Munson final thesis creating an educational network

Creating an Educational Network: Using Current Technology and the Arts to Connect with High School Students Dana Jung Munson In partial completion towards A Masters Degree in Curriculum and Instruction, Creative Arts in Learning, Lesley University School of Education Abstract The US students of today are inundated with technology; from iPods to Facebook, they have technology at their fingertips. Teachers today need to learn how to harness one of the greatest technology platforms available, social media. Understanding that play is the center of the social media platform and that play is what appeals to their students is the key to creating an educational social network that will fit the needs of teachers and students. By developing an educational social network that is based the arts – drama, storytelling, visual arts, and music - teachers and students will be able to connect to learning in a new and innovative approach that will make life-long learners. The problems with creating an educational social network are (1) creating a teacher-monitored environment so schools will not block the network, (2) using a good assessment tool that will help teachers evaluate their students’ performance online, (3) developing the proper software that will hold the students’ attention, and (4) encouraging teachers to take advantage of this unique educational tool. By creating an online educational social network that addresses these problems, I hope to create the synthesis of science and the arts that will help the students of today become life-long learners. Table of Contents TOC quot;
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Abstract PAGEREF _Toc155199007 iiTable of Contents PAGEREF _Toc155199008 iiiIntroduction and Rationale PAGEREF _Toc155199009 1Description of Project PAGEREF _Toc155199010 14Implementation Plan PAGEREF _Toc155199011 19Sustainability Sources PAGEREF _Toc155199012 22Evaluation PAGEREF _Toc155199013 23Conclusion PAGEREF _Toc155199014 26Appendix 1 PAGEREF _Toc155199015 29Appendix 2 PAGEREF _Toc155199016 30Appendix 3 PAGEREF _Toc155199017 31Appendix 4 PAGEREF _Toc155199018 32Appendix 5 PAGEREF _Toc155199019 33Annotated Bibliography PAGEREF _Toc155199020 34 Introduction and Rationale Using technology both inside and outside of the classroom can be fun and interesting for students and yet difficult and time-consuming for teachers. Students of the twenty-first century have grown up living with a virtual world of information at their fingertips. US students today are not been bound by the flat pages of a book and are attracted to every digital device that conveys even the smallest scrap of information as long as these devices provide some entertainment value. From iPods to Facebook, US students are bombarded by technology everyday. Their lives are immersed in virtual communities. Unlike our students who have adapted to the fast changes in technology, teachers have not always found the best uses for the newest and most innovative technologies CITATION Ber10 1033 (Bernard, 2010). One of the fastest growing technologies in the US culture today is social networking, and more specifically Facebook usage (Facebook, 2010). In order to tap into the potential for reaching students through social networking, US teachers today need to understand how the social network platform works, and how a teacher can create an online learning community that can encourage students to learn as they “play” on an educational social network that is developed through the arts. According to Facebook’s press page in December of 2010, there are more than 500 million active users and over 50% of the active users log onto Facebook on any given day. Finding specific statistics on social media usage of teens in the US is not so simple. There are many sites that offer unsubstantiated facts about teen usage, but few with specifics. In 2009 the Nielsen Company published a report on the use of media by US teenagers. According to their data of the teenagers polled, over half of US teens use Facebook. Of these teenagers, 67% updated their pages at least once a week. These teenagers used Facebook to gossip, to share photos, a source of current information, and for adviceCITATION Nie10 7 1033 (Nielsen Company, p. 7). Though the Nielsen survey provides some hard facts on teenage use of social media, it is now almost two years out of date. For most data this would seem current, but social media changes everyday and as these platforms adapt and grow so does the teenage use of this media. -1771653180080Figure 2. Age students began using Facebook.Figure 2. Age students began using Facebook.32518354665980Figure 3. Hours spent a day on Facebook.Figure 3. Hours spent a day on Facebook.31946851008380Figure 1. Number of friends reportedFigure 1. Number of friends reportedIn order to get current data, I informally polled 132 of my own students about their social media usage in December 2010 at Riverwood International Charter School. Of the 132 students polled, 89% used a social network and 83% of those students specifically used Facebook. These students were also asked to guess how many friends they currently had on Facebook. Of the 132 participants, there were a total of 71, 033 friends with an average of 538 friends per students (Figure 1). Since all Facebook users must be 13 years old to join CITATION Fac10 1033 (Facebook), of the students polled most students joined Facebook at age 13, while many joined as early as age 9 (Figure 2). These students were also asked to guess at the average amount of time spent on Facebook during a day. The result was an average of 1.83 hours a day spent on social networking (Figure 3). These students were also asked to rank their favorite activities online. While updating their statuses on their profile pages was one of their most favorite activities, they also enjoy sharing photos and playing games on the social network. The most glaring detail this informal survey shows is that students have begun at an early age to use social media and will continue to adapt to the virtual environment as a part of their daily lives. Overall, it is perplexing to imagine that teachers are missing an opportunity to capture the attention of their students for at least 1.83 hours a day. The problem that teachers face is how to use the spirit of the social network to their advantage. If the playfulness of the social network can be tapped into and used academically then the students can learn in an environment where they will take an active part