Blog 6 - Cited

I had never previously heard of CITEd and am thoroughly impressed. I occasionally teach professional development courses in my district on integrating technology in the classroom. I have often thought about having a tool exactly like this, one in which I can gather resources and information for the people in my classes. What an easy way to gather specific resources geared towards a specific class topic, specific curricular area, or specific group of teachers!

The idea of finding out how to integrate technology into your classroom, when you have never done it before, can be very overwhelming. Often administrators advise us that we need to start doing it, without giving us much support on the "how". Teachers can be nervous about venturing out to research on their own. CITEd offers an opportunity to gather an interesting, limited group of articles and websites from reliable sources to send to teachers who would like to know more.

As a teacher educator, I can have a variety of toolkits for varying levels of ability, familiarity, and interest among the staff. Even a teacher who had no interest in pursuing technology could like at resources about the Cultural Divide, for example, and perhaps find an interesting entry point into technology.

I love the organizational factor of this website and wide variety of resources that it provides! My plan is to share the small toolkit I created with the people registered for my next tech class, before the class meets. That way teachers can gain an understanding of some of the salient points and prepare questions so that the class can be more geared towards their needs. Below, take a look at the list of resources I chose to include. I picked only 7 because I don't want to overwhelm anyone and I wanted to gear the class towards using Web 2.0 technologies in literacy related classes and topics. Hopefully these resources provide a good springboard to get into some specifics!

Resources in this Kit  

• 4Teachers.org  Remove
• Classroom 2.0 Wiki  Remove
• Classroom Technology Management  Remove
• Digital Divide and EdTech  Remove
• Online Technology Tutorials  Remove
• Reading Matrix  Remove
• Route 21  Remove

Blog 5 - Working with Videos and Moving Images

For the first assignment this week, I created a 60s concept video that I really love. I took clips from my end of the year theater unit for the base of the video. I narrowed down 56 videos to just a few, then I took short, 5 second clips from each that highlighted the star in a favorable moment. Then I used to text to write a meaningful caption for each video, tying them together with the same verbal and conceptual theme. Finally, I selected music that would highlight the overall message of the video and tug on the heart strings. The result is a Save the Arts video that I am really proud of!

For the second activity I tried to do a story board for my MMP, but I ended up doing more of a map than a story map. My project is actually not a movie or website exactly, but is a series of Glogs embedded into my class wiki in order to further elucidate my first unit. What I've drawn below is a plan for the first two glogs that I planned to get done before the end of this class. The map basically outlines the multimodal components that I feel would best add to an understanding of our unit themes and connection concepts. I tried to use the same shapes and colors for different types of pieces, such as video, music, links, quotations, or text. In this way I focused on making sure that my glogs used a variety of modalities to try to reach out to my students and help them better understand our unit concepts. 

Take a look at my screencast for this week to see how the first map has come to life!

Blog #4 - Working With Digital Images

For the first activity I chose a variety of personal photos and tried some creative cropping. These are some of the my favorites :

It was an interesting process because I feel like I thought about cropping as a tool in a completely different way. Of course I've cropped photos before, but always to cut out unimportant things and to focus in on the people in the picture. In this exercise I tried to choose a focal point that might change the meaning of the picture as a whole, therefor making cropping more of a design tool. In the first photo above, I focused in on my engagement and wedding ring, which changes the emphasis of the photo from a vacation snapshot, to a romantic focus. In the second, the focus becomes something that could be an advertising shot. The third changes the focus from a group meeting, the the emotion of one participant. And the last switches focus away from people altogether to focus on something more timeless. Amazing how much you could get out of one picture!

In the second activity, I experimented with choosing colors from the original picture to create a layout. What I discovered as really interesting was that colors are made up of many tiny little colors. I tried to choose black, or green, and discovered that I was getting a subtle shade of that color. At first I was thrown by this, wanting to get more vibrant colors. But as I started to play around, the subtle shades actually helped create a unity in the layout that was soothing and peaceful. The color in the second one actually came from my skin tone!

The third activity I did had to do with using borders to help create a different feel in a picture. Often times in education you see layouts, websites, and presentations that are created using as much "fun" color as possible. I've come to see that this is not always the best design concept! From the exercise done below, I am really interested in using a variety of border shapes to emphasize images. You can see how each different shape changes the feeling that the image creates in the viewer. The soft, fuzzy borders of the first creates a dreamlike feeling, whereas the white, jagged border creates a more lighthearted feeling. I never thought of borders as just as important as the image itself before!

