My students frequently search for images for a variety of reasons and so spending time exploring the ethics of using images, is the flip side to knowing where to find them. I explore the similarities and differences between text and images as intellectual property. Most students have been taught at some point about how to use and reference text. Why would images be different?

Two sites I recommend that search images posted on Flickr but allow students to narrow the selection to images with a ‘Creative Common’ designation are:

Compfight
“Search engine for visual inspiration and free stock photos for the advertising community including images of creative commons and public domain.”

Flickr-storm
“FlickrStorm is a better search for Flickr! It works by looking for more than what you enter to find related and more relevant images… Be suprised! …” This site also allows you to collect a series of images in a ‘bucket’ and download a thumbnail with the URL to make it easy for students to cite sources.

















Richard Byrne at Free technology for Teachers also has a couple of great posts on visual images; 7 Places and ways to Find Copyright-friendly images, and one about resources for Teaching Copyright.

Whether for inspiration, reference or remixing, we need to teach students to think and act with integrity when using images.

1. New Technology

New versions and updates always get rolled out at the start of the school year (which does make sense.) Our Blackboard course has been updated and I’m glad we have the new version. However, right now I just want to update and add new material to my courses, and the new version has presented an extra barrier to getting ready for class. When we are coming to terms with new tech I’m sure our tech department must think we look like this….

How does timing impact the way ‘new’ learning challenges are perceived?

2. New Students, New Teachers, New Admin

There’s usually some anticipation associated with introductions and getting to know new classes, new colleagues we’ll work with and new leaders. Will we connect? (Will they understand my accent?)

School is like a glass of water. Add a new person and their distinctive color does add a new dimension to the whole color scheme. Established systems have a familiarity and security that can be very comfortable but new people bring new ideas and fresh insight.

How can we embrace the new and honor the past?

3. New Educational Horizon

From individual challenges to school challenges to the biggest challenge for our whole profession; the relevance of the school system as I am part of it is most definitely something I know I need to keep thinking about. From The Partnership of 21st Century Skills.

The 21st Century isn’t coming; it’s already here. And our students have the opportunity and challenge of living and working in a diverse and rapidly changing world…schools must prepare our young people to understand and address global issues, and educators must re-examine their teaching strategies and curriculum so that all students can thrive in this global and interdependent society.
Global Competence is a 21st Century Imperative – Dennis Van Roekel, NAE President.

As I re-examine what and how I teach, how much will I need to change to be relevant in this approaching new horizon?

I’ve been trying to catch up on reading my RSS feeds and I took note of a post from e1evaition on ‘Top 10 Free WordPress 3.0 Ready themes’ via specky.com. I ended up with Suffusion which I like because it is quite flexible enabling me to customize the look. It’s clean and has options the older theme didn’t offer. So Voila! Here is the new look blog.

I’ve been working on updating my Blackboard courses in preparation for the start of school. As I have been considering what I might do differently and how I can ‘update’ my curriculum units to personalize and differientiate learning, technology has been much on my mind.

So the piece in Education Week on the new draft  Teacher Standards put out by CCSSO was nice confirmation of my pondering.

…they’re meant to guide teachers at all levels of their career, with more-experienced teachers exhibiting the practices in more-sophisticated ways.

In addition, the standards put more emphasis on teachers’ ability to use assessment data to support instruction, to address cultural and linguistic diversity in the student population, and to harness technology as a tool to support learning.

Technology (and use of data) has definitely been a reoccurring motif in many education circles.  The Key Themes in the Updated Standards said…

Technology was much in the minds of the committee as we thought about learners and what they bring to learning. As digital natives, young people are used to accessing information instantly and communicating across boundaries. Educators need to find ways to build on and harness the power of what tech-savvy learners bring to the classroom… we sought to treat technology not as an end in itself, but as a tool for learning and communication.

So, I’m going to keep working on my personal standards for integrating technology and using data to inform instruction. I definitely want to better harness the power that the tech-savvy learner bring into my classroom, bee that with an iPod, laptop, tablet, digital camera, facebook, or even my iPad.

• 2 classes of AP Studio Art.
• 4 variations of the three exam types offered in AP Studio Art (Drawing, 3D Design, and 2D Design, 2D Design-Photography.)
• the exam requires a large body of work to be produced specific to the exam type so at ASIJ students have the opportunity to take the class over 2 years and submit the exam in the second year. (16 pieces of work for 3D Design, and 24 pieces of work for 2D and Drawing.)

This means there are potentially up to eight different groups of students for me to teach in 1 class period. Here is a diagram created in Gliffy to illustrate.

