Subscribing to Feeds

     For those of you who, like me, are new to Web 2.0 tools, you will be pleased to find that there are usually tutorials and easy step-by-step directions for getting started. This is true with RSS ("Rich Site Summary") feeds, which help to gather favorite news sources, blogs, wikis and websites to one central location. If you have a Google Reader account you can go there and learn how. You can type in a search term, look at a list of available feeds, and easily subscribe. I used Wisconsin Art Education as a search term, and I chose to follow a fun RSS by the Wisconsin Arts Board named ArtBeet, Inc. I like it because it gives an art-related quotation every day. I like to post a new quotation on my (low-tech) chalkboard each week in the art room. These can provoke great class discussions on aesthetics and other art content. (By the way, I have found that the high schoolers at my school often cannot read cursive writing! It seems that keyboarding has replaced handwriting...this makes me sad, but if I want to be understood I see that I stand a better chance with printed lettering. Let me now what you think of this phenomenon, okay?) Another feed that I feel may be valuable to my students is ArtBistro.com, which posts information about art and design careers in our state. 

     Another interesting feed that I am checking out was listed when I used "creativity" as a search term. It is titled Creativity Tools, Creative Solutions. This feed is geared more for business professionals, but it has information that has helped me in my ongoing investigation into creativity. There are tabs for topics including Leadership Skills, Time Management, Problem Solving, Stress Management, and Practical Creativity. All of the topics are meaningful for teaching 21st century skills to teenagers. I did notice that many of the articles give brief overviews from materials that you must purchase in order to read them completely. In the Practical Creativity tab I found an article that describes several creativity techniques that are briefly described, though. One that I liked is called "Reverse Brainstorming." It involves brainstorming for the opposite concept, essentially defining solutions for a concept by coming up with things that it is not. I am planning to use this idea in a student interest inventory that I like to give at the beginning of the school year. Among my questions to students I will ask them what they don't want their art teacher to do. I will also ask them the big question of: "What would the world look like without art?"

     I plan to follow these feeds for a while, to see what comes across. The RSS "waters of information" are flowing into my Google Reader account now, and all I have to do is dip into them now and then to refresh the curriculum that I already have in place!