Design is more than just making the picture look nice. It's about using tools like cropping, a color palette, and    borders to create an image that does the job you want it to do. Using those tools helps the images to create the feeling you want them to create. The Design Basics Index states that "the rest of our color education happens on a more instinctual level during a life-time of observation, enjoyment, and hands-on practice" (Krause, 2004, p. 207). By allowing our instincts to help us use these tools, we can tap into the real benefits of design!

Blog #3 - Effective Design and Layout

The readings this week focused on a variety of facets of graphic design having to do with the components of a piece. One specifically was the typography of a design, which I think plays a huge role in the subliminal messages that go out to the reader. So I chose to complete the really interesting Word Portraits activity on page 241 of the Design Basics Index. The activity calls for us, as graphic design beginners, to think about the implications of meaning carried with each type of font. I chose two words that made cognitive sense with the implied meaning of the font, and one that is seemingly the opposite of that meaning. See what you think the overall implications are!

As you can see above, so much of what we expect from an advertisement or presentation rests, not on what the piece actually says, but on the font with which it is stated!  It is perfectly described in the first sentences of this chapter, which states that "Typefaces give voice to your words" (Krause, 2004, p. 231).  And they really do. As the chapter explains, this is indeed an art form that is seen everywhere, yet hardly ever gets credit for moving audiences. Imagine giving students a test in which all the questions were written in the Jokester font shown above. Students would understandably have trouble taking the questions seriously or focusing on the task at hand. Or imagine sending a quick email to your girlfriend written in the Chiller font shown above. Terrifying consequences!

For my second exercise, I chose the Corporate Compositions activity on page 143 of the Design Basics Index. The activity asks the reader to create a logo for one of several companies using shapes to create abstract mini compositions to convey meaning. Similar to the above exercise, this one has to do with implicit associations that the mind of the viewer has with color, line, style, and shapes. I chose to compose for the Holistic Medicine Center. These are my favorite ideas that I brainstormed. We were suppose to choose three, but I liked all of these for one reason or another.

I really enjoyed choosing soothing, natural looking colors and shapes that I think people associate strongly with Holistic medicine and healing centers. Choosing blues and greens I believe leads the viewer to think about nature, while choosing reds and blacks causes the viewer to make an association with Eastern Medicine of some kind. In the end I chose the design below because I think it also creates an unspoken feeling of light and growth, which people associate with getting better.

I refrained from adding text, as I do not think that is what this exercise was about. I liked what the author stated at the beginning of the shape workshop: "Cultures worldwide have long used basic shapes to formulate intricate and highly individualized visual dialects" (Krause, 2004, p. 125). This is, in the end, all about communication and we want to use all the tools at our disposal, not just text, to have the most meaningful and successful communication with our audience that is possible. Using font and shape design as seen above helps to reach out to those audiences and draw them into our meaning.

In working on this, I discovered that some graphic designers post their portfolios on Youtube to get attention from potential employers. I thought this was a really interesting combination of ideas that we've been talking about. Take a look at this sample below. The designer really illustrates some of the unique ideas we've read about in our texts having to do with use of space and size with shapes.

This really helps to highlight the idea that using font and shape design as seen above helps to reach out to those audiences and draw them into our meaning, whatever our purpose may be.

Mini Art School - Blog 2 - Intro to Rules of Design

After doing the readings for this week, I started thinking about all the websites people go to on a daily basis that are a pain to navigate. So I started asking around for what people felt were the worst. A friend of mine recommended that I check out Chud.com, which they said was great content-wise, but was visually very confusing and overwhelming. This is what the front page looks like :

And the page continues down below for quite a while with more links like you see at the bottom of the page. There are some good things about the design of this page but, according to the "Layout Sins" outlined in Chapter 4 of Golombisky and Hagen's "White Space is Not Your Enemy", but there are also a lot of  bad things.

1. The authors warn to avoid using things that blink constantly. Chud does have an animation that repeats in the box in the center of the page. It scrolls through options for movie reviews. Golombisky and Hagen recommend showing this sort of animation once and then ending it there, but Chud plays this animation the whole time you are on the page. On the plus side, the scrolling is slow and there are only three options, so it does not feel the same as incessant blinking, but this could have been avoided. 

2. Warped Photos:  Chud.com has no problem with this. Their photos are all movie photos and are scaled as they should be.

