Assignment #8 Reflection

As an Art teacher that teaches a variety of traditional Drawing and Painting classes, Advanced Portfolio classes and Digital Media classes I am using technology like this constantly. I am always looking for ways to motivate my students, provide them with information and keep them connected to current and historical art examples they can use to progress in their own work. I also look for examples to give them direction when they need more clarification on a project or an example to demonstrate a method that shows a process visually. It is extremely difficult to gather and store all of the visual information that I use daily with limited storage space. Relying on the Internet and some of the free information and storage systems available there has helped tremendously.

I currently have a del.icio.us site and although I have not used it often yet I will be relying more heavily on storing my resources here. I use hundreds of websites to teach kids platform functions and using tutorials that are found on different sites is a necessity. To be able to store links and to publish those so that students have a list to use is extremely helpful and will be something I begin initiating more frequently. It is also great for my advanced students to find more in depth sites to research from as well as gather information on processes and inspiration from images.

I have also used YouTube as a constant resource in my digital media class. I teach Flash and need examples of flash animation all of the time. I keep all of my favorite video casts organized in a YouTube account. I have also talked with another teacher who is going to be teaching me how to download video content from YouTube so that I will not run into the possibility of an example not being available after a certain period of time. Not having text books in our classrooms, as Art teachers, we have to keep a variety of resources "up our sleeve" and this course is helping me to create a large resource pool to allow me to give my students a strong enrichment within their curriculum.

Assignment #6 Tasks

I must say that wiki's are definitely not my thing! I am not really sure why, as a teacher, I would need to use these as I have already so many other controllable ways to interact with my students online. I am not thrilled with the fact that posts can be placed unedited and would never trust all of my students to use respect and consideration when using the wiki. I find the whole wiki thing difficult to navigate and, sort of, a glorified chat room where anything goes. It feels like overkill to me.