Art Tech Task #4

              

https://youtu.be/Ds7aF3w_-cw

Hey everyone! I'm super excited about this weeks "Art Tech Task", because this week was our video assignment. Making videos used to really intimidate me, simply because I was unfamiliar with how to make and upload them! Which now, seems pretty silly. I chose to use YouTube for it is the absolute easiest way to make, publish, and share your videos. This is now the third time I have taken advantage of this site for educational purposes and the videos always come out great. And fast! YouTube is a video sharing website filled with millions of videos about millions of different topics. I would argue the most popular stream on this site is music, but there is also a wonderful array of helpful educational videos. I have used this website for almost 10 years for all kinds of purposes.

I think this tool would be awesome for creating integrated arts activities in the classroom. Film is a type of art, and an assignment such as the one I have done above would be great for assessing a students knowledge over a specific content area. Students could also you this site to make up educational songs or sing-alongs. Showing creativity through music would give students a wonderful opportunity to express themselves. Other purposes as to why an educator would want to use YouTube in their classroom include:

• pairing a video with a lesson plan to help further explain the content area or reinforce what was talked about
• receive a different perspective on a subject area by hearing another's opinion
• listen to an educational songs to help with visualization/memorization
• digital stories
• find a tutorial on how to do literally ANYTHING
• record and upload a lesson if you as an educator know you are going to be absent, that way your students can still get the information they need

Furthermore, students could definitely use YouTube to create their own digital artifacts. For me, I took a video straight off of my laptop using the built-in camera, and from there went onto to the site and click "upload". And within a matter of minutes, it was fully uploaded and ready to be viewed. SUPER EASY. The only catch is, a user needs an account. It is completely free to use, but the site will need your name and an email. It is easy for anyone, because the upload button is located in the right upper corner, totally visible. You can upload any video within your computer's file folders. And music too! I really don't think any part of this would be challenging, unless a student tried to upload music that required a copyright code. Then, they would need to know what information to put in the credits so the site runners don't take their video down.

I love YouTube for all of my video needs!!

Lastly, I'd just like to point out some of the standards, for particularly kindergarten (my main focus) that would align with presenting a video such as this one to a class.

Speaking and listening kindergarten Ohio standards:
SL.K.1. Participate in collaborative conversations with diverse partners about kindergarten topics and texts with peers and adults in small and larger groups. a.  Follow agreed-upon rules for discussions (e.g., listening to others and taking turns speaking about the topics and texts under discussion). b.  Continue a conversation through multiple exchanges.
SL.K.2. Confirm understanding of a text read aloud or information presented orally or through other media by asking and answering questions about key details and requesting clarification if something is not understood
SL.K.5. Add drawings or other visual displays to descriptions as desired to provide additional details

Ohio Reading Standards: (reading material off screen)

RI.K.4. With prompting and support, ask and answer questions about unknown words

RI.K.7. Describe the relationship between illustrations and text

RI.K.8. With prompting and support, identify the reasons an author gives to support points in text

RI.K. 10 Actively engage in group activities with purpose and understanding

Common Core:
K.W.8. With guidance and support from adults, gather information from provided resources to answer questions

Art Tech Task #3

Soundcloud

 (Web-based browser and phone application)

Read Aloud: "One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish" - Dr. Suess

MY AUDIO:
Today, I have created a read aloud of Dr. Suess' famous story One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish. I chose to do a read aloud as my audio because they are wonderful for children that are just learning how to read! Hearing something else while following along relays to the students how the story is supposed to sound. It teaches them fluency, expression, and pronunciation. It can also introduce or clarify any unknown vocabulary words. Read alouds have been proven to be such an effective teaching tool. And of course, Dr. Suess has been named the best stories for beginning readers for his rhyming and language patterns present in all pages.

ABOUT SOUNDCLOUD:
Anyways! The app I have chosen to make this audio with is called Soundcloud. I have been using this site (well, app) for years to listen to music. It's fairly new, as it was only created in 2007. But, it's a place where anyone (mostly artists though) post music, audio recordings, or their educational things such like my read along. You can upload videos off of your device or it's super easy to make a recording straight through the site. All you need for this is a microphone built into the computer. Then, you can edit it any way you like. Just upload, edit, and share. Everything goes public for anyone and everyone to have a chance to access it and listen along. However, you can set it to a private mode. So, Soundcloud is basically a hub for all audio purposes. It is free to use by signing up with an e-mail address or even through a Facebook account. You will need to upgrade to a premium costly package if you plan on uploading more than 300 minutes worth of audio.

WHY USE THIS APP IN THE CLASSROOM?