3. Naked Photos: The chapter mentions Naked Photos, meaning photos with undefined borders that blend into the background, as a design sin. In examining this website closely, you can see that they carefully do, as recommended by the authors, use hairline rules to border all their photos. They have even taken the time to do so with the series of small thumbnails near the top of the page. This helps to give the page a defined feel.

4. Bulky Borders and Boxes : Chud uses a variety of strategies for separating information. There are some borders, which are done as a film roll, so they conceptually make sense. In the list of links below, the borders are this lines, so there is no major offense in this category. However, I do feel that they do not use negative space to their advantage here.

5. Cheated Margins: This website is kind the outside margins of the page and do a great job in that regard. However, they do not seem to consider much the inset and offset margins around pictures and the inner columns of text. The negative space within the page is definitely cheated, which adds to that cluttered feeling.

6. Centering Everything: While there is a lot centered at the top of this design, the addition of 3 text columns does help to vary that for the viewer's eye.

7. 4 Corners and Clutter : Even though the outside margins of this page are nice and big, the rest of the page feel claustrophobic and cluttered. As Golombisky and Hagen indicate, "Good layout feng shui requires calming pools of negative space," which Chud.com is definitely lacking (Golombisky, p. 37, 2010).

8. Trapped Negative Space : There is no trapped negative space in this case, but that is because there isn't much negative space at all.

9. Busy Backgrounds: There is no background on the page itself, which is a plus. However the large focal title at the top, with its own reflection, feels a bit busy and overwhelming.

10. Tacky Type Emphasis: There is so much capitalization on this page that I feel I am being yelled at all the time. I think it would help to minimize some of it, especially in the article sections. Also, the entire page is reverse type, with white print on a black background. This feels difficult to read for the eye.

11. Bad Bullets: No bullets.

12. Widows and Orphans: I'm not sure if this qualifies exactly, but the far right column on this page continues far beyond the first and second columns, which leaves a huge awkward area of white spaces running down the page for a long time. This column could probably be unorphan-ed in some way.

13. Justified Rivers: Not a problem.


Overall, not horrible design, but this page could definitely be improved. The overall feeling it gives is one of clutter, shock, and overemphasis. It is definitely not a soothing or relaxing site to visit, which may influence web goers to subconsciously stay away!


I also completed the design exercise on page 71 of Design Basics by Jim Krause. I used the Paint program to create these, which is always my version of pencil and paper. In thinking about composition and shapes, I tried not to think at all, but to go with my natural inclination. And I found myself fighting the natural inclination to center and have symmetrical balance. Here's what my images looked like :

And after doing all of those, this is the one I came up with that I liked best composition-ally :

Part 3 :

I also worked on remodeling an old flier that I created this year to advertise a language arts help wiki that I created. I tried to improve it using the various principles of design we saw in the readings and on the websites for this week. First, I changed an All Caps font I used for the first 4 questions so as not to be using Tacky Type. Then, I eliminated a border box that I felt was unnecessary and tried to organize the negative space to do the same job. I also limited the variety of fonts to mostly one. I think the design is simpler now, though I may rework it again for compositional elements. :

 So far I am really enjoying learning about graphic design. I find that all the small tasks I perform as a teacher, making websites, creating assignment sheets, sending home fliers, could all be vastly improved by employing some of these strategies!

Where Do I Belong?

     
In thinking about which Thinkfinity groups to join in preparation for my Multimedia Project, I was really thinking about a deeper question. Where do I belong in terms of my educational research and beliefs?

I have worn many hats in my short 10 years in education. I have been a substitute teacher. I have worked with Kindergartners and 1st graders. I spent three years teaching all subject areas to 3rd graders. I have been a Language Arts teacher to middle school students for 5 years now. I am also certified to teach Social Studies. I have worked with all age groups in gifted summer programs. I have also been a teacher educator in my school district, teaching professional development courses on using technology in the classroom. I am passionate about things as old world as Shakespeare, but also about things as new world as TED-talks and blogging. Sometimes I have a hard time narrowing down all of the things I want to do, but I did begin to see a trend developing across all of these interests : creativity, literacy and technology.

I recently listened to an amazing TED talk related to keeping creativity in the classroom and how important that is to our development as human beings and a society. Check it out :

Building a Better Classroom 

I noticed that I was really focusing myself, in teaching and in research, on the idea of integrating multimedia technologies and Social Media technologies into the literacy classroom to stimulate creativity. How can these new worlds of reading and writing inform our instruction of the language arts? What benefits can language arts teachers reap from using Web 2.0 tools? Are there disadvantages to these new technologies in the way they impact literacy skills? Or is it just a new kind of literacy that students will develop? How can we help teachers to navigate a world they did not grow up in, well enough to instruct their students? I have implemented a few projects with my students focused on these very ideas and am interested in taking it a step further as I look towards my dissertation.Our students are already showing their creativity using technology!

