flickr photo shared by Runar Pedersen Holkestad under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license
Welcome back,
After an enjoyable winter break it has been great to get back into the classroom and get hands on with the children again. I have been looking at allowing my children to use more inquiry methods while learning and it has led to some interesting lessons, including an attempt to plan a journey from London to Dubai using planes, trains and buses! i think most of the children are still stranded between Stratford and Heathrow but they’ll find there way eventually!
I am really interested in the topic of this course because I feel like it is going to be very challenging for me. I quite like finding the right picture to inspire a lesson but when it comes to that eye for design (as well as patience) that you need to create a visually engaging PowerPoint or blog is not something that comes naturally to me. Just ask my art teacher from my school days, an eye for colour I do not have!!
I began this week looking at some of the websites that Rebekah shared. They were excellent resources that you could see could have instant use for lessons in the classroom whether as morning work when they arrive “What is happening in this picture?” “How do you think the person in this picture feels?” or as the basis for a series of storytelling lesson in literacy by providing the children with a setting/character/object which they must base their story around. Also some of the more powerful images can provide great thought provokers during social studies lessons. I particaularly loved the Flying Japanes Girl (a comic book title in itself) and the Big Picture I am a real believer in the power of an image or video especially to begin the flow of writing ideas or discussion. Two other websites that I frequently use for these kind of images are 360 cities and anything from the Literacy Shed (have linked to the inspiration shed section because when do we not need a little inspiration!!) which has tons of writing ideas generally based on an image or video.
As a bit of a Star Wars geek, I obviously dived straight into George Lucas’ thoughts on the education system. Some of the points were very valid especially when it comes to teaching children “communication in all of its forms”. The focus can too frequently be on writing and speaking but we need to also help children to realise that they can communicate in a number of ways, either in video, picture, music, dance or with the help of some graphic design. I also liked the idea of a communication cycle with Math at one end that focuses on the logical side and music and art at the other end of the scale is an interesting thought. I had never really considered math as a means of communication but I suppose it is and for some children it is there best way of communicating. I will be using the Universal Arts of Graphic Design video as a starter in futures lessons as I think it is a great field to make children aware of and thinking about at an early age.
Finally I looked at the visual hierarchy article before reviewing my own blog site. My first thought was how I never really look at my blog from a visitors perspective and it was a good exercise to examine it with the visitor in mind. I was actually pretty happy with how my blog looked and made some minor changes. I swapped the “About me” section with the home section as I want people who come to my blog to visit this section and I think it is in a slightly more prominent position. I changed the name of my blog to make it clearer as I feel it was getting lost in the symbols and also added course sections to make it easier to navigate. i also tidied up my catergorisation and tagging of posts to help with the navigation. I was hoping to find a way to display the comments section more prominently as I feel that is important to the blogging conversation but I couldn’t find a layout did that without affecting the overall look of the page. I willl continued to play around with different themes to see if I can find one that works. Anyway here are my before and after pictures and any tips are much appreciated.
Before
After
Cheers
Paul