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Expanding into the Digital World |
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Photography instructor Mary Ann McQuillan took a one-week intensive course at the Maine Media Workshops in Rockport, Maine exploring the multimedia applications of Photoshop and Final Cut Pro for Photographers. The course was designed for photographers interested in creating multimedia content, which means producing works that integrate photographs, voiceover and video to tell stories. “This was a hands-on, technical course that covered system setup, media management, and video standards, “says McQuillan. “We also talked about the aesthetics of editing still images and understanding how timing, pacing, and transitions affect the emotional impact of a story. I have already begun to apply what I learned in this course to my work with my Photo II students as we are preparing a multimedia slideshow of our recent field trip to the Raynham Greyhound Dog racing track. With the explosion of photographically-based media for the Web, this course was very forward looking in terms of teaching the tools to prepare photographers to show their work in expanding venues and for students to think about applications of photo essays on the Web.”
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Improving Skills in Ceramics |
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Visual Arts teacher Lindsey Schubart attended a ceramics wheel throwing course at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Lindsey says the class, “Enhanced my knowledge of ceramic wheel throwing and glazing techniques. I learned to throw bowels, mugs, shaped pots, and lidded containers. I also learned hw to glaze on the wheel and to apply clay slip, paper resists, and high fire glaze techniques. I improved my overall understanding of the electric pottery wheel, construction methods in clay, and glazing approaches.”
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Embracing Lessons of Gaming |
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Upper School social studies teacher Karl Neumann attended “Games and Society,” a one-day Teachers as Scholars seminar that focused on how video gaming can incorporate many of the same individual and social learning skills found in traditional learning environments. The day began with “the observation that many young people will persist whole-heartedly in learning to overcome the mental challenges present in the voluntary exploration of a video game, but will demonstrate relatively less persistence when they perceive the learning task to be mandatory and less stimulating than the digital environments they have experienced elsewhere,” explains Neumann. The seminar participants had a chance to play examples of typical collaborative and competitive video games with the Nintendo Wii gaming platform. “Participants were asked to reflect on their gaming experience and what they observed in the collective gaming environment as it applied to the concepts introduced in the previous discussion,” says Neumann. “The program continued with an examination of the presenter’s view of the ‘Four Freedoms of Learning’ that should be embodied in educationally valid gaming experiences. These four principles were then discussed in relation to a new on-line math game called Labyrinth, introduced by the speaker at the end of the program. Observing this model provided the participants with ideas as to how to apply some “play” principles to the lessons and activities they currently use in the classroom.”
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