Audacity ideas for Visual Arts

My education and technology friend Bianca is looking for ideas on how to use Audacity in different subject areas. I have not used it before but wanted to respond so I could come up with ideas for my own practice. Even though my ideas were quite simple, I found that to leave my response purely as a response to Bianca's blog and to not take my own ideas further would be a shame. So, I thought I would post my response here so that I might look to the future and implement these tools in my own classroom...

Hi Bianca!

I am sorry I did not get in on time for your last post but I too would be really interested in learning about audacity.

I have not used audacity myself for Visual Arts yet, however a fairly obvious use for this tool in the subject would be for students to describe an artwork to an audience. A lot of museums use podcasts to teach people about artworks however, to get students to use this approach would help them to develop how they analyse, talk about, discuss an artwork from different points of view.

Students often find describing art works in an in-depth manner difficult and to get them to publish their description in this manner would give them practice and accountability.

They could also post an image of their own artwork and use audacity to publish a description of their own artist practise – describing their work, why they did it, how they did it, what it means, etc.

Students could also be told about access in museums for those with disabilities which is a really important focus for museums these days. Students could be asked to use audacity to provide access to an artwork for blind audiences – how might they describe the work so that blind audiences have the best access possible. Students could be told how their recordings could be combined with having the actual sculpture/painting, etc. present in the gallery for touch and feel so that blind audiences get to know the work through other senses than sight.

I hope this helps. Maybe I will look at implementing my own suggestions this term!

Sal
x

See MoMA for an example of Podcasts about arworks.

Learning Curve

Are you feeling overwhelmed by the possibilities of technology in education? Me too. But...

I feel very lucky - my digital literacy is really very good. I have a good knowledge of computers and a range of programs.

I have, however, feel like I have been living under a rock. I didn't hear about Edmodo, Yammer, Education Blogs, etc until a few weeks ago.

But then, how lucky am I??? - My ignorance has pushed on a very very steep self-guided learning curve. And even luckier, because I have discovered all these amazing teachers and educators using these tools in so many ways.

So what have I done to solve my ignorance problem?

Here is a list.

In the last few weeks I have:

- Re-started my art teaching blog. A project that was abandoned after only a couple of posts has now had new life breathed into it!
- Re-started my Twitter account. Before I realised other teachers were using it, I had NO idea how Twitter was a useful tool!
- Started a group on Edmodo. Even if though only one of my year 10s is regularly using it at the moment, it is going to be an amazing tool in my classroom.
- Stayed in touch and made contact with other like-minded educators on Twitter, etc.
- Watched many powerpoint presentations and articles on the use of technology in education. This I hope to keep doing!
- Thought about the many possibilities, and tried not to get too overwhelmed by these possibilities by becoming more knowledgeable.

Do you have any other suggestions?

Digital Tribes and The Social Web by Steve Wheeler

Some very interesting slides as part of this presentation. I particularly like slide number 24, which shows a diagram of the three web tools that facilitate the three human interaction characteristics of cognition (blog), co-operation (wiki) and communication (social network).

Slide number 34 is also particularly good. As a teacher, I often think of different kinds of 'literacies', and even though digital literacy is high on my agenda for both me and my students, I had never thought in-depth about what these characteristics of digital literacy might be. I have listed them below for my own reference and possibly for yours! What are my students doing at the moment? They are creating animated self-portraits. As part of this project they are expected to develop their competencies in identity management, creating content, organising content, filtering and selecting and self presenting.

- Social Networking
- Transliteracy
- Privacy Maintenance
- Identity Management
- Creating Content
- Organising Content
- Reusing/repurposing content
- Filtering and Selecting
- Self Presenting

Digital Tribes and the Social Web

View more presentations from Steve Wheeler.

An alternate view

Wow, very interesting. Maybe gaming aint that bad people...

12 Canoes Resource

I was watching Message Stick on the ABC this morning about the broadband website 12 Canoes

A beautiful site with an accompanying PDF education kit.

Check it out, share it in the classroom, pass it on...

Inspiration

Where I live...

Where I live definitely serves as inspiration for the art I do...and I try to get my students to also appreciate their own surroundings, and communicate ideas about their natural environment in their artworks

 

Print Criticism

Print criticism (1989)

An interesting article by Christopher Allen on print criticism - the art critic responding to printmaking in a different way to how the critic may respond to criticism of other forms.

What distinguishes print criticism from criticism in general? I suppose it’s essentially the fact that you have to take account of the different or the specific qualities of the medium or rather many different media because, as we know, and [as] we’ve seen today too, there are many different techniques and media involved in printing, and combinations, re–uses; re–readings of those techniques today...