in their learning and not just merely connect with friends. Within my own school district, all social networks are banned including Facebook, MySpace, and even small online communities like Ning.com. There are many reasons why school districts block these sites, but mainly it is so that the students will not “waste” time playing instead of learning and will not participate in cyber-bullying CITATION Ray10 1033 (Ray, 2010). According to a June 2010 CNN report on the PTA and Facebook trying to make online activity safe for students, parents are most concerned about bullying within the online networks and with the weakening of literacy skillsCITATION Gro10 1033 (Gross, 2010). The PTA feels that without parent or teacher monitoring, the youth of today are in danger of deciding on his or her own ethics, social norms, and basic civil behaviors, cyber bullying or stalking. Understandably there are problems with teenagers using social networks where they can play in an unmonitored virtual world, but it is their preferred way to build communities. Teachers today must decide to either ignore sites like Facebook, or use them to our advantage. The problem is that teachers must be able to balance a meaningful and educational use of social media while keeping the students interested. Teacher use of technology today varies in many degrees from simple blogs (Figure 4.) to interactive sites, but there are no accepted guidelines on how to make an educational site entertaining, factual, and safe. According to EduDemic.org, a site for connecting higher -1771652540Figure 4. Class blog site, December 23, 2010.Figure 4. Class blog site, December 23, 2010.education and social media, there are 8 ways a teacher should use Facebook: (1) to share presentations and notes with students; (2) to answer questions from students while they are doing homework; (3) to “humanize” yourself with your students; (4) to share photos of what students have been doing in your classroom; (5) to find other teachers and exchange ideas, best practices, gossip; (6) share as much information as is ethically possible; (7) to join and actively participate in educational groups; and (8) to use it a teaching tool, but not a way to avoid teachingCITATION Edu10 1033 (Edudemic.org, 2010). All of these eight ways to use social media can be done through blogging and are not original enough to be more than an extension of the everyday classroom. My own class blog addresses all these ideas (Figure 4) and I have limited visitation for my blog. My students tell me it is just like their class and doesn’t allow for any interaction, so they don’t bother with accessing it. Social media is a good way to empower students and is not used to its full potentialCITATION Mar10 1033 (Marcinek, 2010). To be able to truly realize the full potential of an educational social media site, educators need to first understand what a social media site is. The common definition of a social network is a social structure where individuals are connected by common interests and can communicate freely. On social networks, people build small communities that can interact with each other or within other larger communities. From uploading photos to playing games, these social networks have become virtual worlds for meeting, sometimes working, but mostly for play. Through the Facebook format, each user has a personal profile page with some ability to change its layout to suit each user’s needs or interests. An educational network needs to be able to have the same functionality so each student will feel more empowered as an individual within a larger learning community. Facebook offers users the ability to make common interest group pages and helps users foster a sense of community online through the ability to post personal photos and videos to share with a group of friends. Facebook also uses free community games that encourage cooperation and collaboration for each of the game participants. An educational social network would need to have the capability of building learning communities in a playful way that could collaborate with other learning communities through photo and video sharing and through online community games. Building an educational site that mimics Facebook but empowers the students to learn is the key to making a successful use of the social media platform. The playful spirit of the social networks is one of the reasons social networks are blocked throughout the schools in the US CITATION Ray10 1033 (Ray, 2010). Most school districts believe students will only want to play and not complete their work. By creating an educational social media site that schools could feel safe in allowing student-access to is the key. Teachers would need to be the guides and monitors for this type of site. In other words, instead of creating a virtual classroom, teachers would be group administrators and monitor the students for inappropriate behaviors as the students learn through “playing” within learning communities on the educational social site. Creating the right educational social network is the key to creating a learning environment of the future. “The challenge for our education system is to leverage technology to create relevant learning experiences that mirror students' daily lives and the reality of their futures”CITATION USD10 8 1033 (U.S. Department of Education, 2010, p. 8). Teachers of today need to use current technology, but also to be able to get their students involved and hold their attention, if not, teachers will only be creating a boring virtual classroom. One of the best ways to engage students within the traditional classroom is through the arts. For decades the arts have offered a way for educators to actively engage students in their own problem solving and not merely present them with facts or theoremsCITATION Fow94 5 1033 (Fowler, 1994, p. 5). By integrating the arts with other subjects on the educational social network, the students will feel learning is more fun and be more actively motivated to participateCITATION Wra09 93 1033 (Wraga, 2009, p. 93). In order to create a social network that will be as successful at capturing the attention of US students as Facebook has been, an educational social network needs to employ the spirit of play while integrating the arts, such as drama, storytelling, visual arts, and music. Employing drama into classroom assignments provides teachers with opportunities for building communities and engaging students to learn through empathyCITATION Wil98 24 1033 (Wilhelm & Edmiston, 1998, p. 24). Drama