Excel

At first I did not see the relevance of using Excel with students in the classroom. This project opened my eyes to a new way of using Excel for more than just numbers and data. I was able to create a worksheet that allowed students to practice their knowledge of color theory. It was nice that you were able to program the worksheet in a way that allowed students to see if their answers were correct or not right way. I found this program to be a bit tedious and not the most simple thing to use. I'm not sure that I would use this with my students or not seeing as I won't have access to multiple computers in an art classroom at once. It would be a quick way to access students knowledge and maybe gain interest being on a computer, not to mention saving paper and time for grading.

I movie

We used i movie to create our own digital stories. I choose to incorporate a list of contemporary sculptors with a list from A-Z for my story. I movie was very easy to use and simple to import images and add titles and captions to pictures. I think that is a great program for students to use to first learn how to edit and create movies. It is a more limited program and something such as Final Cut Pro would allow students a more in depth look at movie editing. Imovie is a good starting off point and requires less instruction, which is a good solution when you have less time with students such as in an art classroom.

Twitter

I explored Twitter for my Web 2.0 tool. At first I was skeptical of the use of Twitter at all, much less its relevance for the classroom. Personally, I would not use Twitter for my private use but I found it interesting to be able to follow celebrities or politicians. In relation to the classroom I found the above YouTube video that opened my eyes to the uses of Twitter. Students are used to using Twitter and texting in their everyday life and using Twitter as way of developing class discussion could be a great way to encourage participation. Having a character limit forces students to to think critically about their responses and have concise answers. Especially in a University setting I can see this as a positive form of discussion. Students that are shy are allowed to first think about their responses before sending it to Twitter. College classes are often large lecture classes consisting of hundreds of students and using Twitter allows everyone to voice their opinions in and out of class time. I feel that for class discussion in a high school or college setting this could be a great way to integrate technology and gain student interest.

Inspiration

Inspiration was a tool that I had never used prior to this class. It was very easy to use and user friendly. I think that it would be most effective as a way of documenting inspirational ideas for a upcoming art project in my classroom. I'm not sure that I would ever use this for a way of having students document a presentation or project they had worked on, other programs such as PowerPoint and google presentations were more effective for this. I liked how easy it was to change colors and text and the shape of your inspiration bubble though. The click and drag feature for inserting photos was also nice.

Scavenger Hunt!

TPTE 486 Picasa

Picasa is a free very simple program to use. In the classroom Picasa could be used to allow students to create slideshows with inspirational pictures for an upcoming art project. Also, it would be a great resource for a quick easy slideshow presentation for students to use on a topic they were currently learning about. It could be used to upload pictures from a scavenger hunt students did around the school or on the web.

What I liked best about Picasa was how user friendly it was and that anyone could easily learn how to use it and post their slide show to a blog or website.

Web 2.0 tools

Web 2.0 tools are free web based tools that anyone can have access to such as twitter, glogster, picnik, smilebox, and wordle as well as many more. The best things about these tools is that they are easy for anyone to access and learn how to use. I could see how many of these tools could be used in the classroom for projects or for a teachers instruction. With many of these tools such as glogster you can have students easily make presentations without having to spend money on making a tri-fold presentation board.

My favorite of the 2.0 tools that I have learned about so far is Wordle. Which is a program that allows you to put in a bunch of words that are similar to each other (or not) and it creates a word bubble connecting all of them. It's a good tool to use as a introduction slide on a powerpoint presentation or wiki.