Here's a sample video that my students created, their own music video version of Call Me Maybe:

Therefore, thinking about our class project was really thinking about a lot more for me. I decided that the best groups to join would be the Reading and Language Arts group and Erica Boling's group on Integrating Technology into the K-12 Classroom.

The Reading and Language Arts group seems to be a place that really allows teachers of literacy to share ideas, and also to pose problems. Teachers in this group feel comfortable asking for help from other professionals who deal with the same struggles of trying to encourage students to read and write every day. I know that I will benefit from a place where I can pose my questions and be confident that the answers provided come from experienced teachers with a strong understanding of teaching literacy skills in the modern era. This group deals largely with the original content of my discipline.

Join the group here : Reading and Language Arts

The Integrating Technology group deals strongly with the new content and strategies of my discipline. In this group teachers of all age groups and subjects discuss the positives and the pitfalls of bring new technologies into the classroom. It is a great resource because it brings me out of my little bubble. I work in a district where students are pretty comfortable with technology, learn new skills quickly, and have parents that encourage their educations. It is enlightening to read problems and comments posted by teachers who are trying to integrate technology into other school districts. I think it will really help me, as I look towards my dissertation, narrow down the issues that need solving and the possible areas where research could be beneficial to teachers. And, of course, it is a great resource for ideas to use in my classroom!

  I hope that being part of these two communities will help to further focus my attentions on the unique issues plaguing language arts teachers who want to prepare their students for new literacies, while being stuck in curricula and state testing scenarios from the last century.  In order to use technology to help us move forward, teachers need all the support from each other that they can get!

Privacy Vs. Publication

This seems like as a good a forum as any to voice a confusion I have been experiencing for 7 years now. As a language arts teacher, I have been working with blogs and wikis at the 3rd grade ad then 8th grade level for years. The kids love being able to interact online and utilize the tools online to enhance their writing, their research, and their experience.

However, I feel that I am constantly caught between a question of privacy and safety, and that of authentic publication and interaction. For the most part, my students work in a closed, password protected wiki that only our members can see. But occasionally I long for a wider audience for my students. A few years ago we created a gorgeous Webzine and I obtained parent permission to make the wiki public and shared the address with our school. That was a neat experience for the kids because other people were able to see their work.

Check it out : http://EaglesWebzine.wikispaces.com

However, there was no interaction, there were no comments, as there would be on an webzine. And there was no opportunity for participation in a real online community, dealing with authentic and current topics and issues.

Sometimes I wish that I could teach my students about modern language arts skills by participating in live online forums, discussion boards, and creating our own public blog. It would be a wonderful learning experience if we could read articles on Slate.com and respond with our comments. Or if we could publish or own timely blogs documenting this election year and link it to other public sites. However, as they are only 8th grade students, there is some opposition based on safety concerns, which I completely understand. The tension of being authentic and real, and being private and safe, seems to be constant.

I comfort myself by thinking that they are, as students do, learning in a gradual release of responsibility model. That they are not quite at the fully independent experience level yet, and that they are gaining enough out of what we do. And I dream of more possibilities!

Adaptation

I have recently been given a SmartBoard at school, which is utterly awesome. I was not formally trained, but have been working on understanding its possibilities. I have discovered that it is a wonderful was to allow swift adaptation in Language Arts teaching!

Language Arts can sometimes seem to be technologically stodgy. It still involves a decent amount of paper, reading, writing, etc. The preparation often takes a long time and can be a bit set in stone because of photocopying and materials. However, with a SmartBoard, all of that can change. Students can work on editing and creating at a moment's notice. The class can collaborate without a lot of whiteboard erasing. We can even save notes so that each class has their own differentiated set! Activities like Chalk Talk used to be a pain with 5 classes, because erasing made it difficult to continue discussing the next day, without using a lot of paper.

This has actually caused me to change my practice and I find myself to be more flexible on a daily basis. If I notice a flaw in my student's work, I can create a new note sheet on the SmartBoard immediately, allow students to come up to the board and make changes, then save those changes and add to them the next day. If I decide that the prompt the student are working on is not what http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifI want to do at the last minute, I can change it and just pop it up on the smart board. If I want to just take two minutes out http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifof my day to illustrate something on the wiki, it doesn't involve any set up, so why not? In this way, the students are getting their little questions answered, as well as their big questions.

