Following on from my previous post, my colleagues and I are chugging along the Making Thinking Visible course. We are now entering “Artful Thinking.” It is described as:

The Artful Thinking program takes the image of an artist’s palette as its central metaphor. The artful thinking palette is comprised of 6 thinking dispositions – 6 basic colors, or forms, of intellectual behavior – that have dual power: They are powerful ways of exploring works of art, and powerful ways of exploring subjects across the school curriculum. The Artful Thinking palette comes alive through the use of “thinking routines.” Each thinking disposition has several thinking routines connected to it. Thinking routines are short, easy-to-learn mini-strategies that extend and deepen students’ thinking and become part of the fabric of everyday classroom life. They are used flexibly and repeatedly — with art, and with a wide variety of topics in the curriculum, particularly in language arts and social studies.

I’ve redesigned the booklet and if you are a classroom teacher, you may find the resource of use to use visual art in your curriculum. You can download the pdf via Issuu here, or via Google Docs.

Currently, myself and some colleagues are undertaking the Making Thinking Visible online course offered through the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Adaptable to any subject area, Visible Thinking allows getting started almost at once with ‘thinking routines’ that help students ponder ideas from the subject areas.

I’ve compiled these “routines” into the booklet below for myself as a quick reference. The routines are simple and quick. Have a look if interested. You can download through Issuu here, or via Google Docs here.

My grade 10 art class are working on a major unit on generating ideas and creativity. To make a long story short, they have to visually represent a theme. They are still currently in the research and planning phase. I know their ideas may be adequate, but more often than not, they will require more breadth and depth. As a teacher, how can I push them to try new things? How can I get them to think outside the box?

If you can get your hands on Nicholas Roukes’ book “Design Synectics: Stimulating Creativity in Design,” I highly recommend it (Davis Publications, Amazon). He offers some enlightening challenges and ways to think. It’s pretty much a staple in the art room. His “Art Synectics” book is good as well.

Within the first few pages of Design Synectics, he gets right in to offer ways to challenge your thinking about your subject. I’ve compiled them below into a document for my students to consider and apply. Feel free to use it if it makes sense to you as well! You can also view the pages via Flickr here.

What advice do you give to your students of art? Yeah, the list varies, I know. I’ve compiled some ideas from books and sites etc., with Kit White’s “101 Things to Learn in Art School” being the most used. I was playing around with the Moleskine app on my iPad and my one page document on advice ballooned into the 36 page booklet below. It was also time for me to become more familiar with InDesign, so I decided to merge the two ideas. Only the text was done using this and I purposely kept the “art” looking crude. Have a look below and let me know what you think. Feel free to drop me a line if I have omitted a gem of an advice nugget for the art room. If interested, you can also view the booklet by individual page on Flickr here.

I’ll be the first to admit that I wasn’t a big fan of visual journals before. I thought they involved too much “craft.” However, the more I read and the more examples I saw, the more I became interested. I am considering making visual journals as a new art unit of study for my grade 7s. The reason being, it may be a good way to introduce various ways of drawing and various other ways of utilising various mediums and presentation (that’s a lot of various). These activities may further assist the other units the students do on drawing and collage as well. I am considering the summative assessment to be a visual journal for their one week field studies trip that they will do in October. Anyway, as I read, I took some notes on journaling and compiled them into this attractive document to share here. I know you will be dying to read this during your summer vacation by the pool. If you have any suggestions for me, I’d love to hear from you. I’ll also let you know if I decide to go ahead with this idea.

July 29th Update: I’ve decided to give the unit a go. 

I have been updating my Web 2.0 wiki and doing some further organisation to the site and the “Tools to Explore” page. I have reorganised Imaging, Drawing & Photoslideshows into seperate categories for easier navigation. If you are dying to experiment with some 2.0 and other app tools over the summer, feel free to have a look and use it as you see fit. If this is not your sort of thing, perhaps at least check out the Hardware & Technology Tools page, which is located under the “Other Good Stuff” area. If you are really lazy, simply go here to check out my essential online tool list (also embedded below), which I have also posted here on this blog in the past. (Now back to my holidays.)

I recently returned from Singapore attending an MYP Arts workshop. I was talking to some teachers there about resources and it got me thinking.

