Arts Education

One of the things I am working on this school year is visual thinking - making my ideas more visible and asking my students to do the same. To that end, as a teacher, I will continue to focus on drawing tasks with my students and, as a learner, I am exploring sketchnoting. I blogged about that here . The app that I am using for sketchnoting is Paper by Fifty Three . Paper is a sketching app with a recommended bluetooth stylus that allows for more functionality than a typical stylus. It is pretty easy to get started with Paper. And though I thought my first sketchnotes were pretty clunky, I got a lot of compliments on them when I shared them. Those first sketchnotes were a bit of a struggle. The empty white canvas is threatening to me. I feel like I need a plan before I start and sometimes halfway in, I want to scrap the whole thing and start over. As I got started, I kept wishing that there was a way to import some images that I could compliment with drawing and text. Of course, it tu...

Last week I had a lot of good luck with new webtools. First I tried Quizalize and that was great. I also tried LearnClick (more on that at some point) and it was pretty good too. Then I finally got to WordWall's beta web version of their interactive whiteboard software. It was fantastic! I first learned about WordWall on Danny Nicholson's excellent blog . I have had the tab open in several browsers for months. I wanted to use an activity created in SMART Notebook, but it wasn't working well with my new Epson projector, so I needed a substitute. It was a perfect time to try out the beta WordWall . WordWall wants to keep teachers using "large touch screens" to " to create activities that are a pleasure to teach with, and fun to participate in." The WordWall concept is to create templates for teachers to use to create interactive activities. These templates are designed by graphic artists and are easy to use so teachers can focus on content and not on...

One of my most popular posts is this one , a comparison of Kahoot!, Socrative, and Quizizz, three great formative assessment tools. Each of them has a quizzing feature with some gaming elements that make learning fast-paced and fun. This week I tried Quizalize , another formative assessment tool that will give them some competition with some of their best features plus some extras.  I learned of Quizalize when they followed me on Twitter (thanks, Quizalize, btw!). Intrigued, I headed to the site to check it out. It was very easy to make a new quiz. Click the + New Quiz button and you're on your way. Add multiple choice questions with a few features -- a range in timing from 5 to 60 seconds, images, math mode (for math symbols and equations), and an explanation of why the correct answer is correct. I used the math mode so I could insert superscripts. I did have to read their excellent guide on how to make that work, but I felt like I learned something in the process. After I c...

This week a reader commented on  this post  about my use of my iPad to lecture in my classroom. He asked what apps I was using to project to the class. Below is a picture of a handout I used to suggest some options to my colleagues: Of all the options on the page, IPEVO Whiteboard is the one I have used the most. It has just the right amount of great features combined with intuitive simplicity to make it easy to use. Yesterday I wrote about using iPad Keynote as a remote control for laptop Keynote. DeMobo Slides does pretty much the same thing with Google Slides and Prezi . If you have a laptop or iPad and a projector, one of the above apps will probably meet your needs.

  Today, while prepping an activity for Monday with a colleague, we accidentally discovered awesome. He was using the iPad to tap through slides in a Keynote I made and he tapped too long on one slide. From the bottom of the screen popped up some hidden tools - 7 colored markers and a laser pointer tool. I know this isn't like discovering Teflon - and maybe everyone knows about this but me - but I was still pretty excited to find these hidden treasures. Once the tools pop up, you can select a color and write on the screen to highlight an idea or draw something onto an image. Tap the laser pointer and you can drag it around to emphasize or draw attention to something. I have written this year about using my iPad as part of my classroom routine for giving notes . I have been using an app called IPEVO Whiteboard for this. It has just the right amount of bells and whistles for me, including the ability to import images and record the screen while talking and writing. Yesterday I pres...

In my most recent post , I mentioned the Straight A Fund Grant that my school received to renovate 60+ classrooms, our media center and lecture halls, and build a professional development center. Our grant evaluators spent a few days at the school this month. They attended a faculty meeting to touch base with our staff about how the blended learning initiative was progressing. They summarized for us what they had learned about our students' hopes for the pilot in meetings with the students. Students expressed a desire for: increased availability of Information greater Interest in content deeper Interaction with teachers and content These three points struck a chord with me. They aren't new ideas, but they are important ones. As this year gets off the ground, my colleagues and I are trying a lot of new things to use our available technology as much as possible. It is helpful, though, to have a litmus test to use for determining whether or not a use of technology will benefit t...

The school where I teach won a large grant last year to move ahead a vision of blended learning. The result has been a 1:1 program in the high school with 60+ redecorated classrooms, a new media center, and renovated lecture halls. The science rooms were limited a bit because we have a lot of specialized lab furniture that couldn't be changed. Still, our student desks - the classic desk attached to chair - were going away and we had to choose a new style of student seating. My room is especially crowded and I worried about adding a lot of tables to a space that already contained 7 lab tables and a teacher demonstration desk. In the end I chose tables where three trapezoidish tables form a wonky shield table . Six weeks in, I love them! So far, I have used the tables in three arrangements. For everyday use - notes, group work, some stations work - I am using the trapezoidy tables in pairs. They create strange rectangle workspaces that are big enough for four students. When I need a ...