Having this kind of tool at your fingertips allows the exact kind of teacher responsiveness that Schrum and Levin indicate is possibile with technology in general. I feel that I am better addressing the needs of my students because I feel that I can address it right in the moment. If teachers are willing to adapt to using this kind of technology, then it will allow for a lot more adaptation to our students needs!
Check it this YouTube Channel devoted to Smart classrooms :
http://www.youtube.com/user/SMARTClassrooms/featured

Blog 2 - Standards are not so Standard

Though I am familiar with using technology in the classroom, this course is the first time that I have really taken a look at the technology standards. Both the NETS and the NJ Core Curriculum Standards stress the same concepts of what should be learned by students in our schools. It is appropriate and about time that there are such standards, considering how crucial technology skills will be to our students for their future education and careers.

But are we meeting these standards in our schools? Schrum and Levin state that "our current educational system is not adequately preparing our students for the kinds of jobs and lives they are likely to encounter in their lifetime" and I can't argue with them (pg. 7). True, in most schools now there are some teachers like the teachers in this course, who are excited and committed to incorporating technology into the classroom. However, in those same schools there are always teachers who still run a classroom like it is 1969. This is not to say that their teaching is not engaging and effective, but they are not meeting the technology standards in any way. Even if the students in these classes are getting a wonderful math or social studies or language arts education, isn't their education incomplete? Our jobs no longer involve simply teaching our content areas. We are now involved in a more complicated purpose of preparing students for using out content areas on the 21st century.

As the standards imply, studying any subject in high school and college now involves the use of technology. Working in almost any career today involves, at the very least, basic understanding of computers and the internet. Teachers should be considering the technology standards in their regular planning in order to be sure that they are helping their students be ready to take on whatever comes next. What kind of accountability is in place for teachers who do not regularly consider using technology to improve their instruction?

I found this interesting video on Youtube made by a fellow teacher!

Blog Post 1 - To Wiki or to Blog, That is the question!

When I was teaching my professional development course on Wikis, teachers asked me all the time whether blogs or wikis are better. The answer I gave was that they have different purposes. Secretly, though, I have always thought that wikis are "better" and offer more options. However, I was thinking through my experiences with both and I realized that blogs still retain their worth.

When I first started to dabble in using educational technology, I was teaching 3rd grade. I had taken a professional development course on Blogging, but was concerned that my students were too young to participate. I decided to give it try and started using Edublogs.org with my 8 year old students. Their parents were more than willing to help them get started and the kids really took to using the technology. The questions or prompts that I posted were simply, with the goal being just to get the kids involved in an online community from home. They loved it and from then I was hooked.

When I moved to being an 8th grade language arts teacher, the possibilities for blogging were endless. By that point, our school website offered its' own blogging function and I was able to use that with my students. I posted discussion questions for each book we read and the kids were able to hear the thoughts of students who were not just in their own class period. This really allowed conversations to widen and thoughts to expand with more interaction. Blogging was perfect for me to create a question, situation, or prompt and have all my students respond to each other.

However, after a couple of years, I began to look for something different. The wiki offered an opportunity for more collaboration between students instead of just conversation. And when there was conversation, it was individualized. Students could have their own work, on their own page, and a discussion on that page dedicated just to them. It allowed for focused discussion and creation of new work. It truly is an extension of the classroom, instead of being just one way discussion models. As a result, I haven't gone back to doing "just" blogs.

However, our readings in class have reminded me that blogging isn't just about providing a discussion prompt for other people, but it is about ruminating on your own thoughts with an audience. As Richardson states, "Weblogs truly expand the walls of the classroom" and opens up a conversation (pg. 27). This conversation is open to a broad audience and everyone gets to read the ideas shared there, instead of missing posts because they are spread out through the wiki on separate discussion boards. So there are definitely possibilities in blogging that are still exciting and viable for education. Richardson reminded me that "blogs archive the learning that teachers and students do, facilitating all sorts of reflection and metacognitive analysis" (pg. 27).

It really is about what your purpose is. I prefer wikis for collaboration and individualization of discussion. I have rediscovered my love of blogging for ruminating on thoughts and including everyone in one discussion!

Check out this video on blogging! Blogs in Plain English