• This tool can be extremely purposeful for creating a read aloud, such as I have done. As I've explained above, this type of method is great for beginning readers because they have the opportunity of hearing how it is supposed to sound and then in turn can try and mimic it. It exemplifies what a good reader should do while reading and sets a goal for students.
• Audio's are great for other purposes as well! Say you're a teacher and you have no choice but to call in sick one day. Well, maybe you've already had some lessons prepared on soundcloud that the substitute can play. This way, no time is lost throughout the school year and the students are still getting the information they need.
• Because these audio's are public, someone else could have shared something educational you want your students to hear. Or vice versa! You want others to hear what you as an educator have to say

The possibilities are endless!

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN??

As far as using this application to create integrated art experiences in your classroom, it can do that too! How cool would it be for students to give a presentation through an audio recording with music and singing. I remember my 7th grade history teacher actually made us do this. He handed our partnered groups each a topic and we had to make up a song about it that would teach the other students the information they needed. Soundcloud would be great for students to record theirs on because it is music AND audio. Totally student friendly.

What's Easy?

• Signing up is a breeze. You plug in your email/facebook and you're good to go!
• There are few buttons and they're self-explanatory. There is a profile button where your information and audio files are found, a search bar, and an upload button where new recordings can be put in
• After hitting record, you say what you need to say and after saving, you're done and its uploaded. It really is that simply

Challenging Aspects?

• I really don't think there is anything hard about this site. It is so user-friendly. It would be a great tool for any classroom.

Also found by typing in:
https://soundcloud.com/user-681908949/one-fish-two-fish-red-fish

Art Tech Task #2

Hello again! This week, I am going to be talking about creating comics. I want to start out by saying that I was not originally a fan of comics and after having made one, I really don't like them! I began with several different comic-making websites and each one was a fail. Here's why:

1. Make Beliefs Comix: the user can only make 3-strip comics. So I thought to myself, "well, this is annoying. But! I'll just make several strips and put them together on my blog" WRONG! I spent about 30 minutes on my first strip, went to save, and then the file failed and couldn't be opened on any other medium.
2. Comic Master: At first, this sight looked very useful. There were numerous buttons and ways to edit your comic. However, there were not many options at all! There were four "super hero looking" characters to choose from, six backgrounds, etc. Nothing fit into what I was trying to get across through my comic. It was extremely narrow and not helpful for educational purposes.
3. Witty Comics: Once again, you could only create 3-strip comics with very, very few characters, backgrounds, and enhancement objects to choose from. This site was not fit this assignment, at all!

So, I ended up using Chogger, a browser based application. This site was the most useful because of the wide variety of options that were available when creating a comic. Through this website, you can have up to EIGHT boxes in your comic strip. Way more than other online comic-making site that I've looked into. My favorite option was being to upload your own pictures, characters, objects, and backgrounds to each box by searching google through their site or uploading from your computer documents. FINALLY A SITE WITH CUSTOMIZATION OPTIONS!! Each image can be edited with erasers, drawing tools, shapes, or blurring. Adding captions are awesome too, because you can have a thought, speech, caption, text, or meme. The options are endless. And everything can be personalized with color, font, or size.

This tool would actually be useful in integrating art experiences in your classroom. Comics are a fun, easy-to-read addition to any lesson. By combining pictures, color, and expressions and adding educational information, comics could reinforce or introduce any topic because it catches the students attention.

Potentially, older students could use this site to create their own digital artifact. However, I would not want them too! This comic literally took me FOUR HOURS to create. It was way to intense of a project for the little information gained out of it, when the students create it. I would much rather have my students do something kinesthetic or create a craft project to learn and present their information. Comics are just too short of an area to relay ideas, take too long to create, and I believe there are better, more creative, and aesthetically appealing ways to grab a students attention. Plus, there were several things that I did not like about the site. First thing being, you had to create an account in order for your comic to be saved on the site. And once its saved anyone can access it, so there is potential for students to steal another persons work or have theirs stolen. It's easy to cheat. And secondly, if you choose not to make an account, your comic cannot be saved to your computer. So after my four hours of work, I couldn't even share it to my blog. Luckily, they did give me a URL to go to for access.

What made this site easy:

• The buttons and editing tools were self-explanatory and easy to use 
• customizable for personal/educational purposes
• do not need an account (although, it is recommended)

Challenges:

• work cannot actually be saved off the site
• there were several times where I logged on to edit my comic and the site was down and nothing was working - extremely unreliable for students especially

Find my original comic at:
http://cho.gr/g5fIf
                                                                        Screenshot:
                                                  

Studio Project #1 - Kindergarten

Today, we've created a piece of artwork of a room in our house of our choosing using a piece of white computer paper and only primary colored oil pastels. I've created a picture of my bedroom, drawn horizontally from a birds eye view.