helps to take teachers beyond the traditional teacher–student relationships encouraging a sense of play while learningCITATION Sch061 8 1033 (Schneider, Crumpler, & Rogers, 2006, p. 8). Drama is a perfect tool for an educational social network and makes for a framework of play necessary to capture and hold the attention of students online. One of the greatest lures of an online community is that users have the ability to develop alternate personalities and can then imagine different worlds for themselves. This is the best way an educational social network can provide the structure for learning about history, literature, art, music, and science in a new and different way that will appeal to a modern teenager. If students can learn about history by imagining a different life, then figures from throughout history can come to life in cyberspace. Wilhelm & Edmiston (1998) assert that imagining and becoming another person (as one would on the online social network) creates deeper learning in multiple contexts, through reflection, and by implementation and use of new understandings beyond merely writing an essay or research paper. Drama online can be just as engaging as drama in the classroom, and for today’s students it will seem even more in step with their popular technology trends and even more alluring. Literature students who are studying Hamlet could be required by their teacher to join an online Hamlet group. Each student could be assigned a character from the play to become. The teacher could create discussion board questions that would require interaction between the characters. The students would answer in character and could reflect on different outcomes for the characters. By creating an online world for the students to play as characters from Hamlet, it would encourage a deeper understanding of difficult materialCITATION Wil98 129 1033 (Wilhelm & Edmiston, 1998, p. 129). According to Charles Fowler in his article Strong arts, Strong schools, the best way for students to learn is for them to study first handCITATION Fow94 4 1033 (1994, p. 4), in other words to be as much into the world of study as possible, and by creating the world of the play online each student would be participating within a virtual world of Hamlet.In the spring of 2010, I created a small online community for my Drawing and Painting students where my students became famous artists online. Each student had to learn about a famous artist and to “talk” online in the voice of the artist. I developed research and discussion questions for the students to answer and incorporated responses to other students into the assignments. As they learn about their own artist, they are also learning about each other’s research (Hetland, 2007, p. 79). In order to make the site more playful, I had a performing dramatic artist visit my students to help them get into character. These drama techniques offered a way for the students to act outside of their everyday roles (Wilhelm, 1998, p. xxi). As the students imagined another personality outside of their own reality and had the opportunity to play as this personality online, I had created new learning opportunities that created a deeper understanding of art and history for my Drawing and Painting students. I believe one of the best uses for an educational social network is to create virtual communities based on historical, contemporary, and literature figures. Students can use drama techniques to help each student to take on the personality of a historical figure. Researching a historical figure, time, or literature character is a usual classroom assignment, but by taking the assignment to an online learning community where the students become personalities from history, then the students will deepen what they learn and the knowledge will more personal. By adopting a new personality from history, not only will the students be able to fulfill curriculum requirements in a new way, but will also have the means for carrying over the knowledge for the future. Using modern technology to help students connect to their own learning, to each other, and beyond their everyday classroom can lead to life-long learningCITATION USD10 8 1033 (U.S. Department of Education, 2010, p. 8). Not only can an online social network develop through drama, but also through the art of storytelling. One of the more interesting outcomes of my own social network last year was my Drawing and Painting students learned how to tell the story of an artist instead of making a report to cite facts. As the students created their artist personalities they had to learn how to tell stories about their artist. The students had to research their artist and find the facts that were most important, and then how to make them interesting online. By creating stories of their artist-personality online, they not only learned more about the artist, but how to evaluate outside information sources and reflect on how to make the information more engagingCITATION Nat94 125 1033 (National Storytelling Association, 1994, p. 125). My students had to learn how to tell a convincing story through their online personalities creating a deeper, more comprehensive knowledgeCITATION Nat94 116 1033 (National Storytelling Association, 1994, p. 116). At the beginning of our social network, the students would post about their artists and the postings were monotone and sounded like they were just repeating facts from other sources, but as the students began to evaluate facts and to talk in the voice of the artists online, they began to tell more personal accounts of the artists and were using compelling storytelling techniques. An educational social network can take storytelling further by allowing for video retelling of historical events. In social studies students are required to learn about events, dates, and persons from the past, but if they were to join an online American Revolutionary War community in order to tell stories through video, they would be more motivated to learnCITATION Nat94 125 1033 (National Storytelling Association, 1994, p. 125). Social studies students could develop short videos to upload to their online community based on personal accounts of the Revolutionary War. With an established educational social network, students studying the Revolutionary War could connect with other classes throughout the US and exchange their videos while learning from each other. The teachers would monitor each video for content and could even have open discussions online about whether the student told the story accurately giving other students the ability to evaluate each other. 38233351169035Figure 5. The Death of Marat by Jacques-Louis David. 1793. Oil on canvas, 65quot;
