We're learning more ways to use communication technology every day. Skype is the communication of the future for my generation. Like the "Back to the Future" movie's predicted! Ha! We already have video conversations by artist and others available to show our students but with this technology we can create our own interview with an Artist or Creative Professional. Chapter 5 of the book "Digital Diet" gives planning advise for holding such an interview. The main point is the more planning given the more successful the interview. The questions and the students asking the questions should be planned out ahead of time. The finished interview could be posted on YouTube if the person being interviewed will approve it and it can be saved for viewing by other classes. The more the students are involved in it's production the better. Student led learning engages the students.
Another communication tool that's catching on is Twitter. This could be used similar to a blog for outside of class discussion and sharing of ideas. One way a class could use twitter could be in a group creative idea mind map. Students could bounce ideas off each other and then look at all of them in class and narrow down to the best solution for the problem. Viewing a group or class assignment as a problem to be solved and opening communication as much as possible can contribute to it's success. Another use may be to get feedback on the class from students. They may find it easier to share their viewpoints this way and a teacher can get beneficial feedback.
Social networking sites have become very popular in a free time sense but in Chapter 8 of "The Digital Diet" many great ideas for using these in education are given. The most popular one "facebook" reaches such a large group of people that many groups inside facebook have been formed. Students can be led in learning outside of class by a facebook set up by the teacher just for viewing by that class. There could be pictures of students projects included and maybe a featured student artist weekly or monthly. This would be a great way to show parents the learning going on in class. Flashcards and other learning tools can be set up for the class. This is similar to using a classroom blog but there are more applications or things that you can do. The chapter in "The Digital Diet" did advise that you need to find out your districts policy on using facebook or other social networking sites. They also advised that you should not use your personal site which I think is good advise. In setting up one myself I am cautious about how much information I want to share.
Voicethread is shown in Chapter 9 of "The Digital Diet". This is a good tool for making multi-media presentations. Students could use this to present the culture of their family and childhood traditions. That would be a great way to share the multi-ethnicities in our classes. the students can present a project and show the steps and difficulties they encountered working on the project. The Teacher could give an example of this and that would be a great way to show how creating Art takes time and sometimes evolves or changes during the act or to show the creative process involved. The teacher could also create a library of these on different technical skills or Art topics and these could be made available to students to perform further research on their own. Demonstrations given in class could be included in this library then if a student wants to re-watch it they can or if they missed class they can still watch it. The ease of this software in using slides, videos, sound and voice opens up a lot of creative ways to use the computer in education.
Resources:
Churches, A., Crocket, L., & Jukes, I. (2010). "The Digital Diet: Today's digital tools in small bytes. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin
Brooks-Young, S. (2010). "Teaching with the tools kids really use: Learning with web and mobile technologies." Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin
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