TECHNOLOGY CLASS POSTS #1-3

#1  I am excited to be taking my last education course at Dominican University, 'Integrating Technology into the Classroom' ('Technology' for short.. ), before student teaching in the fall - da - da daaaaaaa !! - of which I'm a little nervous about (in one of the student teaching placements I will be teaching art to 740 students. Not all at once, but it seems like kind of a lot). This past year at Dominican I've been coming up with my art teaching "focus" - which is going to be integrative art, art that is combined with a topic from another subject. I don't know how much other teachers where I end up working will be into it, but I can certainly teach it on my own inside the art room. I know that technology is a way to speed things up, change and warp things - faster than working by hand. And it is a way for students to be seen and heard and to share what they are working on and thinking about.

I hope to work in CPS, but with the closing of 52 schools, I'm not sure what is going to be in store for me in the near future.. And also with CPS I'm wondering what kind of technology funding they have in individual schools.. I know that teachers have a lot of resources at their disposal if they know where and how to access it, grants for instance, private donors.. ingenuity and old fashioned hard work.

The reason why I became a teacher is because I had (have) a kid. Now turning 13 this month (he was born in 2000 - which helps me remember how old he is, lol!). I did not realize how much I like kids until I had one of my own and gained quite a bit more exposure to a broad variety of them. I got to be a stay at home mom and got to do different kinds of volunteering in the classroom as my son grew. Kindergarten math stations wasn't one of my favorite volunteer positions. I signed up for it because math is one of my son's favorite subjects, probably his favorite at that time (art is one of his least favorite subjects, weird how that works out). So one time his second grade teacher asked me to help with making a papier mache dinosaur for their dinosaur unit - and also asked that I do one with the other second grade class (to be fair). There's the T-rex up there, and my guy when he was in second grade. He's already going into high school this coming fall. I can't believe it!

Anyways, I was a go-to mom for asking for help with class art projects. Later I was coming up with my own ideas and asking to volunteer. A friend landed me a job where I work now, at the First Baptist Church of Oak Park Preschool & Kindergarten:  www.opfbcschool.org   (I do their site)
I work as an art teacher for the after school kids (range K - 7th grade) and as a classroom assistant and substitute teacher. During working there I decided to go back to school to earn my Type 10 for art teaching within an MAT degree at Dominican. And that is how I became a teacher.


#2  Research:  Something I learned from the research presented in class Monday that I feel I could use to my advantage in teaching were some of the stats on students' use of social networking sites in general and also for school work, homework help and collaboration. The Kaiser Family Foundation reported in 2009 that '74% of 7th-12th graders have a profile on a social networking site.' One would think that percentage would only have increased. Project Tomorrow's 'Speak Up' survey conducted in 2012 to K-12 students found that 30% of students have used Facebook for homework help and also as collaboration on group projects 38%. Other social networking sites such Instagram and Pinterest can be joined by students for educational use. Since these sites have a strong focus on the visual presentation of topics of interest it would be good to encourage students to take notice of what their peers and others are talking about and finding interesting in their lives, in addition to the ways in which they are presenting this info. Questions to ask students could include: what kinds of images are you seeing in your social networking sites and on the internet in general? What catches your eye and why? What do you think is behind others' choices in their postings of images? 
As an art teacher, supplementary to in-class art reviews, I could create a Facebook account for my students to use as an online class gallery. Students could join the account by creating a new Facebook account for themselves that would only be used for the class art gallery to post examples of their artwork and leave comments to each other. It could be left viewable to the public so that other students in the school and their families could also view the students' artwork as a way for art students to have a public forum of their work.
Another thing that I found helpful to learn about for educational purposes to my favor is the annoying prevalence of cell phones in teens (AND earlier). I find cellphone usage to be annoying when kids (or adults) are supposed to 'on task' and they are actually 'on Facebook' instead - (but I suppose it could be OK if they were visiting our class Facebook art gallery.. ). According to the Pew Internet Research report: Teens and Technology 2013, 78% of teens own a cell phone, about half of which are smartphones and that 1 in 4 teens are 'cell-mostly' internet users.

http://blogs.reuters.com/alison-frankel/2011/08/24/2011-a-samsung-litigation-odyssey/

I believe this could work to my favor when compared with some of the data found the Technology Use in CPS report from 2011-12 whose findings support the use of technology in the classroom for increased student achievement (and also unfortunately support the correlation between socio-economic levels and the achievement gap). Simply put, in lieu of having computers/internet access in the classroom we could have students in small groups with a cell phone per group - hopefully there would be enough smartphones in the classroom for each group to be able to use one - and use the cell phone to be able to look things up on the internet and also as a camera for capturing photos to use as images sources for creating visual art.

#3  Where I am in the 'Stages of Technology Integration' according to the ACOT study:  I would definitely like to say that I am 'all up in there' and put myself in Stage 5: 'Innovation,' but I definitely feel that I would like to be more fluent in the apps I currently use as well as have more knowledge of and ability in other apps. According to the ACOT study the participating teachers were given minimal training. It seems like a part of the study was to see how willing the teachers were to explore and learn on their own. I myself have received a fair share of training by having taken a course load at the Center for Electronic Art in San Francisco (now unfortunately closed - during the 'Fall of the Dot Coms.. '). The courses I took included Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, and a film editing program whose name I can't remember and which likely no longer exists.. I also had training on some kind of dinosaur-like very clunky animation program back in the stone age when I got my undergrad degree in art. So basically I may have had more training/exposure to computers than some of the teachers in the ACOT study.

Anyways to have the gall of putting myself at the final stage of 'Technology Integration:' Innovation, is really about some of my 'wish list' teaching ideas for the future, which involve a combination of using computer art apps and fine art. An example being the bug I posted previously which was drawn in pencil and then scanned into Photoshop to add color, a process used by many illustrators. A process in reverse to that would be taking a digital photo and altering it in Photoshop and then drawing or painting the result on canvas. Mixed media and multimedia work very well as a combination of fine and computer art. Technology in art as well as teaching students about future careers in art, of which there is a broad field of computer-based art, are addressed in many of the IL Learning Standards for Fine Art. The ability to instantly view a ton of images and quickly research topics from a broad variety of sources is something that I believe all teachers and students benefit from. Also as far as utilizing technology as a teaching and learning tool - I can definitely see the benefits for our visual/kinesthetic/experiential learners as well as for the fact that this tool, the computer, is simply a part of kids' daily lives.