Further to my last post. Met the teacher concerned and have decided on trialling the following:

• Using Edublogs blogs as portfolios - mainly connected to A01 which is ‘Record and Observe’ - exploring other people’s ideas through secondary sources. Student’s will explore secondary sources attaching hyperlinks to the sources or uploading examples and write about the pieces. We discussed whether or not to use the blogs for recording and annotating their own pieces but felt that this was an unnecessary extra step and would interrupt their natural workflow as they tend to record their thoughts about their own work in their sketchbooks.
• Using Mind42 to develop and explore (A03) and find a theme that inspires them. The teacher was particularly impressed with this free web based mind mapping software and could see it being very useful for the students. The thing that stands out about MInd 42 (and I’ve tried lots of different mInd mapping software including Openmind) is that students can collaborate with each other and mind map together.
• Use Photoshop to manipulate student’s scanned in sketches - particularly using the motion blur tools, filters and pattern maker as these will help students to explore cubism / futurism and visualise what their sculptures may look like.
• Use Stop Motion Pro to create an animated gallery of their sculpture, possibly exploring the use of green screening too.

I’m looking forward to working on this project, it should be quite interesting to find out what the students find useful tools and how they use them - quite often how one person uses a digital tool can be quite different to how another chooses to. Personalisation in action!

A couple of weeks ago I was tasked with thinking about how ICT could be embedded into GCSE Art. A teacher wants to stretch the more able students and reach better grdaes through using ICT. Here are some ideas:

• Create a Teacher’s Blog using Edublogs. use this to host useful resources for students and post questions or stimuli for homework. Students add comments in response. Example
• Create student blogs using Edublogs (Example) to use as portfolios for art projects. Teacher can post comments to these. Students can upload images, video, audio and written text. Used in conjunction with the online tool for collaborative mind mapping Mind42.com
• Use Flickr to create a class group and upload and share images - either student’s own work or secondary resources. Add comments and notes to the images.
• Using photoshop to scan in artwork and adapt it using filters, layers and the pattern maker.

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As usual, it’s easy to get carried away with ideas without remembering the golden rules of new projects and moving practise in the classroom along (especially in the real world!). Meeting the teacher involved on Thursday to discuss and might end up scaling some of this down but at the very least I’d recommend every teacher have a teacher blog to start!

Our CLC is currently undergoing a partial rebuild - we’re getting a new room on the back. It is approximately 100m squared and has flexible underfloor wiring for data and power. This got me thinking about what exactly we’re going to do with the new room and how spaces either help or hinder learning.  What sort of projects would fully exploit the space whilst also encouraging schools to come in and have a go?

I found the Futurelab paper on Learning Spaces and Personalisation really useful when researching this.

Here are some of my ideas:

• Creation, Communication, Collaboration -  as themes running through all projects. How could the space and the digital toolkit in the room support these themes?

• Multi Modal learning and Individual Learning Pathways - the digital toolkit and space allowing students to learn through any one of or a mixture of audio, moving image, written text, still image, web. Allowing them to choose what suits at different times.

• Learning Community - not a Class - learners of different ages, communities, remote learners - How can we include different types of learners and break down barriers?

• Range of experts - remote, pupil and community. Role of expert and learner interchangeable and transient - shared knowledge construction.

• Encouraged to use own devices - No ban on mobiles!

• Building learners capacity - less on fixed content - links to Building Learner Power and Enquiring Minds. Embedding activities from both across projects where suitable.

As such I’d like to see a ‘Learning Wall’ where students can come and select a range of devices for learning from - PSP’s, EDA’s, Gaming Consoles, Mac Books. There would also be a number of digital interaction boards around the room for collaborative work that can be seen easily by all involved and take multi-input.

Of course, this may all be a bit too ‘pie in the sky’ - certainly for the budget but sometimes it’s important to visualise what it is you want to do before thinking about the limitations of resources.