FAEA State Art Conference

I leave tomorrow morning for the State Art Conference in Orlando. I am going to try bloging, podcasting, and streaming video from the conference. I would like to try and do real time streaming video but that depends on the connectivity at the hotel. Stay tune on this blog for more.

Learn, teach, learn, teach

I’ve been reading other blogs about using web 2.0 in an educational setting. I guess as with any emerging theories there are many different opinions of how web 2.0 should be used in the classroom.

Some see the use of the web, blogs, podcasts, wikis, MySpace, Flicker and other collaborative web based tools to be liberating and empowering. Others cannot understand allowing that much unscripted, unsupervised activity in a classroom or any learning environment.

Being a classroom teacher I understand the need for control. Conversely as an artist I understand the need for freedom in a creative environment. The challenge now is to balance the two needs.

Of course mistakes will be made but those mistakes should not be a signal to return to the old ways of teaching. With the speed of change happening teachers must learn to teach as they learn. Learn, teach, learn, teach… It is a brave new world that is recreating itself faster than we can get use to the old one.

My First Podcast

I did it, I created a podcast in my class today. I was doing Art of the Day with a third grade class and they were have a good discussion about a work of art by the artist Mark Di Suvero. This summer I visited the Denver Art Museum and one of Marks works, Lao-Tzu is outside the museum. I took a picture of the work and showed it to the class. They came up with some really great impressions of the work.
http://bryant.mysdhc.org/teacher/0527bliss/Techinart/
This is a link to my podcast page. It's pretty cool how easy it is to do and the kids love it.

Podcasting

Ok,
I've taken the district workshop on podcasting and it is very cool and easier to do that I thought it would be. Bradley Smrstick the area 6 Tech trainer did a great job presenting the workshop.
Like with most things on a computer we learned many ways to create the audio files used to make podcasts.
I think that by using a small hand held digital recorder it will be very easy to create podcasts with the kids in my classroom. I am going to share this with the faculty at Mary Bryant.
So far the only problem I've had is that the podcast files quickly fill my allotted server space on the IDEAS server.