x 50 3/8quot;
. Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts at Brussels.Figure 5. The Death of Marat by Jacques-Louis David. 1793. Oil on canvas, 65quot;
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. Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts at Brussels.Throughout history, images have given us a window into the past. The visual arts for centuries before the camera was invented supplied the world with visual references of the past. Throughout the ages, artists have drawn the content of their art from the entire world of knowledge CITATION Uns99 1033 (Unsworth, 1999). Visual artists have been the historians for decades. If visual art students were researching an artwork like the Death of Marat by Jacques-Louis David (Figure 5), students could not only learn about the Neo-Classicism art style of David, but also the history of the painting and what led David to paint this masterpiece. Students could post their work to a common photo gallery and leave information on the painting for other students to learn from. Learning not only about the artist who created a famous artwork but the forces that impelled the artist to create are both integral parts of the national standards for the visual arts and art history (Kennedy Center, 2010). By being able to place this work in a photo gallery online on the educational network, each student who posts will be able to have a more personal connection with the work and its history. Creating a full complement of works of art throughout history could become an online competition at the same time it gives students more learning opportunities. Just as visual arts have recorded history visually so has music been the auditory recording of centuries prior to recording devices. By playing music from Beethoven and Bach, students can hear the sounds of the time of the artists who created them. Musical students can record their own recordings of the music and could have a place online to share their talent as well as their research of the music. By performing their own versions of famous musical scores, students will have a deeper understanding of the “passion and excitement of the times”CITATION Pag95 45 1033 (Page, 1995, p. 45). Students could also be exposed to many and varied forms of music as they develop the sound gallery from throughout history. As the online educational network evolves and more student groups participate, the sound gallery could also encompass music from different cultures as well as from throughout history. Students who study music from a multicultural point of view are more easily able to accept the intrinsic value of each music and can develop a deeper sense of a world perspectiveCITATION Rei02 18 1033 (Reimer, 2002, p. 18). Students studying different Native American cultures could develop groups online on the social network that incorporate a study of not only the music but also the dance of each tribe’s culture. By creating an online collection of music and dance, these students could create a virtual community of Native Americans and be able to compare and contrast the differences between geography and time that contributed to the formation of different indigenous groups. Creating a virtual community that revolves around the students becoming famous artists, musicians, writers, politicians, adventurers, or explorers opens up learning to a new world based on twenty-first century technologyCITATION USD10 8 1033 (U.S. Department of Education, 2010, p. 8). An online learning social network provides the framework for the students to have their own voice in their educationCITATION Smi10 334 1033 (Smith & McLaren, 2010, p. 334). By learning to become other people and having the opportunity to connect with other students who are learning in the same way, the students online can make connections to each other and to their own education. By combining modern technology with the arts online on the educational social network. According to Charles Fowler in Strong Arts, Strong Schools CITATION Fow94 7 1033 (1994, p. 7), students would be able to not only to learn data but they would also gain the insight and wisdom needed to develop a true meaning as they learn through the arts. In order to fully complete the idea of an educational social network, teachers would be the essential administrators for the site. In addition to setting assignments, teachers would be necessary to monitor their students. Lack of appropriate adult supervision is one of the problems with current social networks and why they are blocked by school districts. Teachers would provide the adult supervision necessary to prevent cyber-bullying and inappropriate behaviors CITATION Gro10 1033 (Gross, 2010). Each teacher would ultimately be in charge of his or her own students to make sure the students behave appropriately and provide correct information. While teachers monitor their students, they will also be able to collect reliable information on how students participate and use the educational network. Since the educational network would provide an online record of each student’s participation and entries, it would be an ideal system for tracking and collecting data to show how students can participate in their own learning and how this platform creates learning connections with other students. Since the climate in the US public schools today is accountability of teaching practices and what students are learning through standardized testingCITATION Mar03 229 1033 (Marsak, 2003, p. 229), the online social network would need to be able to provide objective reportable data. According to David Marsak in No Child Left Behind: A Foolish Race into the Past, the problem with standardized testing is that it is more reflective of the beginning of public education during the first two decades of the twentieth century based on age-graded schools and tests that don’t meet the needs of the different learning styles of studentsCITATION Mar03 229-230 1033 (2003, pp. 229-230). Post-industrial education should include “digital-age literacy (scientific, mathematical, technological, visual, information, cultural, and global), inventive thinking (ability to manage complexity, creativity, risk-taking, higher-order thinking), effective communication (teaming, personal and social responsibility, communication skills), and high productivityCITATION Mar03 231 1033 (Marsak, 2003, p. 231).” Learning through