Blog Assignment 5

This weeks lesson was about visual literacy and how the arts coincide with technology in this area. As an art educator this is very important to me because students often times don't stop to think about how elements are intentionally placed to add interest or get attention in ads, signs, or to draw a person to pockets of information.

I have briefly explored Glogster before and use Edmodo in the classroom frequently, but Prezi was something I have yet to use.  I had heard reviews from other teachers about how good it was and how students loved to use it for their own presentations, but had never really tried it myself, assuming it was a flashy PowerPoint.  I liked how you could really move in and around the Prezi and zoom into other areas of it rather than just click from slide to slide like PowerPoint. One of the things I really like about Edmodo is the ability to connect with parents. It has been my experience, however, that the parents you are able to connect with through such technologies are the parents that are already checking on their children frequently in school through other forms of communication anyway. Although Edmodo makes it more convenient to check in, I still wonder if it is convenient enough to get the parents who don't normally check in on what their children are doing to use.

In my classroom, we often work with the art elements and principles to create compositions, and I feel like I need to add a little more emphasis to technology and how these elements need to be considered to promote visual literacy on signs, web pages, ads, etc.