Curation in Personal and Professional Life

Twitter. Feedly. Diigo. Pinterest. And still more curation tools I haven't tried yet.  Which is the one for me?  Is there just one?  Somehow I think there will be more than one, yet I am wary of the need to monitor and truly need to find ones that will not require me to monitor.  I have a Facebook account but rarely use it, I fear, even though friends and family are frequently on it.  I prefer not to be open to the world; instead I am inclined to personalize my messages, inquire about specifics in folks' lives, tell each what I think s/he will be most interested in about my life. Twitter and Facebook are so public.  Right now I am not seeing how Twitter can help me too much, outside of possibly posting homework assignments.  I like how we had a little time to practice today, yet feel I still need more time to play and tweet, for instance.

In my personal life I can see using curation as a reserve for ideas, essentially.  When working on decisions for our new house my husband and I piled up ideas in Houzz, which is an interesting site.  I certainly like the idea of keeping the curation in the cloud, although if there is no internet I guess I'll just have to stare at the clouds or read a book (hooray!!) I've already started collecting ideas for a trip to Quebec in diigo.  Another tag in diigo will serve to help curate sites for our art trip to NYC. Prior to doing this it has been saved on a google doc, which works.

Pinterest has piqued my curiosity in the past and I welcomed working within the site.  I like how it is set up visually and think I could have students follow certain pages that I have created. In particular, my AP students could follow my AP pages and create their own.  I believe the curation concept would be great to teach to students, yet as with us this week, showing a few tools and letting students pick their own might be the best bet.  If they are more excited about their method of curation they might be more intent to make it work for them.

Tech Plan Ideas

6.19.13

THOUSANDS of photos.  That is what I end each year with.  This past summer, before my computer got re-imaged, we determined there was not enough space on my hard drive to hold all the images.  In an act of desperation and up against time, I put the folder of my images on the server, with a promise to remove them "soon!"  As I have not truly missed those photos this year, only occasionally wishing I had them at my fingertips, I think I can let them go.  However, I need a better system moving forward and determined yesterday that flickr might be an answer.  I need a place where I can not only store and view photos, but where students can do the same and also get copies of their images for their on-line portfolios.  I would like to be able to create folders and albums to separate my classes and the projects within each class.  Prior to this year, when I did not organize my photos outside iphoto for public view, I used iweb, which created a tidy way to show student work.

In my first uploading attempt yesterday I realized moving photos to flickr will take time (8+ minutes for first folder of 60 photos....) and will be best done when I am doing something else, not on the computer, at the same time.  I hope to be able to use another computer today to do more exploring of flickr's ability to catalog my photos.  I would also like to do a little looking around at what other art teachers are doing towards the same effort.

Additionally this morning/today, I would like to find out if art teacher peers around the state are also using things like feedly, diigo, and twitter (I am sure they are) as I believe I will find all three much more helpful if I know I might be able to combine resources with other passionate and like-minded teachers.  If I can figure this out today I can focus some searches that might help with class work next Fall.

If I finish everything on my list I would like to look at a way to gauge how much time I spent on each project so I can look at where I might be spending too much time and where I should shuffle projects.

EdCafe Takeaway

EdCafe Takeaway

Ramsey Musallam (Ted Talk)

creating questions and curiosity

student questions are the seeds of real learning

What the doctor said about his surgical confidence:

curiosity drove him to ask hard questions

he embraced and didn’t fear trial and error

intense reflection allowed him to grasp/gather knowledge he needed to learn and move forward

Musallam's realizations:

1. curiosity comes first
2. embrace the mess
3. practice reflection== what we do deserves our care, but it also deserves our revision

Angela Duckworth

motivational perspective: Duckworth and crew visited many groups of people to ask the question:

“who is successful here and why”

Those who succeeded had GRIT.

GRIT is passion and perseverance for long term goals, living life like it is a marathon not a sprint

How can we boost grit?  (not sure)

Grit is unrelated to measures of talent

Growth mindset (from Stamford): the ability to learn can change with effort. When kids learn about how the brain learns they tend to not give up as easily.

Grit is what my AP students need. Perhaps we need to try to teach grittiness to students by setting long-term goals, such as the AP Portfolios.  They know they need to get to the end.  Be more open about the strong possibility that there will be failures along the way, works that will not eventually go into their portfolios, on which they will spend time and energy and will have to “toss” to make room for the product of new learning.  This happens in Ceramics, too, when something breaks. Unfortunately, in a short class, when something breaks there isn’t always time to learn and re-do something better with the gained knowledge.

Model grittiness.

Inquiry/Question, Passions, Reflection, Grit: how do we incorporate all this into our classrooms

Try:

• Take the grade off a project or two.  Does doing this build in the scaffolding/tools of learning so that in a future project students utilize those skills during a future graded lesson.
• Create a “job” of summing up the learning of the day (stand on a stool and summarize)
• Model Grit.  Put up a sign with “next race:        “
• Show that video (on Grit) and ask them what they think it means.
• Educate parents on the power of Grit
• Ask students: What is your marathon?  How will you run it?
• Can still have criteria, even if not graded.
  
  
  Wouldn't it be great if all students had IEPs containing where they were at academically, socially, extracurricularly and where they were going/future plans? It could still be a fluid document, yet would have someone asking them what their plans were and how they were going to get there. Would that encourage grit? Maybe Advisors should do this during each Fall, meeting with advisees. I think this would be a great way to get to know my advisees better and I think I would be more invested in their progress in classes and outside of classes if I was more aware if each's "big picture." At this point I don't feel confident I know each of my advisees' big picture--and they are seniors!!!
  
  
  

Rita and Teens Ted Talks

Four key things I heard mentioned:
1. Every child needs a champion
2. Everyone needs human connections and relationships
3. The teen thinks students should be taught how to speak and think for themselves
4. Creativity is being sucked out of students as they become increasingly focused on the numbers needed to get into colleges.
5. Teen spoke about a teacher who was clearly passionate about his topic (economics) and could rattle off current things that he had read or watched that were related to the economic topic at hand.  Kids weren't going to be tested on the information, yet could feel his passion through his making the connections--it became more real, too.

I love the idea of bringing more real-world relevance to the concepts and topics I teach.  This could come in the form of more contemporary artists when we are looking at drawing styles, for instance.  There is an artist,  Tony Orrico, who creates his art by lying belly-down on a large piece of paper and creating amazing works by turning his body after drawing with his arms.  I have never shown his work to beginning art students, but wouldn't it be great to, then to try to do it ourselves?  I think I run up against my nemesis--time.  If I take the time to watch one of his videos and try his technique, what will I give up?  Is it worth giving something up if I am engaging the students more, inspiring them to pursue more art?  I think it might be worth a try!