The purpose of this lesson was to educate young students on distinguishing the primary colors. This project was more than appropriate for the grade level (kindergarten) because it followed Ohio's standard curriculum while creating a fun and open learning environment for these young students. Visualization and kinesthetic activity are always the most ideal when educating early childhood because those are the types of lessons that fit their attention span and learning capacity. Furthermore, this activity allowed students to work with only three colors for an extended period of time, engraving the primary colors in their brain. Also, at the beginning of the activity, the students had to grab the primary colored pastels out of their box, proving that they had learned (or didn't) from the lesson on primary colors. This project back up the quick lesson, reinforced the main ideas in the lesson, and had a "sneaky" form of assessment for the teacher to gather who took something away from the topic. 

The standards are as follows:

Ohio Department of Education - Visual Arts
1.1.6. Elements: primary colors
1.2.1. Skills and Techniques: explores the tools and processes of visual arts

Common Core ELA
K.W.8. With guidance and support from adults, recall information from experiences or gather information from provided sources to answer a question
K.SL.4. Describe familiar people, places, things, and events with prompting and support, provide additional detail.

As seen above, all of these standards were covered by using different arts tools and recalling information from the lesson on primary colors by answering questions and visualization on paper

Areas of difficultly I could potentially see if I were to implement this lesson myself are: honestly none. I think this lesson covers a decent amount of standards along with the chance to walk around and see which students are striving and struggling on this lesson. It's creative, opens discussion, and can be done in large groups.

Art Tech Task #1

Hey everyone! For this weeks "Art Tech Task", I chose to use a photo tool called Get Loupe. This tool allows students to make photo collages into a shape of an object of their choosing. Loupe collage is a browser based application.

So, here's how it works! First students go onto the website and upload photos they are going to be using to make their collage. Uploading photos can be done through a number of different ways: Facebook, Drive, Dropbox, Flickr, Instagram, Google Plus, or photos already in storage on Loupe. You can also easily search the web for endless images on the site! This makes getting pictures super easy because Loupe allows you to access pretty much every preexisting account you have. Once you have uploaded everything you would like, the next step is picking your shape of the collage. The photos will automatically be placed in the desired form and is then ready to be downloaded or printed.

This tool could be used to create integrated expressive arts in the classroom in a variety of instructional ways. Collages could be used at the beginning of unit to introduce students to new terms and materials by having them go online, do a scavenger hunt for them, and then create a photo collage in the shape of an object that summarizes the topic. Loupe could be used in the middle of a unit as a type of hands-on informal assessment to see how much the students have comprehended what has been taught so far. Or lastly, it's great to use at the end of a unit as a final project to give students a chance to show what they have learned throughout a several week span. Either way the educator chooses, it gets kids involved, doing hands-on/kinesthetic activities to get their brain engaged verses lecture format. Visualization is the way the majority of students learn and actually comprehend what is being taught because it sticks better in their mind when they have a picture to connect the material with. 

Therefore, why wouldn't an educator want to use this tool? It's an engaging, visual comprehension tool that allows students to actual work with the material that is being presented to them. Obviously, I have explained this tool to be super easy to use because it really is! The only complications I could see with this tool is having the younger k-2 students use it. I think it's more generated for a little bit older of a crowd for several reasons: the main way of uploading pictures is down through social media accounts, it does involve searching the web, and there are a countless number of buttons/options to use on the application, which could be harder for a younger student. But, the educator could still use it to print off visualizations for them. Kindergartens love colorful, new things to look at!

So here are some examples of my own art that I have chosen to make with Get Loupe:

This is paintbrush made out of visual arts materials including: paint, paintbrushes, tape, scissors, crayons, markers, and construction paper. By clicking on any given picture within the collage (when in the application) the name of the object will appear. 

Ohio Department of Education Visual Arts Standards
Domain: Perceiving/knowing (Kindergarten)
Sub-Domain: Visual Arts
Strand: Cognitive and Creative Learning Processes
Standard: 5PE Identify and name materials used in visual arts

This image is a fun representation of another kindergarten standard. It is a rectangle "collage" that shows the different parts of children's book, to educate beginning readers on the very basic elements of story books. 

Ohio's New Learning Standards
Domain: Craft and Structure
Sub-Domain: Reading - Informational
Standard 5: identify the front cover, back cover, and title page of a book

Last but not least, this collage I have made for a potential kindergarten class is filled with different representations of objects freezing or heating

Ohio Department of Education
Domain: Concepts related to Earth's interior
Sub-Domain: Physical Science
Strand: Earth and Space Science (ESS)
Standard: Properties of materials can change due to heating or freezing (PreK-2)