Klibcke’s Weblog

To some of you who may not know me, this is going to sound like a rant. But trust me, I do not rant unless I can help find a solution. This had been bothering me for a few weeks and I had to get it off my chest.

These past few weeks I have been faced with some very new “teaching styles”. These teaching styles, in my eyes, are things that you should steer away from in the classroom. And this is just COMMON SENSE. This may be even more difficult for me because I am a full-time student and teacher at the same time right now. And these awful teaching tactics are coming from both sides of the spectrum.

As a student, it is always very important to me that my professor does not intrude in my personal life. You do not mix business ( my school life ) with personal ( my home life ). Now of course this can be disregarded if the professor has been given an invitation into your personal life. But if there wasn’t an invitation, then you weren’t invited.( For the record I’m NOT NOT NOT talking about our Digital Media professor. Selila actually demonstrated what should be done in this scenario.) In one of my other classes a professor tells a student how to and not to raise their children. This should NOT be done in the classroom. The same scenario came up in the Digital Media classroom, and Selila handled it ALOT differently. When your teaching you should also not be discriminatory against any race, religion, gender, etc. etc. Even if it appears to you that a particular type of person is not in the room, it is still offensive. ( Oh yes, I’ve had this happen) As a teacher you should bring nothing but respect into your classroom.

Another teaching tactic I saw this week was bullying. Now what bothers me most about this is that I saw this as a teacher and as a student. As a teacher, one of my coworkers screamed at a bunch of students to get a job done. Now of course with the screaming came cursing and name-calling. You can not expect your students to respect you and not call you names if you don’t respect them. Plain and Simple.

While I was a student, I also saw forms of bullying in the classroom. I don’t want to go into full detail because that would just rat the professor and class out. But if you’re in the class you know what I’m talking about. As a student, I do not feel safe inside of the classroom if the teacher is constantly analyzing my every move and then talks about it in front of the entire class. I also do not feel safe if the professor calls a student out every class with name calling. And I certainly do not feel safe with a professor who needs to be in constant control. Every scenario can be turned into a lesson if you let it.

As a student, if I do not feel safe or comfortable in the classroom I will then shut down. I will complete my work, and then not talk to anyone and won’t even acknowledge the professor. I feel like a line had been crossed, and I do not take disrespect in any shape or form. I can see why many students within my school may also feel like this with other teachers. Students at my school are always trying to hide-out in my classroom, even during lunch. If someone feels disrespected, you are not going to get respect back.

I also learned the differences between Open Access and Open Source sites. Open Access sites are ones that can not be modified, but hold a great deal of valuable information. Open Access sites that I didn’t even know I used every day are Google and Hotmail. I mean, I knew they were free, but I didn’t know there were a whole genre of educational sites like this. Open Source sites are then the ones that can be modified or edited by anyone. Sites like these that I have also used are Wikipedia.

After researching more about Open Access and Open Source sites, I found some good ones that may be helpful with extensive projects and every day uses. Sites that I found for every day uses were those that could help putting together documents, resumes and reports. The site that I really likes for this was:

www.docs.google.com . This site had free templates for everything from business cards to photo albums. Another site that also helps produce word documents and spreadsheets that is free of charge is: www.thinkfree.com .

From an art teacher’s perspective, it would be helpful to have more tools for manipulation and design in the classroom. I found some sites that can be helpful and are free of charge to download.

www.Gimp.org , www.infranview.com and www.picasa.google.com , are all sites that are for photo manipulation, touch-ups and rendering. For video production, editing, and conversion I found some great sites that are also free of charge. Cam studio is a desktop screen recorder that can be used to record right from home. Their site is: www.camstudio.org. www.audacity.sourceforge.net , is a site for audio editing that is free of charge, and for converting movies into any format I found: www.erightsoft.com/super.htm .

Sites that I found that are for helping teachers with lesson plans and curriculum are:

www.hippocampus.org and www.hotpot.uvic.ca. I was really impressed by Hippocampus’ site. You could register (for free of course) so that you could make custom digital interactive lessons for your students. The only downfall was that I didn’t see many for visual arts.

I didn’t see anything posted about reading, but I don’t think that is a free weekend pass. I definitely think that it means that I need to be blogging myself. I wasn’t really sure of what to blog about so I guess I will talk about what I have been doing for my project.

My project deadline is November 10, and I am doing animation in the classroom. My goal is to have one of my classes actually create their own animation for the project and also bring in some research that I have been doing. Some of you may already know that I teach at a special education school for children who also have behavior difficulties. So in order for me to get this lesson done with them I am going to have to go through ALOT of planning. I also have to pre-select which classes will be doing this project based on their needs.

When first thinking about animation, I immediately thought of simple animations made in flash or after effects. I also thought of claymation. As a warm-up activity I usually give my students clay or play-doh to make certain objects or fantasy scenarios. The kinesthetics is perfect for this group of students, and they also make some great stuff. Due to this I was thinking of having my class make a 10 sec. claymation. In order to get this done however, I would have to break it up into numerous separate activities to make sure they understand all of the concepts that go with making an animation. I’m very excited about this lesson, and I know the kids will be blown away by it.

After doing some research on the topic, I found some great sites of animations that kids have done in other classrooms. I didn’t even think of this until I started researching, but one classroom had non-digital animation. Would I be able to bring some examples of that into our Digital Media Classroom? Or should I leave that out? Examples of this would be a flipbook or a circular piece of paper with pictures on each side and strings attached. On one side of the circle is a cage and on the other is a bird. When you twist the paper you see the bird in a cage. Sounds pretty basic, but I think that it would really get my kids thinking about animation, even in the simplest forms.

I haven’t really done extremely in depth research on animation and how it is used in the classroom, but I think actually making one will help speed things along for me. Let me know if you have any ideas for me and my topic.