the online educational social media fits Marsak’s definition. Not only will it provide a great way for students to use technology to take part in their own learning, but it will also provide the assessment data critical for today’s teachers and administrators. By using an online educational social network based on the arts, teachers could find the bridge to the youth of today. An educator’s use of technology is only limited by his or her own knowledge of technology and how he or she implements the technology. Students today learn from a broad variety of sources, some are unreliable while others are more scholarly. Finding a way to tap into today’s students need to connect online with a teacher-monitored educational social network is the key to innovative and creative learning through technology. The arts can build the bridge between research and the social network, making it a community of connected students who learn from each other and build on each others experiences, research, and abilities – a true blending of educational and social media. Description of Project 2794635627380Figure 6. Home page for Montmartre Cafe.Figure 6. Home page for Montmartre Cafe.Step 1: The Beta Version. The first steps to creating an educational social network have already been established through my own beta version, the Montmartre Café. In the spring semester of 2010, I created a social network on Ning.com (Figure 6). This social network which I called Montmartre Café after the section of Paris where famous artists like Vincent Van Gogh, Renoir, Degas, Monet, Manet, and Pablo Picasso (just to name a few) would meet to discuss art, politics, and life. I wanted my online social network to be just the same – a place where my Drawing and Painting students could become famous artists online and connect with each other while learning about art, love, and history of their prospective famous artists instead of just writing a research paper about a famous artist. Ning.com, at the time I set up the initial site, was a free site, but in order to be free there were ads on each page. My school district, Fulton county, had blocked all social sites, so I thought if I could have the ads removed from the site and make sure it was totally blocked to the public then I would be able to have the site unblocked at my school. Unfortunately, removing ads required a monthly fee of $21.95. I knew I would need a small grant to make this happen. Since I was writing a grant, I decided I would enhance the Montmartre Café by taking the students on a field trip to the High Museum of Art to see the exhibit, the Genius of Leonardo da Vinci and to have a visiting dramatic artist come to help my students learn how to get into character online. Fortunately, my school, Riverwood International Charter School, has a foundation that raises money just so they can help teachers with grants for ideas like mine. The Riverwood Foundation was happy to grant the money I needed. The next step was to make sure my students had Internet access. Instead of just asking them if they had computer access, I decided to ask how many were members of Facebook. All of my two classes of Drawing and Painting students used Facebook. Once I had established the Montmartre Café site, their ability to go online, and begun the process of unblocking the site at my high school, it was time to select who the students would become online (Appendix 1). 19945352684780Figure 7. Paula's page for Leonardo da Vinci.Figure 7. Paula's page for Leonardo da Vinci.The students were then asked to register and complete their own personal pages on our social network. Each student needed to make a collage with their own picture and either the artwork of the artist or a photograph of the artist. They needed to incorporate the name of the artist into their own name. They could use Photoshop if they knew how to merge photos, or the students could print out the images and make a collage, then together then post them online. The students were creative with their names and photographs. They enjoyed beginning the process. I had begun a site for artists like Kourtney Matisse, Claude Sahiba Monet, and Gabema Moses (Appendix 3). Before we began any more work on the site, we all went on a field trip to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia to see the exhibition of the Genius of Leonardo da Vinci. The focus of the exhibition was to show the influences from throughout Leonardo’s life and how these affected his artworks. It was the perfect complement for the online social network. The students were given their first research assignment for their social network discussion board. They were to find out who or what was the love of their artist’s life. The responses were to be written in first person, but their first attempts were more like research than personal entries (Appendix 4). My whole idea was to use the fun and personal nature of a social network site, so I knew I needed to bring fun into the project. I arranged for a visiting dramatic artist, Edwin Link, to do two short workshops with my Drawing and Painting students to help them get into character. He led them in a series of warm-up exercises, which gave the students the permission to laugh and have fun. Edwin had planned two different activities where the students were to find the intent of an author through a written statement and then act it out. Edwin brought the drama exercises back to the social network and tied the drama into their research. Their next discussion board assignments grew increasingly into the first person and by the end of the semester, each student had begun to truly understand their artist and was actively engaged in their projects. The discussion board assignments ranged from a personal ad statement to researching what was a technological development of the day of each respective artist. The students were beginning to develop their entries online and to connect to each other. They were teaching each other about their artist. The artists began to take form online and they even developed an artist gallery without any assignment or prompting from me. They uploaded their artist’s work and even some of their own artwork. The social network had begun to have its own life. This beta version only had a shelf life of one semester due to the timetables of my high school. I needed a way to bring closure to the process, so I asked each student to make a presentation in class about their online artist from the social network. They were required to be creative in their presentation and to make three