Miss Smith's Dynamic Learning Blog

Content curation has evolved tremendously since the late '90s when every other website was titled "My Favorite Links"! It is amazing how many tools we have at our disposal to organize content. It is more important than ever that we are giving ourselves and our students places to organize relevant and important information. With so many curation tools we are lucky to be able to find something that suits our own individual needs. I love pinterest because it is so visual, but found that uploading from the web sometimes feels too public and a little clunky. For this assignment I tried LinkHub which I found to be quick and easy to curate, but there seems to be an issue with the way they pull images from the sites you link to. I haven't had to tool successfully pull an image on its own, and stopping to upload one separately is time consuming. The tool is still in beta so I sent some feedback to them and am hoping for an update soon! I loved the arguments made in the ...

I've used google forms in the past for many purposes, including student feedback and assignment submission. By going through this form-creation exercise I am getting excited about the possibility of using student feedback forms to shape the studio centers that my students will work in throughout the year. Working artists that share a studio would constantly be communicating with each other about personal and studio-based needs. I think that by asking the students to contribute, on a monthly basis, by giving feedback about what works in the studio will help to further the authentic experience that I am hoping my choice-based curriculum will give them as artists. In addition to helping me craft my classroom space and curriculum based on student need, using this feedback form will help me to keep track of inventory and address questions of students in a timely manner. I am hoping to replace one reflection period per month with a feedback form similar to this draft. Loading...

~*Cloud of Goals*~ Word clouds are something that I used to do with my students all the time. I'm not sure why I stopped other than I felt that it was getting overplayed when students started to make them in every class. I really enjoyed this activity and using word clouds to reflect some of my personal learning goals for the upcoming school year. In building a word cloud you are forced to sum up the goal in one or two carefully chosen words. Looking at my word cloud I can see by my chosen words what is of the most importance to me. I have been working this summer in building a choice-based art curriculum that focuses on the authentic artistic processes of the students. I can see that this is reflected here and that a huge piece of this is to continue to build and draw from the professional learning community that I became a part of after my participation in the NAEA conference last March.  I created this word cloud with Tagul on wordart.com . I chose this site because of ...

I love using short, student-friendly videos like this one to introduce the importance of taking care of your digital footprint. Today's students are fighting an uphill battle when it comes to protecting their image online. When they come to my classroom at 10-12 years old, typically a family member has already documented their every move on social media up to that point. Those potty-training pics might have been cute 10 years ago but for an adolescent, not so much. It is important that students recognize and understand that what they post, text, tweet, email, and comment on will follow them indefinitely. How Your Digital Footprint Can Hurt You       This article from the Huffington Post includes an awesome slide show of "7 Ways you might be Oversharing". Oversharing is a big problem for kids who are just starting to find their way on social media. Suddenly everyone can read and react to their opinions! I often see kids get themselves into uncomfortable situations b...

When searching for myself, the results were surprising in a different sort of way! https://docs.google.com/a/sandwich.k12.ma.us/document/d/1PgyJP4ifhWCvbtT14rQCcs8sFBGmMzkzdopt_6g8ToM/edit?usp=sharing

Teaching students (and parents) about online safety is as important as the "stranger danger" discussions we all had as children!  OnGuardOnline  &  NetSmartz  are two awesome resources to get the conversation started. Both sites have parent/teacher resources as well as kid-friendly pages. As informed adults we are better able to support our students as they navigate the web. Technology is constantly changing so it is important to stay up to date on the latest safety and security tips. These sites also cover a wide scope of tech devices including video games and social media. It's easy to take for granted that when we are feeling safe at home or school we have the entire world in our pockets, on our computers, or TV screens. Something that seems like its "made for kids", like apps and games, might be the very place where our kids are most at risk. Having the conversation about online security early and often creates a trusting relationship where kids and stu...

Got to play with one of my all time favorite resources for helping to build computational thinking with students: Code.org! This site uses engaging games with recognizable characters to hook kids in to using code to solve challenges. It is seriously addicting! Already getting excited for the Hour of Code this December :o)