Lightening the Load of Carrying Textbooks

Photo courtesy of Shena Macdonald

USING GOOGLE DRIVE TO HOST LEARNING CONTENT

Over the years Mrs Moore has built many wonderful powerpoints that were saved on our school server and as I mentioned previously we would have days when we couldn’t access our material, so we began using Slideboom to host Powerpoints. This meant that when the server was misbehaving we could teach off the internet. It also meant learners could view class PPTS (powerpoints at home). However Slideboom does not have a edit function so we were delighted with the Google Presentation functions on Drive. Uploading PPTS to Google Drive allows you to convert them to Google Presentations which can be edited online and shared with learners. Learners can also make copies of the presentations which they can edit and add to. There is also the comment function on Google presentations which facilitates online discussions. Enabling learners to access learning material at home assists them with studying for exams.  Sharing content online, also allowed us to share colour resources with the learners as well as provide links to research articles that we felt would broaden their understanding of the visual art syllabus.


Thus our Google Presentations function as digital textbooks. The immediacy of producing online content means that we can create content on current events, but I will write more about that in another post. 

So the first step to enabling learners to access online content is to place it your Google Drive Cupboard. You can do this by uploading existing content from your computer onto Google Drive.

Link to Tutorial on Uploading Presentations

Remember that the file size needs to be small so that content loads faster online. One way to reduce file size is to compress images or break a large powerpoint into smaller sections.

 Link to Tutorial on compressing images on Powerpoint 

You can also generate content online by creating new documents in Google Drive.

Link to Tutorial on creating Google Presentations

 Link to Tutorial on adding content to Google Presentations

The next step is sharing the content with the learners.

 Link to Tutorial on sharing settings on Google Presentations 

And finally how would you like the learners to access your content?

We like to use a blog to host the links, so the next few posts will be about that and I will add some links here once they are done.

Link to PPT on creating links in Blog Post

Early Discoveries: Online Discussions using Blogger Comments

During 2012 and 2013 we (Neith Moore and Shelanna Sturgess, visual arts educators at Durban Girls high School) began posting  briefs and links online and testing various hand in formats.  We wanted the learners to interact with our blogs so we experimented with using the comment function on Blogger to create online discussions.  

This photo by Carey-Anne Dooley captures my mom laughing as she engages with an Indian lady on a bus in Jaipur. It brings back many happy memories of our India travels and reminds me how important is to engage with people around you which is something we have tried to increase in our visual arts classrooms. Sometimes it is online conversation and other times it is in the here and now.

Link to Project using Comments

How our journey into online learning began

Photo Courtesy of Shena Macdonald 

Sometimes the best journeys in life are the unexpected ones- the little pit stop you had at quaint coffee shop because a monkey stole your padkos or the magnificent storm sky that broke open a landscape while you sheltered under a bridge.  Our experience of blended learning feels something like that.  It was something we (Neith Moore and I) had heard  about and were vaguely considering but most of the discoveries feel like we stumbled upon them and were surprised by the view.  

In 2011 Moore was invited to a Microsoft presentation and they happened to mention Skydrive. Our school server was giving a lot of trouble at the time so we started saving things online.  In that same year Moore also built a website (theopenstudio.co.za)  as part of a web design short course she was doing through UNISA (University of South Africa). 

Thus in Term 3 2011 we taught the Grade 10 Jewellery project off the website and the learners seemed to enjoy the concept of accessing work online. However Moore found that it was complex to alter projects on the website so she decided to try a blog at the end of 2011.  I had thoroughly enjoyed handing in my assignments online at DUT and Moore was encouraging me to create a blog so I created my first online teaching experiment at the beginning of 2012. 

Moore and I decided that it would be better to each have our own online classrooms as we each have slightly different styles and often work on different projects to facilitate sharing of physical resources within the Fine Art Department.