weebly, yola, & blogspot

I have been using blogspot.com as a teaching tool in my classroom for years, most recently with rbceramics.blogspot.com and rbvisualarts.blogspot.com. Blogs and websites serve as a means to store and access links and lessons from any computer with the internet. It also enables students to view these resources, examples, and lesson plans from their home computers. The silver lining is that the sequence of lessons that evolve on my websites become a visual organizer for each class curriculum.

Upon exploring Weebly and Yola, I am all the more familiar with different avenues to build websites for educational and artistic purposes. Through experience, I am far more comfortable with the technical capacities of Blogspot, but weebly looks to be a clean and user friendly host as well. I look forward to using the Weebly site I built, www.rbdesignbasics.com, with our student artists to work more independently to learn about and apply art compositional skills.

google docs & art

Why use this resource as an educational tool? Access presentation in Google Docs here to find out!

www.rbmediaart.tumblr.com - Art Snapshot!

facebook in the classroom?!

Three Phases of Educational Technology video

This video, Three Phases of Educational Technology was an interesting breakdown of how technology can be integrated into the classroom. I am most intrigued by the third phase, which explores how educators can utilize our students' attachment to technology. Rather than fighting the fact that our classrooms are full of handheld devices and constant social networking, we should find a way to channel this avenue of communication and get more academic content out there to share with our students, and in turn, the world. Within the world of art marketing, professional artists use facebook as a means to distribute information about upcoming shows, exhibit works, and research imagery and artists to inform future works. It keeps us current and inspired - which is a tool that I want my students to use in their own artistic process. This is just one way to use technology in the classroom, amongst many. As an educator, my goal is to embrace progress and youth culture as a tool in my teaching belt rather than a thorn in my side.


Video: Just for Fun! Drawing Rome from Memory shows Stephen Wiltshire right side of the brain at its best...