OK – I have slightly lost the plot. This is actually my first Saturday off since before Christmas so I figure I have some excuse for falling behind with my posting for my ‘52 Photographs’ project.

The Abot Kamay service trip to Thailand provided great opportunities for photography. This might not completely fit the ‘1 per week goal’ but it catches me up. Here is just one image – to see the rest of the set go to Flickr

The reward for completing the 12 Things was an invitation to attend a workshop with visiting Tech consultants Lyn & Jennifer. They were inspirations – less for the tools they shared but for their use of differentiation and group work in their teaching style. The Friday afternoon time slot was well worth coping with. I got to work with some other ‘Roadrunners’ (thanks Barbara, Josh, Mike and Jim) and we had lots of (loud) fun working out how to use this neat tool Tagul. It looks a like Wordle except that each work is a live link to search (you can select a search source). I can see how this could be used in an intro to a topic – provide a starting point for research. I made this one with the Web Design class in mind, but I want to try out using a list of artists and designer too. 

I have a couple of things I want to do which will fit nicely into my final ‘12 things’ PD.

1. I want to find an app that will replace me. Hmmmm. Might sound odd to you but as a design teacher I am asked to do quite a few ‘little jobs’ that when added up amount to a lot of time. I am practicing saying ‘no’ in the mirror but I also would like to suggest a DIY option when asked to design a poster or invite for an upcoming event.

My search thus far has lead me to something called Glogster. http://glenniebakes.edu.glogster.com/dyi-poster/

It is easy to use – just upload images, use text boxes and items from the Glogster tool box and then publish. Above is my first play around.

2. The other ‘thing’ is more student focused. I have been searching for a more suitable app for Art student to create e.portfolios with. I use Wordpress as a learning journal for the Web Design class but I was hoping to find something more ‘arty’ for the Graphic Design class.  My first stop was at myfolio. I set up an account and played around with the upload and sort functions. I wasn’t completely sold on it; it just felt a bit clunky and I wasn’t that impressed with the way the folio looked.

My next stop came via a recommendation from one of my AP Art students. So off to Carbonmade.com I went. Now this I liked! The set up was really easy, the presentation of the folio offered a couple of choices and looked much cleaner. You can organize work into different sections which I thought would be great for students who take a couple of art classes and want to keep adding to the folio. So, the Graphic Design class will start their e.portfolios with Carbonmade next week. If you want to see how it looks I set up an example site to show the class http://gbaker.carbonmade.com/.

And, that’s completes my 12 Things.

Thanks ASIJ – TMIC!

Espresso

Nothing like a short of coffee to end a magnificant mulit course meal at Amoroso in Kagaruzaka. Dishes included rissoto with shaved black truffle, roasted Italian pork shoulder, hand-made pasta with brussel sprouts & bamboo shoot…and a whole lot more – what a feast.

Kichijoji, Nakamichi.

Snow fall over night had us wondering if school would be cancelled. The bright blue sky and the only semi-slushy surface of the road said otherwise.

I joined an group as part of an Art Ed network – we are documenting by photography the year 2010. I am taking a photograph a week, others are taking one every day. Here is a slideshow of the groups work so far. arted365/2010

I decided on Dropbox and since in my last post I described doing exactly what the info video said this tool is good for (avoiding emailing files to yoursefl), I think this is going to be a really great tool to use and habit to form. I can also see this would be a valuable ‘managment’ tool to teach my students to use. For example if we could store all the AP Art images on a site like this it would streamline all the file swapping and usb transferring we currently do. Hmmmm. I need to think about file size – perhaps I will need more than the 2G but could post images in the public folder. This may take some thought to work out the best approach.

For my experiment with sharing a public file I decided to upload a document I created last week at our tech PD session with Josh. I made up a help sheet for the seniors to create their Yearbook collage with a Web 2.0 program called GIMPshop (an open source alternative to Photoshop.) I added the PDF to my public Dropbox account and shazammm – it is ready for next year’s seniors to access. Here is the link if you would like to try using GIMPshop to create a simple collage of digital photos.

Google Apps provide the same portability that tagging with Delicious does. I have been using docs and spreadsheets for a while but I hadn’t bothered to use the presentation app. So, for this ‘Thing’ I did! I have often worked on a slideshow presentation at home and I since I have a Mac it has meant that I had to export the presentation as a Powerpoint doc and then email it to myself for use at school. This just makes SO much more sense. The functions are standard and I like that you can add an image with the URL link. Neat!

I also had a bit of a play with the ‘form’ app but I don’t have a good use for it right now – once again, I need time to contempt how it might be useful.

Delicious! Yes, I have an account and I do use this tool pretty much like my bookmarks. It definitely makes sense because it is virtual (I can access it on any computer) and I do have at least 2 computers I regularly work on. I think the power of tagging is probably ‘the Networking’ part but I haven’t really tapped into that at this stage as you will see if you visit my bookmarks (my user name is glendb.)

As with many of these ‘Things’, it takes time to work out how to make them productive for me and time is often hard to find. Given that I value this tool but feel like I am under utlizing it, I would have liked to have read the article ‘Several Habits of wildly successful Del.icio.us users ‘ but (ouch) the link wasn’t working.

I like Twitter. I like that it forces you to be succinct. (Many people could learn from that!)

My Twitter name is glendab . I haven’t worked out how or why this might be a useful tool yet despite having had an account for sometime. I started by following a bunch of people who seemed to be techi or arty. I liked the idea of being given snippets of info that might lead me to things of particular interest but it hasn’t quite worked out that way – yet.

It is a bit weird getting notices that people are following me when I haven’t actually been twerping (or whatever they call it when you post). Maybe it is that aspect that makes me question how I am currently hooked into this tool – not sure I have my approach right.

As part of the ‘12 Things’ PD I also did a search for ASIJ, and I was a little surprised at what came up. One post by a teenager at another school was a little nasty about ASIJ studemts. I think that we need to teach kids that what they put online is PUBLIC. They need to think about how they want to come across in the future as well as now. After all – it is the internet – the WORLD wide web.

Sleeping dog

I give students an assignment to capture movement. We play around with shutter speed and try to create purposeful blur in their photographs. I think the blur in this makes the patterned carpet and my dog start to merge creating a soft dreamy image.