Call me crazy but I am actually quite excited about the problem this creates. It compels me to find new ways to help personalize learning for each student, and to differentiate instruction for each of these groups. Yes, it would be much easier if they were all doing the same exam type, but that wouldn’t have pushed me to think outside the box.

One solution I am hoping will help me is technology. Which is why I have been spending part of my summer reading, learning and playing with things like my new iPad. The use of mobiles and game-based learning were identified in the 2010 Horizon Report as trends that have potential to enhance student learning. This week my focus has been on finding suitable mobile apps that I can recommend to my students to try out depending on their exam type. Here’s what I’ve been experimenting with so far:

ArtLite has info and a good selection of work on 11 artists plus a neat quiz. (free)

PocketChris has the basics of Photography – a bit texty but has some neat visual ways to explain things like depth of field. (free)

PhotoTrainer – still pretty texty but helpful tips on taking photographs in different lighting situations and how to create HDR images. (0.99)

Random Pose – just downloaded this today. 3D human figures in dynamic poses — with shadows! (free)

Dexigner – graphic design, architecture, fashion news and more.

Of course arty apps for iPods and iPhones are just frosting on the cake. The actual cake will still need to be my Blackboard course and the resources I will be linking into that. None the less this challenge is causing me to think differently about teaching and learning, surely that is a good thing.

I’m reading Curriculum 21 in between holiday ficition. It’s a collection of writers led by Heidi Hayes Jacobs on preparing students for our times…and their future.

Here is a snipit I read this morning over breakfast in Chapter 7 Making Learning Irresistible by Tim Tyson from Mabry Middle School in Georgia, USA.

If digitial technology is used in low-level ways–to do the same things we have always been doing in schools, just doing them now with computers–then we have failed to grasp the metamorphosis this technological ecosystem offers.

After a week in London thinking, talking and exploring ways to integrate ‘Technology in the International Classroom’ at the Teacher Training Center this sounds like very useful and inspiring revision.

Content Standard: Critical Thinkers and Problem Solvers – reflect upon and assess the characteristics and merit of your work and the work of others.

Tech, Media & Info Standard: Communication, Collaboration, and Ethical Use: Students use TMI tools to communicate and work collaboratively and ethically, including at a distance, to support individual learning and contribute to the learning of others.

My next job is to gather other tools,  ideas and strategies that might be useful as we move toward 1:1 next year.

On the good advice of my Japanese teacher, Matsumoto Sensei, I decided to arrive at opening time (10AM) to see,   

at The National Art Center. You can get off the subway right below the museum for easy access – they even sell entrance tickets in the tunnel leading to the main entrance. Why? Because Japanese young people, housewives and retirees flock to see block buster shows like this one.  

Despite being there early, when I entered the first room of paintings, the crowd was already at least 15 people deep. Quite overwhelmed, I skirted around the edges and chose carefully what I wanted to line for. I was definitely impressed, but not so much by seeing these works in the flesh again, rather by the volume of spectators moving around the rooms in such orderly fashion, most with handheld lecture devices held tightly to their ears.  

Post impressions? I wasn’t disappointed; I got to stand for sometime (during a lull) in front of some favorite works by Maurice Denis & Henri Rousseau. So today was just another art and culture experience in Japan…one that was just a little more on the culture side, that’s all. 

http://www.domesticatingit.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/HereComesEverybody.png

The iPad has entered my life…and what a life it has become. I am a ‘paddy’ convert. I was contemplating buying a Kindle but held off because I had a hunch that the iPad with its wifi, email, internet capabilites would be worth having. When I heard I could load the Kindle app I was set on it.

It seems quite appropriate then that I am reading Here Comes Everybody on my iPad via the Kindle app. My browsing for the book on the iPad included previewing  Clay Shirky on Youtube…oh how book shopping as changed.

For Fish it means becoming fluent in the fundamentals even before moving on to post-secondary education: understanding the grammar of intellectual, artistic and social practices so that one can participate in them, or at least understand them from the inside. Both commentators, like many others writing today, worry that in our results oriented regime, the study of history, literature and the arts is being compromised or eliminated in favor of narrow skills that fit into so-called objective tests. Instead of giving students the opportunity to have strong emotional and cognitive encounters with well-told stories, instead of helping them find their way to becoming absorbed in great works of art, we have drilled young people into thinking that effective reading and writing are techniques with measurable outcomes to be evaluated on standardized tests. A liberal education produces results, too, but they are less reducible to questions that can be answered by coloring in a bubble with a number 2 pencil.