Digital Graphics!

For the past 5 weeks I have been enrolled in a digital graphics course with Lamar University. I was pleasantly surprised to be able to use my creativity with something for a change. It challenged me to try new things out such as animation, logo making and a newsletter. The course broke design into the CRAP, while the abbreviation seems funny the breakdown of CRAP was very helpful in organizing my text and artwork for the assignments. Being an art instructor I have always just relied on my artistic “eye” to figure out why certain designs are superior to others. I enjoyed the simplicity of CRAP in organizing why good art is pleasing to our eyes. This is something I will definitely use in my classroom. I believe the real benefit to this course is that it gave me lessons that I could take straight to my classroom. The logo assignment was brilliant in really breaking down a persons identity into a visual form. While it seems like a basic thought I labored over color, line quality movement etc. in my piece, I believe my students will benefit from that sort of self exploration. Having other peers via the discussion board was very beneficial in knowing how well I achieved my goal on these projects. Just having dialogue in regards to getting technology used in multiple types of classrooms was eye opening as well. I sometimes find that I look at these courses from a unique spot, as an art teacher. Most other students in our program are technology instructors or in core course areas. I like how I get to see everyone's point of view via our discussions and am sometimes surprised at how similar we actually are. After doing these projects such as the animation I am interested at how having students create their own subject matter will help retention. I would like to see if student ownership makes high school age students more receptive to simple technology. I know that my animation wont wow them, but if they had made it- it would. Through the whole course I was most pleased with my newsletter. It was by far the most relevant project to me and really the most useful to my department. We get so bogged down with emails and blogs are only good is your coworkers constantly check them, so a digital newsletter every two weeks could really show off my department and educate our school on our events and accolades. In short this has honestly been my favorite class, it has given me real useful things to stick in my teacher tool belt and I had a great time experimenting with our assignments.

Design principles in the Gorgeous Book of Kells

For this assignment I looked primarily at the Book of Kells Monogram page. I remembered it fondly from my art history class and loved its images and the meaning behind them. My first impression of the page was its heavy lines and the balance of weight to each item on the page. Although the giant shape that resembles a P is larger and beholds more prominence than the other smaller letters on the right side of the page the page remains balanced. You can see contrast throughout the piece with the thick lines surrounding the letters and pictures. This is almost like a black outline that sets these elements apart in the picture. There is also a great deal of contrasting color such as the red and blue and the use of gold and black. The very stylized artistic elements such as the style of text, the Celtic circle designs and the general filling in of pattern is very repetitious and gives this page a great flow. The alignment of the heavy long line (in the P) on the left side aligns the elements to give right side a more even presence. The proximity of each picture is important in this piece especially since they larger characters are more important. For example Christ's head is much larger than the small mouse. I like in this manuscript how they embellished everything with heavy design. The purpose of such books was not only to teach about Christ but to also entertain people who could not read. They learned through the symbolic imagery. Smart!

Finished PSA

For the last 3 weeks I have been working with a group of fine ladies, Ing Mu, Ranada Smith, Julie Barber, and Melba Gilbert. We hardly knew each other when we started but that changed very quickly as we were given a seemingly daunting task of creating a 60 second PSA from scratch. I entered the assignment with trepidation, as I have never been in a successful group. I have always been unhappy with the end result or been an inactive member of a group. I was glad to be wrong with this group of ladies.

From the get go we worked very well via email. We decided on cyber bullying as our topic as we collectively felt that it was a current and relevant topic. I personally liked that I could use this in my class yearly as well as share it with the campus for internet safety week.

We divided tasks by offering our strengths. I offered to help with the script, take photographs and record audio. I used photographs that referenced technology used in cyber bullying and Ing used photoshop to alter them to match our video. I used audacity to read the script that Ranada put together and edited it also using audacity. Melba shot video and then Ing used Adobe Flash and Photoshop to edit and create our PSA. All of our footage and images were original and Ing received the music from a free sound effect site called www.freefx.co.uk.

As a group we had to be flexible and be able to change things when necessary but this was really no problem. The best part of working with everyone is that via email we were able to share our vision. In the end no ones toes were stepped on and we were very successful with our end product.

Podcast- Movie Maker

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Microsoft Movie Maker Vs' Cyberlink Power Director

This week we needed to use a free yet relatively easy video editing program. I unfortunately have the world most unreliable laptop could not at first download movie maker, which is among the highest rated and easiest rated free programs. So I chose to download for my free 30 day trial Cyberlink's Power Director. The download was easy, i looked at reviews from cnet.com and they gave this program 4 stars. After downloading the program I think this was highly overrated. At first glance everything seems very easy, their icons are all pictures that can set things such as blending effects, artistic washes to your video as well as the normal attributes of a video editing program. The most basic program is that it has so many bells and whistles that it turns out to be too busy to navigate and the sequence editor is very touchy, you will end up clicking on 30 things before the portion of video you need. Frustrated, I ended up at my parents home using their already installed but yet lovely Microsoft Movie Maker. This program is free in most Windows Vista-7. It was incredibly easy to use, drag down menu, easy addition of music and the splitting feature was very nice. For the basics this is the best. I can see my students using this as a entry level video editing program, a start so to speak. In later courses such as multimedia or animation I can see where adobe's suite can come in mighty handy. For fancy fade outs and artistically overdone effects other programs may suit your better but for basic editing that ANYONE can do, Movie maker is gold!

