Something to think about...

Yesterday as soon as I got home from school my laptop did not recognized me, an hour before I was doing a PowerPoint presentation with my group, nothing was out of the ordinary neither did I experience anything wrong with it before.

I reset it and it started acting out like it was about to crash. My mind was in blank, I was in shock thinking that it could be possible I could loose all the work I have done since the beginning of the semester and that I would have to compensate for all the work for 6 classes that needs to be hand in promptly, that meant to redo what needed to be reviewed and start all over what was about to be finished.

 So I called the company and a support advisor walked me through the troubleshooting of my computer, thankfully everything is fine and I made sure to back everything up in my external hard drive.  Otherwise I wouldn’t be typing this work because my other option would be to use the computers and school, but they are not accessible during Thanksgiving.

That made me think once again, that we cannot rely on technology a 100%, it could become a potential Titanic.

As technology advances, it stops to be a luxury and becomes a necessity. Therefore because technology demands that everybody is updated as teachers we must provide a background on technology to our students so that they function in the world.

In Art, Language Art, Math or any other science we must be aware that we cannot assume that the students that we will teach will have access to the technology unless the school provides it.

And even if the school provides it, it needs to work properly.  For example when I try to use the computer at the schools I substitute for many of the computers are not working and the ones that do work block even reliable educational websites (the teacher then will need to put an override code and the student will have to depend on the teacher, usually the code is good for a maximum of 45 minutes) which to me becomes obsolete.

As future educators we must embrace technology but not get carried over by it. 

To finish I would like to share a video I constantly go back to by Amber Case which make us reflect a little bit more about technology.

Join Me

 During this busy semester, it was merely impossible to meet with my classmates to do some of the assigned work.  So we resort in scheduling times and making conference calls, making sure everybody was literally on the same page by getting in front of our computers and try to follow up the parts of the documents that we were working on, it was challenging but moreover a tedious task because it was difficult to get points across in a feasible time.

 That issue was solved thanks to one of my classmates, “Melissa Shea” I got introduced to a website called join me as of this year this tool has been one of the most efficient tools I had ever got in contact with.  What join me is all about consists on a platform which allows you to share your screen with up to ten users, all of the users have the power to control the mouse and type in the same document.

I got worried about other users filtering into our computer as hackers would do, but the website also provides safety, and this is because when you want to share your screen you become the host, the host gets provided with a code and your hostess need to get that code in order to get there (at least thats all it takes to make me feel safer).

It is wonderful!  The first thing I did was to tell my sister about it because she travels plenty, when I told her about it she said that her company uses a similar platform at least three times a week.

And then talking to people I was told that Google also provides a screen sharing service.

In what ways could I apply this technology into education would be essentially to work on art design programs, for example I could teach a student how to use each tool in Photoshop demonstrate and expect my student to follow through step by step.

A more traditional way of using joinme.com or any other program with screen sharing services would then be to evaluate my student’s work, such as drawings and paintings (of course I would need photographs of their progress)…. I could point out how to manipulate formal elements such as line, shape, color, etc.

Collaboration Canvas

The platform PLAYground has a feature called “remix” where the user has the option to collaborate on someone else canvas.

Initially I thought that when using the “remix” feature one would modify someone else’s canvas.

 So I gave it a try for the purpose of my assignment hoping not to get any mixed feelings by intruding on someone else work.

 After more than two attempts my remix did not work as I intended to do so. I thought I was doing something wrong, so I went back to the welcome page of PLAYground to reassure myself on how to create a remix.

I then learned that a remix is very practical; you do not add your collaborative work onto someone else’s original work but on a replica of that canvas.

I decided to collaborate on an interdisciplinary instruction with my "Color Theory" to “Music Form”

In my remix I included pictures of Wassily Kandinsky, which is the perfect example for an interdisciplinary lesson. Kandinsky was an abstract Russian artist who was inspired by music, and who thought that combinations of colors produce vibrational frequencies, akin to chords played on a piano.

Additionally I added some videos that explain how color and music have much in common. 

When doing my search of elements for my remix canvas I found a video that complimented my original canvas so I added it as supplementary information. The video is called "Using the color wheel"

The following link is my REMIX 

Pinterest and Education

          In my Art Methods class one of my classmates showed the class how to do an ingenious lesson plan to understand primary secondary and tertiary colors with the use of model magic.  The lesson works wonderful because the teacher had control over the quantity of colors given to the students and the portions in order for them to create different colors by following precise instructions.

I asked her where did she get the idea, and she pointed out to Pinterest.

          I personally had never used Pinterest. So I decided to give it a chance and explore what Pinterest is all about. Pinterest is a virtual bulletin board.  In my own words it is like the evolution of bookmarks or a reading list because it is a site where the user keeps a record by pinning websites of interest for future reference.  On Pinterest the pins are presented with images as opposed to written content.

As opposed to bookmarks; Pinterest works online so the user has the freedom to use his/her references in different computers. 

Moreover Pinterest has the option to organize and create different boards with different labels/topics and the user can share boards by making boards public. 

          As a future Art teacher I believe that Pinterest is a beneficial platform for Art Educational Content specially because its content it’s presented with visuals at first glance. Something that works great for many artists because we may be looking for a particular image that we memorized but forgot who was the artist that created it or from what country and time period does he or she belong…

       There is so much information and references that as world Art colleagues we can take and share, there are so many ideas that could enhance our form of instruction to successfully teach students about the abstract study of the so many branches of creative activity called Art.

Unit Plan Canvas

Since my lesson plan was based on monochromatic colors my unit plan endorsed “color theory” as a whole.

After creating an introduction to my lesson plan on PLAYground I can say that it is virtually a user friendly platform in which widgets on the left panel give the option to apply videos, images, texts, link sources, connect Twitter hashtags, display interactive questions, etc once they are dragged and dropped into the designing field labeled as “canvas”.  The user gets to choose from selecting and arranging the widgets throughout the canvas.

The downside of the website are for the users that create a PLAYground canvas. Drafts don’t necessarily get saved unless they are published, and even though you publish them you are still at risk of loosing your work. There is no advice that your work was successfully published. Additionally in order to find your published work you have to find it by searching for it with its tags. A final downfall was that once my work was published the boxes showed overlapped to one another even though that is not the way that I wanted to arranged them.   

Even though the site needs to fix its glitches I was able to successfully display the information just as I wanted in my PLAYground.

Afterall I believe that PLAYground compliments a lesson plan because it has the power to engage the students with much ease, the option to display pictures and videos motivate learning in an entertaining manner.