Every 2 years we have a school art exhibition and my passion for photography sent myself and my class down the unexplored path of presenting digital photos at the school exhibition.
These photos were all taken by 7 and 8 year old students in my class last year. The students were given in-class guidance and then roamed the school independently to take their shots with only a list of angles to use given to them, to develop a portfolio of photos to choose their final works from.
I’m in the process of updating my resources site to include the process we undertook to get to the final stage of exhibiting our artworks including lessons and link. Once it is complete I will post the link here.
The knowledge and understanding of how a great photograph makes us feel and how to establish one is a powerful thing for children to learn.
Posted on January 21, 2008 by MissSignal. Categories: Music.
Collaborative music or noise… either way Muxicall is awesome!
Allanahk and dkuropatwa passed this awesome tool on, go check out her blog to find out about the collaborative music that she made with people via a twitter connection.
You have to check this site out – its fun, noisey and colourful. Ticks all the right boxes in my books!
When you get there it loads easily – hold the shift button and run your mouse over the different block notes. Soon you will start to hear the notes you are selecting and if others are on the site you will hear the notes they are selecting also. Jump into the chat room and have a chat with the others online to collaborate more musically on a piece of work.
I was on Twitter a few nights ago and Ewan popped up with a great question about social networking and how it changed or influenced our teachings. A pretty interesting twit discussion ensued with some great comments from everyone.
Ewan informed us on how he was writing a piece for the Economist Oxford Debate which you can take part in here. What wins the debate over entirely is Ewans final comment in his opening statement…
And, if you need a final point to consider, something practical to show the power of the social network for changing the way teachers learn themselves, just re-read this debate. It was written one Sunday afternoon, with collaboration over Twitter, the mobile phone and web-based social networking tool, with teaching colleagues from the US, Scotland, Canada, England, France, New Zealand and Australia. Has social networking changed the face of educational methods? Almost certainly: yes.
For me, 2007 saw a mass shift in my knowledge and use of social networking as a educational tool. Over the last few months I have quadrupled (and then some) my teaching network. Never before have I had professional links to people in Australia, Korea, Scotland among many more countries. I believe that today it is stronger than ever and due to tools such social networking tools it will continue to develop and my professional relationships around the world will strengthen.
It is hard pressed for me to argue against the power of social networking and its changes it can make to ones education when I have already witnessed it first hand. But maybe this is what it takes for people?
On day one the debate is weighing very favourably on the Pro side of the debate. It’s becoming a very interesting read with a range of people commenting and voting. So head over here and take part in the debate.
Stays on tour.
What goes on myspace, stays on myspace…
Yesterday I read this article: Job Seekers told: Don’t Put Secrets On The Net, in the Herald that talks about online anonymity – or that lack of it and today Chris posted a great blog article about this whole discussion. The point really is the education that needs to go on with the general masses to understand this idea that anybody can have access to your information. What is it that you want your employer or prospective employer to see about you?
The NZ Herald article brought up the point that alot of employers are now googling propective employees to see what comes up. The interesting this is that Sam Morgan from trademe also points out
“We ask prospective employees if they have a MySpace page. If they say no, that shows they’re not engaged enough in the web for our business, but if they say yes, they’ve got all measure of problems because all that information is up there about them and we can see it all.”
Chris also points out that your online presence has a positive effect and Allanahk stated in Chris’ comments to this article that she had asked prospective employers to google her name.
While the NZ Herald article is a interesting read in terms of this topic the article doesn’t go further than your usual piece of mainstream media. A piece like this serves to inform? Well where is the information that will serve to educate rather than scaremonger? This is an important social skill that needs to be fully understood. As a teacher this is an really important aspect and I know from talking to students that very few of them have an understanding of this, so it then becomes an essential piece of knowledge that these students need to understand.
Chris also posted this great video that would be good to use with your students as a discussion starter…
As I sit at my computer and watch my tweets go back and forth with some great conversation, debates and discussions I look at the mass of windows I have open in Firefox and am amazed by the inter connectiveness of everything. I have such a powerful tool sitting in front of me to connect to so many amazing people.
For those of you that know me well, know that I LOVE music… so i’m sitting on the computer listening to iTunes as I normally do. But I also have Last.fm up, so I switch to that to listen to some different bands. As I do that I stumble across a band I haven’t seen a video for so off I head to youtube.com to watch one of their videos.
Meanwhile I’m also chatting on skype to my friend in Ibadan and I bring up google earth to check out where she’s living and to see if I can spot her house
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