I’m always open to new ideas to build better units. I’ll be the first to admit that it is difficult at times, especially when under time constraints. First of all, I’ll discuss it with my department or other teachers to generate ideas. (Of course, I also look at our school’s documentation and Scope & Sequence.) Next, I’ll go scouring the web by refining my Google search. However, this isn’t the most effective method. I’ll then browse Nings, check through Twitter, YouTube, Issuu, Diigo and various blogs. Sometimes what I see one person doing in photography may inspire me to apply it to drawing. Of course, this all takes time.

However, I am currently stumped for a grade 8 art unit I do on one-point perspective drawing through Surrealist Rooms. I like teaching the perspective aspect but I feel the Surrealist element is dying a slow death with my students. The unit used to be 7 weeks but is now 5 (as we do 5 week rotations in the arts). When it was 7 weeks, they used to paint their composition. Now they are using markers. I feel I need to improve the unit but am limited due to time. I would also like to go further by introducing 2 point and 3 point perspective as well. Furthermore, more time will be alloted to the arts next academic year so I can fortunately expect a longer timeframe within the MYP framework.

Should I scrap the unit or continue to improve it? Am I missing any resource areas or ideas? if so, I’d love to hear from you.

(photo credit: Joe in Grade 8 2009)

I often feel disappointed when I hear teachers discuss how they can’t find web resources for a topic. At times, teachers expect an ICT Facilitator to find these for them. Finding free resources sure is a lot easier now, but I am referring to going beyond Google. Do you have time to go beyond page 1 of 1.5 million sites (but that’s another blog entry)? What are some other alternatives?

Of course, video helps a lot now with YouTube, TeacherTube, SchoolTube and Vimeo readily available. I don’t know why I feel sad when teachers don’t use or search these options. Your internet connection isn’t so good for viewing? You don’t like the ads/comments that appear? You don’t like the related videos that appear? These are all valid points but then why not use Tooble or KeepVid to download the video onto your computer or embed it onto your own site (great reason to start a blog or wiki)?

Better yet, if teachers are struggling to find resources, why not get your class to create their own resources and then upload them to these sites, or to Slideshare, or to Issuu, or to a wiki, or to Voicethread? To me, they would be perfect opportunities for class projects as well as for assessments. Fair enough, it may take some time to get it set-up but in the long run, wouldn’t time be saved?

Students could have a sense of ownership and leave a legacy of knowledge and learning behind once the unit is finished and then students in the following years could use it or expand on it. Viewers may then rate it, comment on it, embed it or reuse it themselves. The author then slowly builds a network if they comment back and learning continues outside of the classroom. Teachers could then share it with their followers on Twitter or on a Ning they belong to. You see, not only does this benefit the student, but also the teacher. Teachers could use these sites as a source of inspiration to generate ideas or to find examples of and create a digital portfolio or an online presence.

(Hey wait a minute, this kind of sounds like authentic learning.)

If teachers are going to simply create text projects, why not upload them to Issuu or file2ws or to a class wiki or blog at least? That could involve peer editing wouldn’t it? We hear know and see that media collage is dominant, but at times teachers are the last ones to adapt. Why is that? Simple answer: Fear. A lot of teachers don’t wish to put their stuff out there (though we’re one of the first to snatch them up). They feel exposed. Naked. We are the knowledge kings and do not wish to be discovered as false prophets. Sorry, I sound negative and this wasn’t meant to be a rant. Give it some thought. Start small.

(photo credit)

I blogged about my school’s BTG Conference this weekend here where Chris Toy and Kim Cofino are also presenting (I’ll hopefully be able to post on that if I can make it to their session). I myself presented on Essential 2.0 Tools for Teachers and Students. It was kind of tough to narrow the list down as everyone is coming from a different place and are at different IT stages. Most of the tools I suggest are not new and if you are a regular reader of this blog, you have probably encountered them already. I presented using this wiki which I encourage you to look at if interested. Embedded below is the document version provided as a faster reference (also included in the wiki). In my opinion, most of these tools should be standard in classrooms now.

Following on from my post about Creativity 2.0 and web tools to use in your class, comes Best Embeds for Educational Wikis and Blogs from Making Teachers Nerdy. She offers similar tastes on options available for embeddable tools on your site. They are broken down into:

• Collaborative Project Tools
• Communication Tools
• Photos
• Student Products
• Video

Go have a look. I was glad to find Calameo as an alternative to Issuu. Calameo allows you to create digital books that also allow video and audio. Sign up required.