Web Conference Week 2

I did not get to attend the web conference this week. I have had a huge amount of technical issues and am having to use my parents PC for the most part. But I logged in and viewed the conference after it happened. I along with others are/ were very confused about our assignment. It appears that we are only responsible for the podcast portion, so audio only. Dr. Abernathy answered everyone's questions and immediate feedback and guidance was offered. Web Conferences are a great way to interact with classmates and professors but I find the timing of them to be frustrating, especially the second week of school. I honestly feel like I am drowning in this course due to the timing...

My Digital Story

I really enjoyed making this, sorry my microphone sounds so poorly. I am hoping to get a new one by next week.

StarChart Powerpoint

Star Chart for MHS

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My favorite so far- a draft for The National Educational Technology Plan

The brand new draft for the National Educational Technology Plan is quite an interesting and innovative document. It recommends five essential areas such as learning, assessment, teaching, infrastructure, and productivity. It understands that students’ roles with technologies are personally far more relevant outside of school and encourages educators through this plan to help bride this large gap. The plan is extremely well thought out and has incredibly thoughtful and productive solutions. That honestly at first were giant “No kidding!” moments for me while reading. I really enjoyed their professional development proposals for educators.
On page 6 it states “Episodic and ineffective professional development is replaced by professional learning that is collaborative, coherent, and continuous and that blends more effective in-person courses and workshops with the expanded opportunities, immediacy, and convenience enabled by online environments full of resources and opportunities for collaboration.” I think when I read this trumpets went off in my head and I fully realized that the authors finally “get it”. When referring to Infrastructure the plan does not merely talk about machines and basic tools but people! “The underlying principle is that infrastructure includes people, processes, learning resources, policies, and sustainable models for continuous improvement in addition to broadband connectivity, servers, software, management systems, and administration tools.”
I like how they also realize that the plan is not an end all and that we will have to continually work on improvement on each level. On page 81 it states “The underlying principle of continuous improvement is that we are unlikely to improve learning outcomes and productivity until we define and start measuring them. This starts with identifying what we seek in learning outcomes.” The plan really has some ground breaking plans that if inevitably pushed will transform the face of education but the most eye opening of all the data and grandeur was the fact that they actually want educators to comment and critique the plan!

Progress report for the TX Long-Range Report on Technology- Woo!

This progress report is the first one attached to the Long-Range plan for technology. The first portion was eye opening! I had no idea that a previous plan existed, it does not seem evident in my school history that as drastic measures were taken to promote technology. The report states the usage of each grade bracket as well as a breakdown of the technologies each group uses and differentiates between school work as well. It was no surprise that K-2 uses learning games the most. It was also disappointing that the junior and high school level students seemed to only use computers the most for writing projects. This is depressing and makes computers seem a kin to type writers! The TIP immersion pilot gave great feedback in regards to the effect of increased technology campus wide and the moral of teachers as well as the retaining of students. I also appreciated that TAKS results were significantly higher after the 3 year immersion! The TxVSN was very interesting to read about as well. I do not how I feel about the idea of a virtual school just yet. Already I can see a great number of pros and cons with this type of program. Overall the part of the report that I personally felt more interested in was the data collected from Net Day-Speak UP! It was incredibly interesting to read about the drastic differences between, student, teacher and parent. It gave lots of insight into the work we need to do as educators to really tighten the techno gap!

Tuesday Night- Lamar Web Conference!

Although the web conference was a bit tricky to begin with I found the experience to be influential and enlightening. To see co-students and your professors in such a relate-able setting was fun and humbling.  It is nice to feel a start of a community and the basics of the program were laid out by Professor Abernathy.  I was glad to hear more information about the upcoming 18 month internship. Especially the information regarding my personal selection choice, this info has really helped me ask the proper questions on my campus in order to find the right mentor. I was also glad to hear from a soon to be graduate, Glen Harrison about his experiences with the program! He explained to us how the program is overwhelming as well as confusing at first but soon we will be in our own grooves.  We all shared our amazement in the time use so far from the program and discussed where to find a few items such as book lists as well as the handbook on our epic assignments page.  I couldn’t help but wonder how beneficial an online web conference might be to my students.  I wondered how easy it could be to talk to professors at colleges who could tell as well as show off their programs to my artists.

Cool thought!

My thoughts on the Texas Long Range Plan for Technology, 2006-2020

Educator Preparation and Development is the area that I am most interested in improving on my campus. This is where my school, Manvel High School has scored the lowest on our state Star chart. We have scored a 2 or lower on all areas of professional development on this chart for the past 3 years. From this data it is quite obvious that teachers feel they are not getting the time or information they need in regards to professional development in technology. According to the plan 55% of Texas teachers rate their technology skills as average, in schools where tools aren’t the problem people seem to be. This is a bit ironic since we are striving in Texas to provide new equipment in order to fit the Long Range's plan for school Infrastructure, yet we are falling behind year by year in training our educational leaders. The results of correct and useful training are obvious as evidenced in Eric Jones article titled How to put Instructions Ahead of Technology. In his article he states a positive result of quality educator training, “The increased use of technology has helped ignite excitement in teaching and learning while building students’ critical-thinking and problem-solving skills."  After speaking with our technology leader on campus I understand that there is little funding for staff technology development.  Even less available is the time needed to allocate for training. So what can we do when the current plan is obviously not working?   I am hoping to propose a monthly technology skill workshop.  This would be incredibly informal, most likely including a snack potluck.  Teachers would come in like an open house into my computer lab and learn a useful techno based teaching tool each month.  An example may be how to start your own class blog or how to make your curriculum interactive.  With any luck this could start to level the playing field and give educators on my campus the skills they want and need. Would you come? Why? Why not?

The first bite.

Here starts my true blogness.  Prior to this I was a mere dabbler on livejournal and facebook.  Now its for real... at least for this week.