trading cards about their artists – one to keep, one to give me, and one to trade with another artist (Appendix 2). This was the best way to assess how well the students had responded to the online community. This beta version has become the genesis of creating an educational social network. I was plagued with technology problems that stemmed from the Montmartre Café being blocked at our high school. It was a constant problem for all of us and I was only able to have the basic structure of the site unblocked. The students were never able to work with me fully on the site in class. This was an impediment to the whole process, but it made it me think that if I had a true educational network in place then my school district would not block it. I began looking into creating my own network. I knew I could not use a current network site like Ning.com, wall.fm, or especially Facebook. I needed to create my own space. Step 2: Establishing Thoughtspace.org. I have since established my social network based on free source networking software. My site is called Thoughtspace.org and is in the beginning stages. My plan is to take my beta version and expand it within my high school. I can get more funding for my project, as I need it through the Riverwood Foundation. The goal is to involve teachers from the music, literature, and history departments. Each teacher will lead a group of students in building their own network of “famous people” student pages and discussion board assignments. Teachers will administer their site and monitor their own students, but there will be connections made between the groups. Step 3: A national site. Once Thoughtspace.org is established at my high school, my hope is to take it to a regional level and then finally nationally. I would love to see Thoughtspace.org become a national way of connecting students through an educational social network. Thoughtspace will be the first educational site to fully use the format of a social network, using the sense of play the students enjoy while spending 1.83 hours a day on Facebook. Implementation Plan There are several different obstacles to overcome in order to create a working educational social network that will connect thousands of students in the US. First is finding a software developer that can work with current social networking software. There are many free and open source network software programs available online. They are limited in their scope and can only provide a small social network. Since the first goal to making my educational social network open to other teachers is to limit the enrollment to only teachers at my high school, I decided to use free networking software from oxwall.com. I purchased a storage space on a server through hostgator.com. I also purchased the name “thoughtspace.org.” 27946352052320Figure 8. www.thoughtspace.org home page.Figure 8. www.thoughtspace.org home page.Next, I tried to upload the free networking software to my hostgator site. I have created websites in the past, but I have never worked with the administration side of a social network and I had no idea how to upload the oxwall networking software. I needed a software designer. I appealed to a friend, Aaron Karp who has a masters degree in computer animation and is a website designer. I asked Mr. Karp to donate his time to help me with my educational social network. He was able to upload the oxwall software and the bare bones of thoughtspace.org are now in place (Figure 8). The second problem with creating the small version of my educational social network is that I will need time to learn how to develop the oxwall software and turn it into my vision of how thoughtspace.org should be organized. The oxwall software needs to allow me to create discussion boards, chatrooms, and special interest groups. I would eventually like to be able to use games on the site, but I realize that will be further down the road. With the oxwall software, I am very limited in what I hope to achieve. My hope is that if the oxwall software does not allow the teachers and students from my high school to have enough flexibility to create a viable educational social network Aaron Karp will be able to help me design a better site. One huge hurdle is social media is blocked by most public school systems, including my own. One of the problems is the key search words will block any social media site, so my site will not use the word social its title, but will be referred to as an educational media site. Finally, to help further insure it is more accepted by school districts, I have used the ending .org for Thoughtspace so it will not seem like a company. School districts and administrators are more likely to unblock a .org ending than a .com. I am sure I will still have some resistance to the availability of the site, but at this time this is the best I can do until the site is more operational. As the site grows, I am hoping to be able to make our site available to other organizations that are interested in how modern technology can be effectively used in education today. I have already introduced my beta version, Montmartre Café, to art teachers at the Georgia Art Education Association’s Fall 2010 Conference. In March 2011, I will introduce the Montmartre Cafe and Thoughtspace.org to art teachers at the National Art Education Association in Seattle, WA. I will look for teachers who are interested in joining Thoughtspace.com once it is established at my high school. I will also submit Thoughtspace.org invitations to teachers at Art Education 2.0 (social network devoted to using technology in art classrooms), edutopia.org, and edudemic.org. The sites are all looking at new ways social media can be used in the classroom. Thoughtspace.org will hopefully provide their answers. As the site grows, I hope Aaron Karp will be able to work more with the site and make Thoughtspace.org become more like Facebook. The ultimate goal would be to create an educational social network that will be available nationwide and will attract more teachers who are interested in helping their students to take part in their own education. Sustainability Sources In order to begin Thoughtspace.org, I have already used my money to purchase the site name and the storage space. The initial start up was $20.95 in order to purchase the name Thoughtspace.org, and for each consecutive month on the basic plan with hostgator, the monthly fee is $4.95, which I will pay for until I am able to get a grant from the Riverwood Foundation. As the site grows, I will need to pay Aaron