Photoshop Fun!

Fusing Art and Technology by: Allison L. Downey

This article was about a group of students that participated in a project in one of their classes that involved them making art through photoshop. They would take a photo of themselves and then turn it into an Andy Warhol kind of portrait where they had four different scenes or colors to go with the exact same photo. After they finished with their photoshopped pictures, they displayed them as art at an Architectural Firm so people could see their artwork. The article explains how much the kids enjoyed doing their projects because they could be creative and design their Andy Warhol's however they wanted. The teacher also incorporated using the photoshop in other subject area's like science and had the students make alien pictures. I really liked this article because the title really just sums it up, fusing art and technology. I'll be the first person to admit that sometimes technology can be boring, especially for elementary students. But almost all kids like coloring or drawing. This article could be helpful for any teacher who is trying to get their students interested in technology or maybe for a child who enjoys computers and technology but doesn't really enjoy art that much. I think the best way for a child to express themselves is through the arts, whether it be dance, music, art, or whatever. But when you let a child do as they please in a photoshop program, there's bound to be great things happening.

Like I previously stated, this article could be used by any teacher who is having trouble with their students connecting technology and art and I will definitely be one of those teachers. Even without having been a teacher yet, everyone knows children and if you know a child well enough you know their strengths and their weaknesses. Some kids are good at math, while others are good at drawing, and others are good at being the class clown. So when you have students who aren't so good with computers or who just don't get how to use Microsoft Word, start them out by drawing or coloring. All kids know how to do that and then when you introduce photoshop to them and they feel comfortable enough navigating through the program then maybe other computer programs will become easier for them as well.

What's a Wordle?

Words in a Cloud by: Samantha Morra

This article is all about wordles. A wordle is a group of words that are put together to look like a cloud. The text that you put into the wordle is then calculated and the words that appear more in the text are bigger inside the wordle so you can see what words were used the most. You can also change the style of the wordle by using different colors of fonts to make it look more interesting. The teacher that wrote the article talks about using wordles in her classroom to show what different types of text were about without even having to read them. She used it for the Declaration of Independence and her students saw what words were frequently used. I thought this article was really cool because anybody could use it and I think everyone would enjoy using a wordle. The author also talked about letting her students use wordles when they wrote papers. They would create a wordle based on their papers and then use the wordle as their cover page to show people what their paper would be about by displaying the different words. I enjoyed this article so much that I decided to make one myself. I found out that you can type in your own text or use text from a url such as a blog! I made a few and it's a really cool technological tool!

I think that these ideas could definitely be incorporated into my future classroom. Just like how the author was explaining how she uses it in her classroom, I would want to do the same thing. When I have to teach a lesson that may seem boring or uninteresting, I could put that lecture into a wordle to show the students the basic themes or topics that would be presented and then maybe go from there. I would also want my students to use wordles in their own homework or in their papers to help them keep interested in whatever they were doing. Doing a wordle is such an easy thing for anybody to do and it's so fun that it can make any lesson so much better, and it's so simple!