Horray! I can Finally be Considered an Artist!

I stink at drawing, fail miserably at writing poetry, can’t sing in tune or play a melody BUT I can still be an artist thanks to box logic. I was inspired as I read Sirc’s Box Logic to become a box logic extraordinaire, I feel that the subjects to create boxes are endless, and you don’t have to possess some God given talent to create them. Now, I am not discrediting the aesthetic merit to Cornell’s boxes, he was truly creative and artistic in his box creations. Here are some of Cornell’s boxes that I found interesting. I do wonder what his bird fetish was all about….

However, as I read I struggled with the limitations that technology may present in the creation of a box on the web. It seems to me that there are more creative opportunities in actually creating a physical, touchable box. I also feel that many of us already have theses “boxes” started in our lives but have not artistically arranged them yet. For example, right now in my garage I have a box of high school, a box of family cards, a box of my daughter’s mementos, etc. and I am sure that many of you have similar “boxes” in your garage or storage areas. I could begin with the contents of one of these boxes and use the materials to create an artistic “box”. However, with technology, I would need to transfer the contents of this box into the computer to allow me to be able to create a digital box. Some items could not be transferred at all due to size, shape, texture, etc. While I do think that I personally would enjoy creating a physical box, I do realize that technology would allow other elements such as sound and animation.

Thoughts on the Digital World of “Screenagers” and Digital Report cards

The Eastern Sierras and some crazy cloud action

Reading “Turn teen texting toward better writing; Teachers who co-opt web tools for class have the best of both worlds”, affirmed the success of including digital forms of writing that students are accustomed to using in their daily lives. Justin Reich points out that as teachers “the most productive option is to listen to our teenagers and bridge the gap between their social and academic worlds”. I agree with Reich. I know in my own classroom, students preformed greater on assignments that included digital technology than on the traditional pen and paper assignments. While Reich’s article focuses on including digital writing for teenage students, I can attest that digital writing is practiced by a larger age demographic. College aged students not only e-mail, text, blog, and IM, but also belong to chat groups, “mommy boards”, political web groups, etc. I feel that these digital writing tools can also be useful in building writing skills in a writing classroom. However, as a gal who grew up in the old school-pen and paper-English classroom, I find some technologies less “academic” and harder to include in the classroom but hopefully, I can find ways to manipulate them into something educational.

As I read, “Balto. Co. to Overhaul Report Cards”, I saw both some pros and cons to their new report card system. I feel that there are many benefits to directly e-mailing a child’s report card to a parent. It would be cost free, as no postage fees would apply. It would eliminate the possibility of student tampering or thieving before parents viewed it (Ha, I speak from experience). It would also be faster than traditional mailed grade reports. In addition to the electronic aspect, as a parent I saw many advantages of the new grading scale. The additional information that would be provided could be a very useful tool to parents and allow them to work with their child in the areas and specifics that needed improvement. However, as a teacher I also see the downside of this system and realize that more information on the report card means more work for the teacher. However, I would have to say that the extra work could possibly benefit the instructor if the parents work with their children in the necessary areas.

Teacher Training with Virtual Classroom

Life through the passenger window, Gull Lake, CA on Memorial Day 2008

After reading “Virtual Classroom at the University of Central Florida puts Teachers to the Test” and watching the short video clip of the training, I am amazed at how useful this tool could be in training not only elementary school teachers but college teachers as well. The program’s characters are each crafted to take on a particular personality, which in my opinion, shared drastic similarities to the students that a college teacher can encounter in their classroom. While college professors may not be faced with a student as disruptive as “Marcus”, they will encounter students with distinct personalities that may not want to participate in the class or who may be disruptive in the classroom in a more subtle way. For example, in my first college class I encountered students who texted in class and had a student to came late to class and was very disruptive to the other students. How as teachers do we handle these situations? Could we be trained to handle these situations more professionally? Perhaps if we had practice handling these situations and others before we actually stepped into a classroom we would have a stronger hold on our classroom. Another aspect of the program that I found useful was the fact that they can incorporate a live actor with sensors as one of the students in the classroom, making each training session different and unique to how the teacher in training responds. I am interesting in seeing if this spreads to other universities. I have a feeling that this type of training is very costly, which would prevent some colleges from obtaining such a tool.

The Journey of a Novice Web Designer

For the mid-term assignment, as most of you know I opted to make a website through yahoo's geocities. I thought for your enjoyment and perhaps my own reflection of the entire process, I would give a "behind the scenes tour" of my midterm assignment.

• I had this great vision of getting some photographs of myself on a dirt road in a remote location. An idea that I felt could be artsy and represent my "road" to literacy. So after some nagging and bribing I convinced by Husband to go with me up to the high desert and find a location to shoot some pictures. We ended up finding the perfect spot somewhere off of the 395. I had this perfect shot in mind of me on a dirt road, looking at a map, trying to navigate my way to literacy....sounds deep, right? But I failed to realize some things...

I am not a model nor can I pretend to be.

My husband is not a great photographer.

There is a lot of wind in the desert and holding a paper map is virtually impossible.
Here is a photo from our shoot that didn't make the final cut- Me cursing at wind and husband, while trying not to loose map to the elements.

• Once I had all of my images, I began first in Adobe photoshop. I edited most photos I used, whether they were my own or if I had "borrowed" them from another source. I struggled with finding the happy medium for messing with pictures. I may find it cool to turn my old elementary school blue and purple, but my classmates may think I am smoking something good and not view this edit as creative but as a waste of time.
  
  Here is the original photo of my elementary school

Here is what I did to it:

• The thing I struggled the most was not with the actual technology of creating a website, but the actual host/provider of the website, geocities. As most of you know, I had created an entire website, only to have it deleted by geocities in the wee hours of the morning of the day the mid-term was due. My initial website was a little fancier and I had done a lot of the html coding myself. However, due to great time restraints, my second site that I created was created mainly through using geocities page builders.
  
• Here is a link to my final product http://www.geocities.com/tortoros
  
  HOWEVER...............
  As I found out in class on Tuesday, geocities allows very MINIMAL amounts of data transfer per hour. So basically, only 2 people can view my site per hour....LAME! I guess you get what you pay for...which was nothing.
  Here is what we saw in class on Tuesday.....