Saturday, April 18, 2020

Texture Safari - Distrance Learning Style

One of my favorite projects for 2nd grade this time of the year is to take them on a Texture Safari.  They explore the classroom looking for textures both implied and actual, they classify and describe them.  I went in search of a video I could share with them on YouTube but everything was for younger students and it showed.  I went on Safari in my home with iPad in hand to photograph some textures to share with them.  The project will involve first identifying textures then creating their own texture collage from rubbings.

Here is a link to my video. 

Tuesday, April 7, 2020

Teaching with Social Distancing

It just occurred to me that I should be adding my new teaching video experience to my blog.  I've been so caught up with my own learning curve trying to discover what method is going to work best for me to connect with my students.  I used the video setting on my iPad to first record my enrichment lessons.  It worked great and I was happy with the results until it became time to post the videos to another source.  What a nightmare that became.  At that point I was posting onto Class Dojo because nothing had come from our district to give us a common platform, yet.  It was easy enough to open Dojo and record right into the platform however, transfer the video to my 2nd school became an impossible task for me.  I came up with a solution but it was not the best.  I used my iPad opened up into Dojo for the second school and recorded the video from my computer.  Truly, not the best results but I was able to transfer the video.  I also can't seem to transfer those video to this format. 
So this experience led me to looking for other options.  I downloaded Adobe Spark and used it for week two.  This works really well, easily attaches to both school platforms because I have easy access to a link and the quality is great.  What I did not love is that it is a slide platform that streamed into a video.  So, I checked in with a few of the video gurus that we follow as Art Teachers and the overall recommendation was to use iMovie.   It is now downloaded and that is where I will go today as I prepare for tomorrow's postings.  My district is now using Google Classroom as our teaching mode, too.  Watch for posting of all my teaching videos week by week.  I'll get this and who knows what type of teacher I will become on the other side of this all.  It's a whole new world!!!