Mind Your
Mandalas!
Reflection and Summary
Mrs. Bewley's reflection
1. Public schools have so many filters and "safeguards" in place, so using technology to collaborate is a huge challenge. In Wilson, students have Google accounts and with those they may access other accounts within the district, but they do not have email access or access to others outside of the district. This creates a time-consuming process of setting things up to allow the students to communicate with the "scary outside world".
Philosophy differs on technology and students: Do we eschew most technology because the students already have their faces planted in front of a screen much of their lives? Do we embrace the technology and create students who are literate in the world of 0s and 1s, teaching them how to use technology responsibly? I flip-flop on this.
2. I originally paired up my students and gave them five minutes to write down everything they know about Mandalas. Well, they took about thirty seconds to tell me they knew little or nothing. Some of them guessed, and their responses include:
"tropical fruit (yellow)", "something to do with our project", "musical instrument", "you say it a lot", "nothing", "it has text", "collage". : )
3. Worthwhile activities take tiiiiiiime, and time is something that educators have precious little of. Sadly, much of our time is increasingly filled with state exams, common core, larger classes, and more baloney. Teachers should be encouraged to be innovative and creative, and time is the precious commodity that we desire and require. This project with Mrs. Fuller and her class has been challenging, exciting and fun -- and worth every single moment of time. In addition to the creativity aspects of this, the modeling of cooperation and problem solving demonstrated by Mrs. Fuller and myself is something valuable for the students to see. Worthwhile activities take time, but also patience and perseverance.
4. Students enjoyed this project immensely! The biggest struggle was using the online collaboration sites: Marqueed had a space limit and we ran out, then we switched to Mural.ly and some of my students were unable to access it (see Reflection #1 above).
5. Mural.ly vs. Marqueed, in my limited experience: Marqueed's interface seemed more familiar, and it appears more organized. Mural.ly has a more "lively" interface that was very free-flowing but also seemed a little disorganized to me.
6. Finally relented and posted student work on a page formatted as a blog so that comments can be posted AND my students have access without signing up for anything. I am looking forward to doing this project again but with less access issues for my kiddies.
7. In their final reflections my students expressed the idea that traditional art media is more challenging to work with than digital, and part of me bristled a bit when I heard it. I wonder if they had responded to that question in October (when they were just beginning to feel somewhat comfortable with the beast Photoshop) they would have responded the same way? I think they have forgotten the challenges?? Or possibly they are just generally more comfortable with learning things on a computer and less so using traditional media.
Mrs. Fuller's reflection
First things first...
THANK YOU to Mrs. Bewley and her students for being game, jumping in with both feet, and being willing to see where this play with technology would take us. You all are great!
THANK YOU to my students in Ionia for trusting me to try new things, play, and experiment. You are always open to whatever I want to do! I appreciate you all!
Thank you to Dr. Kupperman. You are a most excellent guru and one of the most patient and kind people I've met. You rock and set a great example for me!
Fuller Reflection
This is actually the second project I did for the UM-Flint 660 Enactment course. The first project I did was supposed to be enacted first in South Africa then in China. It didn't happen. Luckily, Mrs. Bewley was game and agreed to be my partner on short notice.
I still wanted to do a distance classroom enactment, and my friend Mrs. Bewley, a fellow visual arts instructor, and her class was a great fit.
beginnings
Mrs. Bewley and I started talking about our collaboration via Facebook. We moved to email then a cell phone call. We quickly brainstormed about our content and came up with the idea of doing mandalas in traditional media at Ionia and in digital media at Wilson. We decided to use Skype to meet as larger groups and Marqueed as our collaboration site for uploading images, commenting, and doing group questions.
byod and no byod
Ionia has had a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policy in place for about a year. Our district actually used a model created by Herb Wansitler, a fellow UM-Flint Ed Techie, because I was about a year into the Ed Tech program when our district decided to go BYOD. I told them that Herb had shared his district's policy with me and they were happy to have it as a model. (Thanks again, Herb!) Ionia's students are allowed to bring personal digital devices to school and use the school's wireless. They are still monitored and filtered through the district, but devices are commonplace within many classrooms today. Individual teachers still have discretion about when or if the devices can be used within the classroom.
The tech directors at Ionia High School got tired of my asking them to unblock sites and to give me access to whatever I needed to better facilitate the learning of my students so they finally gave up and gave me access to most anything I ask for about a year ago. Other teachers were asking constantly for sites like YouTube, so we all have free access to YouTube now.
On the last day of the Ionia student's official participation our district's filter blocked us from viewing or commenting on Mrs. Bewley's getworking.weebly.com worksite! Ionia students couldn't see the digital work of the Wilson students nor could they comment. I made a tech ticket and our tech director quickly unblocked both sites so the Ionia students could access, post, and comment by the next day. The tech director said that the filter was "being naughty" for a day or so. He worked quickly to get us back to where we wanted to be.
Wilson Central is much more protective of their students with regard to the Internet. It is more of a challenge for Mrs. Bewley and her students to do collaborative work outside of their closed system. For example, we originally planned to share documents on Google Drive, but her students can't access outside sharing. Mrs. Bewley had to do lots of the labor and arranging in order for her students to be able to create accounts on Marqueed.
byod conclusion
Mrs. Bewley and I went into the project willing to learn and ready to find creative solutions to inevitable challenges. We both learned and were able to adapt--as busy as we both were!