Arts Education

Participants at EduDesign Shop await proposal pitches. About year ago I had a really amazing experience.  I was selected to participate in EduDesign Shop , a design thinking weekend organized by Jessica Artiles , a graduate student at MIT.  100 people - 25 educators, 25 policy makers, 25 designers, and 25 students - met on a Saturday morning, ready to solve a problem in education that focused on incorporating arts in STEM education, motivational structures, or retention and support for diversity in STEM fields.  It was reality show-esque:  We learned and worked all day Saturday and Sunday in teams of 4 to ideate and prototype an idea and then pitch it in a 2 minute proposal to a team of experts.  Watch my team's pitch here .  I have never had a crazier weekend.  And I loved every minute of it. With no experience in design thinking, it was a tremendous experience for me.  Because I so enjoyed the weekend of design, I was thrilled to read the news t...

In February I attended a webinar, hosted by Richard Byrne , on the terrific features of Storyboard That .  I was immediately impressed by the variety and versatility of this tool.  I couldn't wait to try it out. The picture at the left is a storyboard I created with Storyboard That.  I started with a template and customized the headings and colors of almost everything I added.  The characters are posable and customizable too.  Many (many!) backgrounds are available.  Filters are available (black and white or sepia and so on) and many features in the background can be customized.  I like the idea of creating storyboards like this one for the families of the periodic table.  It was a lot of fun to create this board and it looks like a high quality visual. I enjoyed Storyboard That so much that I designed an extra credit project for my students to see how they liked it too.  Over spring break, students could choose one of my templates or start f...

After I blogged about the new features of The Answer Pad , I received this comment on Google+. I put together a nutshell chart comparing Nearpod , Pear Deck , and The Answer Pad because I see a lot of overlap between them.  Please don't see the YES or NO as an endorsement or lack thereof.  Sometimes a NO is a strength!  These are all great tools that I encourage teachers to try and regularly use.  I would be hard-pressed to choose any of them as the greatest. I also just learned of a similar feedback tool called Formative .  I hope to try that one out this week or next with my students and then I will add it to the above chart. I will put together a similar chart about Socrative and Kahoot and a new favorite, Quizizz , soon.  

Earlier this week I read about Parapara Animation in a headline of Free Technology for Teachers .  I am always on the lookout for a quick and simple way to animate molecular motion, so I thought I would check it out.  Richard Byrne's post gives a great overview to the features of Parapara.   I headed over to the Parapara site and clicked around a little.  After a few failed attempts where I figured out how things work, I was able to create a simple animation of 2 water molecules.  It looks like I should have used a different colored background, but, otherwise, I am pretty happy with my first attempt. I love that this is a free tool and does not require any account or registration.  When you finish your animation, you get a link and a QR code.  When you click your link to see the animation, you also get the embed code and the option to like it on facebook and to tweet it. I would use this to create animations to show particle interactions to my s...