The first thing I have learned in this course is that everyone is a maker. Being a maker does not mean you have invented a revolutionary product that makes you a lot of money. This is what I previously associated makers with. I am looking forward to these field activities to develop and reinforce my abilities as a maker. This brings me to my reflections and documentation for field activity #2 where I will discuss and provide evidence of my history as a maker.
I am definitely experienced with the more artistic side of making. I grew up as a dancer and throughout my high school days contributed to choreographing routines for the school dance teams (I wish I still had the videos). I also really enjoyed fashion and took up sewing classes at Fabricland all throughout elementary school which is something I hope to take up again, starting with patterns and hopefully developing the ability to design my own clothing. I have always felt engaged when making food as well and as we have discussed in class am able to easily "hack" recipes (although I am still mastering my parents pasta sauce).
Recently I have acquired a liking for painting and I wanted to learn more about different mediums and techniques, so I bought some materials, watercolour paint and thick paper and started a portfolio. I used various paint techniques such as blending, using crayons for resistance painting, using ink to create an skeleton of an image with watercolour paint. I will continue working with watercolour and hopefully explore other mediums like acrylic paint.
Reflecting on some of the various artistic making I have done I have realized a few things:
1) You have to start somewhere: I do not think I am really in the innovative stages of making yet. I am learning what I need to do (like paint techniques) in order to achieve the images I wish to create.
2) Maker space makes all the difference: I like to spread my materials out when working. Thus my tiny little desk in my room just did not suffice compared to my harvest kitchen table.
3) Questioning is a big part of the making process: While learning to paint I was questioning and trying different paint blends, and asking things like "what happens if I add more water?" or " what happens if I draw the image with water first then add pigment?". By trying and questioning things during making you are able to have "AH HA: moments, like how I was able to make more crisp lines when painting with just water and adding pigment after.
4) Critically Make: It is important to remain positive and look at things that you make in critical way so you can improve. This does not mean loosing the fun in what you are making but at some point you have to look at your creations and say okay what is next?.... and how can I make this better?
I look forward to working more with technology to expand so I can use my skills of both art and technology to educate and inspire creativity in my students.
Exploring the Virtual Makerspace FA#1-Scratch
For the Makerspace exploration activity I chose to explore the virtual space Scratch. I have heard about it's use in this M.Ed program before and never thought about checking it out until now. Scratch is a website designed by MIT Media Lab to teach people, mainly students between ages 8 and 16, about programming and coding. I was particularly interested in the ScratchEd site in which caters to education by allowing teachers to make class accounts for students to share their projects within. There is even a Scratch curriculum guide that helps teachers introduce the program to their students. Students can learn how to program animated characters, games, interactive stories using the coding widgets provided by Scratch. This would be an ideal tool for teachers to use for curriculum and technology integration as it was designed with getting young students to develop skills in problem solving and creativity. The site is being used in 150 countries and is available to individuals in 40 languages. A challenge that I found with scratch is learning initially how to use it. I have never used scratch before and had no clue where to start. This would mean explicit instruction would have to be given to students before using this in the classroom and it might take time to learn the program. To start off I developed my first animation by watching tutorials and asking people who are more familiar with the program to show me how it works. I look forward to playing around with Scratch and will make future posts of my projects.
Below is the file that can be downloaded of my first Scratch Animation.
Here is the link
https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/97649490/
Below is the file that can be downloaded of my first Scratch Animation.
Here is the link
https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/97649490/
dancing_boy_1.sb2 |