M5 Wikispace Resources

Wikispaces are great tools for teachers to interact with students and parents in one online hub that "encourages collaboration and communication of ideas by having users contribute or modify content" (Roblyer & Doering, 2013, p.268). Using wikispaces also helps "facilitate students' understanding of ways to communicate using the internet," other than just email or Facebook (Roblyer & Doering, 2013, p.202). There are great resources online to help teachers create more helpful and engaging wikis.

A great start for creating a new class wiki is to find inspiration from a veteran teacher's wiki site. Miss Lee’s Art Classroom Webpage is a great example of a classroom wiki. Her site features assignments, announcements, a syllabus, and study guides, as well as a section for weekly Outstanding Art Students and a teacher bio. I really like the "Outstanding Art Student" page because it gives students a chance to shine, and even share their work with family and friends by sending them the link!

Here are a couple other wikis that would be helpful to teachers. They are not classroom sites, but rather sites for teachers to use as resources:

TeachArtWiki is a site for "collaboration for teaching and learning about art using wiki."

ArtInspired is a site of "visual art ideas and resources to inspire and motivate your lessons, artwork and art curriculum."

Podcasts are also a useful tool for teachers and students, especially since they can be subscribed to for easy download (Roblyer & Doering, 2013, p.224). Often they feature interviews or mirror a radio broadcast (Roblyer & Doering, 2013, p.224).

An interview with artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, as they discuss four decades of work including notable projects such as The Gates and Valley Curtain, would be a great addition to an art lesson on installations. It would also be a great prompt for a paper or research project for older students. It is always interesting to hear artists reflect on their own work. 

A National Gallery of Art Video Podcast on the Life of Gauguin would also be helpful when learning about Post-Impressionism. It is engaging because it features video and dramatic narration that would be interesting to young people. 

Additional Resource:

"12 Podcasts for the Creative Class" is an article that links to twelve intriguing and thought provoking podcast sites about the evolution of art and culture. 

Social Bookmarking Sites allow users to save sites as "bookmarks" and access them from any computer or device (Roblyer & Doering, 2013, p.218). This is especially helpful to teachers who can share their favorite sites with other educators. 

Christy Vance has posted a great webmix of Art for Kids on Symbaloo. I figure it’s a pretty good one because of all the hits she’d gotten in the past week. Her webmix of "fun, educational, and interactive art websites" spans from games to more educational activities. Many of these would be fun to add to a class wiki or even to utilize in class. 

Widgets are also great tools to add to websites. They add media that is easy to access and is usually visually appealing.  

Flickr is a great tool for sharing art images. It would be great to have the Flickr widget on a class blog or wiki featuring student work so that students and parents could view and share it. The Flickr feed I currently have posted on my blog features the official media feed of the Louvre. 

Scribd is a cool tool that allows for document sharing. Teachers can upload documents, such as a syllabus, that can be viewed within a window on the page, rather than adding files as attachments or that have to be opened in a new tab. The Scribd site also allows access to thousands of free materials, including novels, cookbooks, and art books. The media currently featured on my blog is a web version of a cool art book featuring the art of Petrichor.