class on march 26th

At the beginning of class on March 26^th I gave my mini lesson on Society6, followed by an extra credit presentation on Flickr. Society6 is an art portfolio based website that is an excellent resource for artists working in all mediums. I chose society6 as my mini lesson, and Flickr as an extra credit presentation because both of these sites have a lot of advantages or uses in a middle school or high school art classroom including:

- Students will need to learn how to photograph and edit their artwork

- Students can post their artwork for others to see, and get feedback and comments from others

- Students can learn to utilize their art vocabulary when commenting on other people’s work

- Students will be able to maintain their own portfolio style webpage for free

- Students can research and view current artists work for inspiration or ideas on a new project

- Students can choose to sell their artwork via society6, or link to their etsy page on flickr if they choose

- Teachers can create a Society6 or flickr page for their AP art class for example, as a digital catalog of their work

- Flickr allows teachers to create sets (albums) of work so they can keep photographs, videos or artwork from different classes in their own section

- Flickr can be used by anyone, regardless of ski level or experience

- Teachers can easily save artwork from previous years to show as examples in years to come

http://society6.com/

http://www.flickr.com/

Teachertube seems to be a website similar to flickr in that teachers can maintain a catalog of video, audio, or photos that are appropriate for school. Teachertube accounts are free, and are safer to use than youtube because the content is monitored. Also similar to flickr, there is search capabilities that allow you to type in key words to find exactly what you are looking for. Teachertube would be fun for both students and teachers to post classroom photographs, projects, and videos that they create during the year.

http://www.teachertube.com/

I learned that you could create a custom search engine using google. Teachers can create a name and description for their search engine. This is a great way to customize a school appropriate search engine to give younger (and older) students experience using a search engine. You can teach your students how to broaden or narrow their search using bullean operators, and using quotation marks to search for key phrases.

Bullean operators help you when doing research using a search engine; they “define the relationships between words or groups of words.” Operators need to be capitalized, and examples include and, or, and not. Anything in quotation marks needs to produce search results with the exact wording as what is in the quotes. “And” helps you narrow your search by finding results containing all of the words it separates. “Or” broadens your search and finds results containing any of the words it separates. “Not” narrows your search and retrieves records that do not contain the term following it. Bullean operators can not only help your students when doing research, but to help teachers search questionable phrases written in students’ papers that may be plagiarized.

http://www.csa.com/help/Search_Tools/boolean_operators.html

Jing is a screencapture program that is helpful when you are not using a Mac. I frequently “screencap” using command + shift + 4 to take a snapshot of my computer screen. Jing is free, and it allows you to easily create videos and images of what you seen on your screen and share it with others.

http://www.techsmith.com/jing.html