ART, hand in hand with technology

To all the art lovers I found in b4e and baw08, I want to share these beautiful pictures by my beloved aunt Coqui.

The video was made by her daughter and her son in law, Beatriz and Martín. As you can see the whole family is very proud of what she does and follows all her achievements.

You can find different techniques throughout this presentation: oil painting, 'pastel' and 'madera a la vista' (I couldn't find these in English). 'Madera a la vista', for those who don't speak Spanish, is a very interesting technique born in the XVII century used to paint on wood. She uses it in say 'the usual way' , I mean to make paintings with frames, and also as craft works which I think are really beautiful and creative. She takes a piece of wood and creates the painting following the grains and flaws (like holes) in it . I love it!

All the pictures show her passions: our region (landscapes, towns and people) and horses. As a teacher she is a good observer and she tries to portray the essence of the country people in our region.

I hope you enjoy her work as much as her number one fan does (that is me, of course).

RSS, TAGS, PODCASTS, BLOGS, WIKIS... YOU DRIVE ME MAD!!!

This was my feeling before grasping their meaning... Now I say, GOD BLESS YOU ALL!!!

I present you my computer before learning how to use RSS. Yes, papers all around as reminders to remember the sites I mostly used, copy books with endless lists and, of course (I intended to be a 'computer person'), I had files neatly organized in folders bearing more endless lists... for nothing. Whenever I wanted to go back to something, never knew where to find it and ended up googling it. Not to mention timeless surfing weekends looking for new material and finding out most of the times there was nothing new under the sun.

But now, thanks to my new friends in blogging4educators and baw08, I really feel like a computer girl (well, a kind of...). A brand new way of finding everything showed up in my screen and it was like Harry Potter's magic! I simply love it! My definite choice was Pageflakes, as I find it very visual and user friendly.

Now my plan is go on experimenting and learning more about RSS and its uses, and of course this wonders called Blogs. I've simply fell in love with all this, though I'm kind of slow to learn, but as you all say, perseverance is the key to success. So after getting to know as much as possible (because you also warned me you never stop learning with so many new tools coming up everyday), I'll start experimenting with wikis.

So, guys, wish me luck!

Putting on our thinking caps

This blog tends to open a space to reflect on the use of Web 2.0, the wide range of possibilities it opens to the field of education and all its advantages and ... disadvantages.

As many of us have already pointed out, using this new means of teaching and learning opens for us as educators a wide range of opportunities to broaden our students' interaction with the real world, but are we aware of the obstacles we are to face in the process?

Think about heads of department, administratives, colleagues, parents, and why not some students. What are the problems you think you would have with them? And moreover think about availability of this new technology in your workplace. Is there availability of computers and Internet at your workplace? Can you use them freely? I would like you to mention all the drawbacks you are likely to face so that we could take one at a time and try to find a solution altogether.

My aim IS NOT to rise a word against, on the contrary, it is to find the way to overcome every single difficulty that may appear in our way. This space is aimed to serve as a springboard for the hard work of finding solutions to the upcoming problems in this new challenge. And I hope you all help me find them.

Patricia