Karp for his time. While the site is limited to Riverwood teachers, I can depend on the Riverwood Foundation for funding. Once the site grows beyond my local high school, I will need outside funding. There are several different sources for grants I can look to for financial support: Target, Gates Foundation, or Edutopia.org. Another option would be to submit a proposal to Facebook to see if Facebook would actually be interested in working with an educational social network. Free social networking software will work fine for a limited network at Riverwood, but as it grows I will need to purchase more robust networking software program. There are several Facebook clones available like SocialEngine. Depending on the plugins and licenses I will want to add to Thoughtspace, it could be as much as $1360. I will also need a software developer to work with me and will need to pay him or her. Finally, to offset costs and to pay any employees of a national Thoughtspace, I will have to either charge a monthly fee to schools and/or school districts, or have a strong vetting procedure for educational ads that would potentially run on the site. Evaluation Evaluation for this project will have to be shown in two different ways: (1) individual teachers will need the ability to show how their students are learning on the online network, and (2) how often the teachers monitor their own students. To evaluate the individual students, tracking software will have to be developed so the teachers can easily track their students’ posts and discussions. Also, the individual teachers will need a common rubric to show their students’ participation and progress based on national standards. To create an individual rubric for teachers participating in monitoring their students, I have created a basic rubric that reflects student participation based on the tracking software, media posts like photos and videos relating to their projects, and finally objectives based on each student’s research and presentation online of an alternate historical, literature, or contemporary personality. The rubric can be used by classroom teachers to record grades at their local high schools for their research and work on the social network (Appendix 5). In the arts national standards from the ArtsEdge site, students should understand the visual and performing arts within the context of history and culture CITATION Ken10 1033 (Kennedy Center). Standard 4 states students should also be able to question and develop a deeper understanding of the “multifaceted interplay of different media, styles, forms, techniques, and processes” employed in the creation of a work of art whether it is in theater, dance, music, or the visual arts CITATION Ken10 1033 (Kennedy Center). By studying an artist and becoming that artist in an online format, the students will be able to understand more deeply how an artwork was created based the history and culture of the artist. According to the national curriculum standards for social studies, students of social sciences should develop similar understanding of time, place, and culture (National Council for the Social Studies). Social studies students are required to understand the role of culture throughout history while understanding the human story across time. The online network can help social studies students fulfill this requirement and this standard can be reflected on a common rubric. While Thoughtspace will provide a place for students to connect to their own learning and the learning of other students, it will also provide an innovative way for students to meet these national standards in a variety of different courses – art, music, theater, literature, social studies. These standards can be easy evaluated through the common rubric. As the site grows, an evaluation tool will be necessary beyond the individual teachers and evaluation of his or her group of students. The site will need to evaluate its effectiveness through monitoring the activity of student groups and how often they access certain formats online like the photo gallery, themed games, video uploads, and discussion boards. The frequency that students are accessing one of the learning modules on Thoughtspace will provide objective data as to how effective the online network is. Teacher monitoring is key to the success of this social network. It is not a site where the students can just visit alone. Without teacher supervision, the site will be just another Facebook. One of the problems with schools and Facebook is that the students are self-monitoring and develop their own ethics, leading to more and more cyber-bullying CITATION Gro10 1033 (Gross, 2010). All teachers will be the mini-administrators for their own student groups, and therefore will be responsible for their online behavior, much like a regular classroom. A system for monitoring the teacher supervision will also be necessary. By tracking the amount of time a teacher monitors his or her students on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis will be a necessary and integral part of Thoughtspace. Since this is the way Thoughtspace will be available to school districts, this will be one of the most important evaluation tools. Much of the evaluation for Thoughtspace will occur with online tracking for individual students, class reports, and teacher monitoring. Conclusion Today’s students have a unique worldview based on what the very best of technology can offer. Not only is a world of information at their fingertips, but they also have the ability to connect to other students across the nation and the globe. The only hurdle to their ability to manipulate technology to meet their educational needs is today’s educators. Utilizing the most current technology in a way that is educational yet entertaining and fun to use is a difficult proposal. By properly using an educational social network based in the arts, teachers will be able to harness the power of the twenty-first century and help students guide their own learning and provide their own critical thinking. Thoughtspace is slowly in the process of realizing this ideal merging of the arts and modern technology. Through my beta version, the Montmartre Café, I have been able to demonstrate how students can use drama, storytelling, and the visual arts to create a virtual community where students can learn from each other as they assume an alternate identity online. Montmartre Café was a small version of my much larger vision of an educational social network. My goal for Thoughtspace is to create the opportunity