Class Website

This project was the process of creating a website using google sites, which is a free tool offered by google.  This is a great tool to take advantage of as a teacher for communicating and providing resources for students and parents.

What went well?

Once I worked with it a little bit, I thought the process of creating the site went pretty smoothly. I like my end product and think it is easy to navigate and looks nice.


What went wrong?

Some simple things like deleting and rearranging pages was confusing at first, I could not figure it out so I googled it and found the answer, so that problem was easily fixed.  I wish that there were more templates to choose from, but that is probably just because I am an art major and want mine to be pretty, but I am ultimately happy with my final product.


What I will do differently next time:

I would not really do much different next time, the process went well and I do not have any major complaints, hopefully I can continue to update this site and use it in my future classroom.

How I will use a class website in the classroom:


I will use this site to show my work and the students work, to share resources about artists we are learning about and different art sites that you can interact with at home to learn more about art.  I will use this website as a tool for the students and teachers to get to know me and keep up with what we are doing in class.

Link to website:
https://sites.google.com/site/mrshammersartclass/

Digital Story Telling

You can also access this video through youtube at http://youtu.be/G91BCOqfgGo

 This is  a video I made using iMovie.  I think that this was a successful project overall.  The process of diagramming a storyboard before we made the movie was very helpful.  Some obstacles I faced were finding pictures that were high enough quality to use on the web, but I managed to find them through some searching.  iMovie was easy to use and very easy to export and share.

This tool will be great to use in a classroom. You could do movies on class trips, other artists, art movements, student's art, your own art, etc. It will be helpful when in the school to be able to use a wider variety of music, because you wont necessarily be posting to youtube and having to worry about copyright laws.

I did my movie on Andy Warhol. There is a short biography of him, definition of pop art, examples of his art, and a few of his famous quotes.

Flip Chart on Complementary Colors

 

This is the cover page to my flip chart that I made covering complementary colors. I made the flipchart using the Active Inspire program.  This program allows you to make, in my opinion, really interactive, fun, powerpoints.  One thing that is great about the program is even if you have powerpoints or slides from a different program you can still upload them and use them in active inspire.

I think after a while the format of the program would get easier once I got used to it, but for this first time project it was a little tricky.  Overall, I had a good experience working in active inspire though.  I feel like you do need to me creative to think of good ways to incorporate the interaction of students. It requires you to think outside the box with how you format your pages.  

This tool obviously is going to be a great asset to any classroom.  It allows you the flexibility to create slides on whatever subject you want and gives you the opportunity to get your students involved with activities at the board, which most students LOVE! They can write on the board the answers, or erase to find answers, move the objects around to match, and many other possibilities.  I hope that I get a chance to work with this program in my future classroom, because I think it is a perfect way to incorporate technology in the class and provides a new, exciting way of learning for students.

Google Forms

This is my example of google forms.

Digital Diagram

We learned how to use the Inspiration software to create digital diagrams in class.  This can be a very useful tool in any classroom because it helps to break down concepts to make them simple for kids to understand.  Many children are visual learners and diagrams are a great way for kids to understand information that might seem complex.  This tool can be very useful in my art class by showing relationships and examples and how all the different terms connect to each other.

I really enjoyed this project and organizing the diagram.  I wouldnt do anything different in this project, but I did think of other ideas I could have done, and will do for my future classroom.  Some of these ideas include color mapping, art movements, and principles of design.

For my project I did a diagram of the elements of art.  This is set to meet the state standards for second grade visual arts.  It has the main idea, the seven componets, definitions of each, and examples of each.

Smilebox!

Today in class we learned about Smilebox and how you can use it in your classroom! It is an easy and fun tool that the kids could even use. You can make newsletters, collages, invitations, calendars, etc.

Scavenger Hunt!

The passed couple of weeks we learned about digital images and different tools for publishing them on the web.  The top example is a Picassa Web Album  that I made containing pictures of a digital scavenger hunt I did that shows all different types of lines I found.  Picassa Web albums are a good tool to publishing pictures and sharing them with others. It is easy to use and FREE! The second example on this page is a google presentation. Google presentation is a great tool to use in the classroom, just like google documents it allows you to collaborate with others and work together on the same project. It is similar to powerpoint. This tool is also simple to use and share, which is perfect for student use. It is also a great way to keep students up to date with class assignments if they were absent, all you would have to do is upload your presentation to your class blog or website and the students can look up anything they missed.

I think that this project went very well, and I would change anything about it. I also think the scavenger hunt is a great idea that I can use in my classroom one day, it's a good way to get students creatively thinking and looking for examples of art in things they see everyday!