.  This very well could be something that would stir an interest in a student for a life time and inspire them to make a change in the world for the better.

By using blogs this way, individuals can work to spread the word on important movements like this one and offers an opportunity for people to become involved in something that they would likely never have known about!

You will be judged in years to come by how you responded to genocide on your watch. 
-Nicholas D Kristof

   

20 January 2012

It's Time For Me

As much as I value posting about prescribed assignments, I figured I would start to transition this blog to be more representational of me, the artist and art educator.  My intentions for taking this course was to learn how to develop a useful blog that I can use to communicate with my students about their assignments and sites that might perk their creative interests.

After looking at a number of art/art education blogs, I realized that a lot of the bloggers use their sites to share lessons and give demonstrations of projects that they have done themselves or have had their students do.  One great website that I have linked on my blog is Art Education 2.0 (you do have to become a member before you can look at links on the site, but it is worth the sign up).

I think the best thing about blogging is getting to share your ideas with a whole plethora of people that you would have otherwise never have had contact with.  Wonderful things can happen when ideas are shared and more people are open to a world of knowledge that they would have otherwise not have been privy to.

"If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas." -George Bernard Shaw, Renowned Irish Author

Powerful Words

As I try to further my knowledge of expanding the interest of my blogs I have decided to try to attach a video clip, more specifically a YouTube video, to my post to spice things up a bit.

I don't think that this is an obscure clip, but I do know that it is very powerful for me and EVERY time I watch it I tear up.  Taylor Mali is an educator, and in this video, he shows off his slam poetry skills by delivering a very moving speech. 

It is three minutes of your time that, if you value education and teaching as a profession, you are sure to  appreciate deeply.



The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives.  -Robert M. Hutchins


15 January 2012

Messin' with Gadgets

I really had a lot of fun exploring and playing with a number of the different gadgets the blog had to offer.  I decided to add links to a number of websites on my blog that are of particular interest to me, and, if I continue to use this method of communication once I am teaching, would be useful tools to my students.  There were a lot of interesting add-ons that I thought about including on my blog, but in the effort to keep an organized, effective space for communication, I decided to leave them behind in an effort to reduce frivolous clutter. 

One gadget that I think might be very useful when I am a teacher (however not so practical right not) is having your followers be notified via an email when a new post was added.  That way if your students (or their parents) are following your blog but generally check their email more often than your website, they would be notified when something new is posted, instead of having to check every day with nothing fresh to read.

These are definitely fun little options to play around with and as my blogging experience progresses and the site has more purpose to it, I may consider adding more relevant, useful gadgets to it later.

We are all students. The moment we believe we have 'arrived,' we're in trouble. -Brenda Behr

12 January 2012

To Blog or Not to Blog...that is the question

The great thing about blogs is that they are yours, your opportunity to vent, inform or simply converse with the outside world, whether it's with your friends and family or strangers across the world that you never (or will likely not ever) meet.  The people that read the blog often have a vested interest in reading what you write and it is likely because they share the same enthusiasm for something that you do.  Correspondence between these parties can build a strong sense of community and often spark strong, inspirational conversations about what you love the most.  Blogs are often more than static words on a web page, new postings and video or sounds bites are uploaded on  a regular basis (if the poster is on their A game) and visitors to these blogs have the opportunity to read something fresh and relevant often.

This is the foundation of the article To Blog or NOT to Blog by Ken Smith where he discussed university students bringing their Alma mater into the blogging age by establishing their own websites and linking them to their university's website.  The student's blogs discussed in the article helped attract a youthful audience to the university's websites.  The article pointed out that these bogs were used for a wide use of purposes, ranging from scholastically based posts to "One blogger, for example, frequently reports on leaving campus to attend professional sporting events, while another graciously answers questions from prospective students"(pg. 59).

Using blogs in this capacity is great for youth appeal, to keep the new students intrigued with what is going on campus and in their classes, however the down side to open, uncensored blogging by student's is that they are free to say whatever they want and sometimes young adults do not have the best filters in their writing.  Overall, I think this is a great way to encourage students to be involved with the goings on around their campus and a way to promote their school. However, for younger, less professional students, if their writing is intended to represent the school, their postings need to be monitored by a supervisor or teacher mentor.

Smith, Ken. "To Blog Or NOT To Blog." University Business 8.12 (2005): 59-62. Academic Search Premier. Web. 13 Jan. 2012.

If I fall asleep with a pen in my hand, don't remove it - I might be writing in my dreams.  ~Terri Guillemets

Blogs versus Discussion Boards

As discussed in Shiang-Kwei Wang and Hui-Yin Hsua' s article Reflections on Using Blogs to Expand In-class Discussion, blogs can be used in many different capacities in an educational setting but one very important function can be for teacher to student or student to student communication.  Of course tools such as discussion boards have been widely used, blogs offer different and, some would argue, more useful methods of communication.  First of all discussion boards are rather limiting in that they restrict use and input to the teacher and students assigned to that class's forum, where as blogs allow for many more people to view and comment on conversations taking place on often interesting subjects.  People can continue blogs, and subsequently the conversations posted to them, after the unit has ended and allows for people to carry on the discussion without the threat of their dialog being eliminated due the course ending.  On a blog, students, teachers, and others who choose to follow the discussion have the opportunity to view the posting on an ongoing scroll format. Students can easily reference earlier comments that may spark further insight into their thoughts and ideas on the subject being talked about.  The authors point out that there are of course risks involved in posting to a public blog versus a private educational discussion board, such as the risk of posting personal information on a site that is available to a wider, and possibly undesirable, audience.  Another consequence of blogging is knowing that their writing is available to the public, so students might have stronger motivation to write well so that the quality of their writing might shine (Gary, 2003; Repman, Zinskie, &Carlson, 2005).

This blog was very insightful and gave me wonder ideas how to utilize blogging in my class.  My only concern is making the assumption that all students have ready access to the internet and know what a blog is and how to use it.  And as obvious as this may seem, this is a great way to work literacy into your classes if your content area doesn't lend itself to reading or writing.

Shiang-Kwei, Wang, and Hsua Hui-Yin. "Reflections On Using Blogs To Expand In-Class Discussion." Techtrends: Linking Research & Practice To Improve Learning 52.3 (2008): 81-85. Academic Search Premier. Web. 12 Jan. 2012.   





A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the other one.  ~Baltasar Gracián