Pinterest

When I was introduced to Pinterest for the first time on the course it was easily the one bit of new ICT I had seen that I immediately thought could really bring something to my specific subject and the format in which is is mainly taught. I could see how personally i could use it to organise my different kinds of work from digital to analogue, design, research and through to presentation, fabrication and evaluation. What I really liked about it was it's format and physical layout. In particular the ability to organise everything with pictorial headings which for me gives me almost infant recall and recognition of what I'm looking in comparison to something like Moodle which for me, wether its to do with some aspect of my dyslexia some other element of my mind that doesn't compute it well, just looks like noise. Endless lists of things that look slightly different from each other. Navigating it at all literally makes me want to smash my computer up. So I felt there were legs in this Pinterest. The only drawback from me was that this isn't just an organisation and presentation tool. I don't like the fact it's as far as iI understand it all open to the public. I can see how that could be good for some people. But for myself it would stop me using it in the way I would like to as I don't want all of my best unused or incomplete art and design work to be in a public forum where it can be pinched. with regard to using it in the sense it's meant to be used this wouldn't really happen in my current placement. There are absolutely no interactive white boards and though I could connect my laptop to the large monitor we have on the wall and sit at a desk looking at the wall whilst controlling it through the laptop for some sort of presentation it couldn't be used in the way in which I'm mainly used to seeing educators using it. if i needed show slides and talk about them to the class I would rather use a slideshow on my laptop using the remote control which would allow me to move around and point at places on the screen and importantly i feel make a better connection with the students.

https://uk.pinterest.com

Some of my examples of my positive use of ICT whilst on my placement:

I used both Photoshop and Illustrator in the making of my exercise handouts for the teaching of this software. I also used the snipping tool to create the screen grabs and screen shots. This was new to me as I have only worked with macs for years however for my placement I had to familiarise myself and work with the Windows OS, which took a little getting used to.

I was able to introduce the some new ICT into the module I was teaching such as requiring the students to hand their work in digitally on a flash drive. Until last year you had to print it all out, as I had had to, and stick it in sketchbook. This both cost a lot and seemed counterintuitive to the concept of working digitally. This also made it easier to mark as the work could be seen as it was designed plus everything including all their additional workings could be easily submitted and taken in to account as well as not being effected by the issues of bad printing.

I suggested they use PowerPoint as a means to hand in a series of images in a specific running order that could be viewed easily for assessment. They weren’t required to submit it in a formal PowerPoint style presentation but as they were not very computer literate at this point it seemed like an acceptable option. I intend to continue to investigate some other ways they could submit their digital work. Obviously they could use applications such as Pinterest etc. but as this was the first significant experiment with using this digital method I didn’t want to overload them with demands to get their heads around programs they don’t know or haven’t heard of and can be resistant to. I felt a softly softly approach would be better to get them on board.

When I do a similar program with the first year next term, as they are a little younger and more confident I think I will be able to be a little more adventurous with the ICT. As it was the group this term though initially slightly resistant and out of their comfort zone initially they all did well with some particular surprises. The conclusion I came to, was that they were very capable they just needed to be introduced to the software and encouraged in a certain way.

Another positive use was the fact that this past term I was unable to interact with Moodle as I should be able to next term. As such I couldn’t provide digital copies of the handouts to the students as I wished to so as a workaround I used Wetransfer.com to send the files to the students. This was great as unlike Dropbox there is no registering, It is very quick and in the free version you can send up to 10GB each time. This meant I didn’t have to compress the files and when I needed to could easily send large Photoshop files that had numerous layers for specific exercises.

In addition to this I set up a specific email account just for this lesson where the pupils could communicate with me as required. I feel the introduction of these ICT methods proved invaluable.