and tools for teachers not only in my own high school, but also across the nation, to allow their students to play and learn online. A social network like Thoughtspace will be able to meet the needs of the different types of learnersCITATION Arm00 13-16 1033 (Armstrong, 2000, pp. 13-16). Spatial learners will be attracted to the visual layout of site and the ability to manipulate it. Students who learn through music will be excited to be able to perform musical arrangements and to post information about how music influences culture. Intrapersonal learners will find the ability to work independently as a great way to contribute to the site, while Interpersonal learners will be attracted to the way the site allows them to connect to other students. Linguistic learners will like having the ability to write and compose online, while the logical-mathematical students will be attracted to the organization of the site and creating logical sequences. Thoughtspace is an environment for students to play as they learn. The environment of Thoughtspace will allow all learners to explore their creativity. By imagining and becoming another person from history, literature, or the arts, each student has the potential to learn history in context, empathy for other humans, and to create personal connections to other studentsCITATION Sch061 37 1033 (Schneider, Crumpler, & Rogers, 2006, p. 37). These subjects will come alive in the virtual community as the students build their own connections. Modern high schools promote a sense of isolationism by segregating learning through age-grades and subjects mandated by the change of a bellCITATION Wra09 88-89 1033 (Wraga, 2009, pp. 88-89). Thoughtspace will give teachers the opportunity to create connections between subjects and with other teachers’ groups. By creating a virtual world where dramatic play allows students to become someone else, these students will be able to guide their own learning. Students will be able to spend as much time online as needed. If their use of Facebook is any indication of the amount of time they will spend on a social network, then Thoughtspace has the potential of going well beyond the average school day. In 2008, Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind, interviewed Thomas Friedman, author of The World is Flat, for the American Association of School Administrators. In this interview, Friedman and Pink both agreed that the students of today need to be able to compete in a global economy and need to be innovative and curious. Thomas Friedman explained that two of the most successful and innovative Americans of this age are Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. For both, the traditional educational institutions did not allow them to explore their curiosity and find new answers to apply to real-world problems. Steve Jobs claims he came up with the idea for the apple computers not through algorithms (although they came in handy), but through a calligraphy course. It was the synthesis of art and science that made the Mac computer (Pink, 2008). Fostering a sense of curiosity, creativity, and imagination is not the main concern of administrators today; instead they are more concerned with accountability and standardized testing CITATION Smi10 333 1033 (Smith & McLaren, 2010, p. 333). “Standardized testing and pre-packaged teaching materials are being forced on educators by ‘education’ experts and policy makers in the US government”CITATION Smi10 333 1033 (Smith & McLaren, 2010, p. 333). Thoughtspace is a relatively inexpensive alternative to systemized teaching and evaluation. Hopefully it can become the bridge between innovative technologies, the arts, and learning. Thoughtspace will make students want to learn and research in order to participate. By creating active learning experiences, students will actively become life-long learners, not just test-takers. The best way to prepare students for the future is to enable students to deal with problems that have more than one correct answerCITATION Eis03 7 1033 (Eisner, 2003, p. 7). Thoughtspace will provide the opportunity for multiple answers to questions the students pose from their own research. My hope is that Thoughtspace will be the synthesis of science and the arts that will help the next generation of innovators to think outside of the box of a standardized test. The social network platform is ripe with potential for use in modern classrooms. Through Thoughspace, I hope to create a new platform for connecting students to their own learning and to each other in order to prepare them to be life-long learners in an ever-expanding virtual world. Appendix 1 Montmartre Café Online! Artist List – By Monday, February 2nd choose an artist you are most interested in studying from this list. Find out Who?, When?, What?, How?, Why? – anything you can. If you don’t choose an artist and research him/her – you will be given an artist from this list. BaconFrancisMagritteReneBeardenRomareMatisseHenriBentonThomas HartMichelangeloBeuysJosefMiroJoanBlakeWilliamMondrianPietCarravagioMonetClaudeCassattMaryMorisotBertheCezannePaulMosesGrandmaChagallMarcMunchEdvardChardin Jean-BaptisteMunterGabrielaChiricoGiorgio deNeelAliceClaudelCamilleO’KeeffeGeorgiaColeThomasPollockJacksonDa VinciLeonardoRaphaelDaliSalvadorRembrandtDegasEdgarRenoirAugusteDixOttoRiveraDiegoDurerAlbrechtRossettiDante Gabrielel GrecoRubensPeter PaulErnstMaxShapiroMiriamErteStellaFrankEscherM.C.TitianFlackAudreyVan GoghVincentGauginPaulVelazquezGentileschiArtemisiaVermeerJanGoyaFranciscoVigee-LebrunMarie LouiseHopperEdwardWarholAndyIngreJean-AugusteJohnsJasperKahloFridaKandinskyWassilyKeiferAnselmKirbyJackKirschnerLudwigKleePaulKlimtGustavKollwitzKatheKrasnerLeeLaTrecToulouseLawrenceJacobLeysterJudith Appendix 2 Artist Trading Cards Final Exam Assignment - Must be completed prior to the final day. Your presentation is due on the exam day. Objective: Create three trading cards about your famous artist with the following- • Creatively use mixed media collage to create an image of your artist that is representative of his/her art style and include some portion of the artist’s most favorite work • Cleverly design a title for the card on the front so that the artist name is a part of the overall design. • On the back, provide vital information about the artist that is creatively and correctly drawn (remember writing is a form of drawing) • Creatively present your artist card and artist on final exam day What To Do? ,[object Object]

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