Reviewing a Helpful Blog

I have chosen to look at a blog run by a Mr Tony Pritchard, who is a course leader on a Diploma Design for Visual Communication. He uses his blog to showcase design ideas that he uses in his teaching.

"My teaching and design philosophy relates to my belief that an understanding of the fundamental design principles such as visual language (colour, form, structure, composition, etc), typography and information design is essential to being an effective visual communicator."

(Tony Pritchard)

He posts videos he has made (posted via vimeo) of art techniques and talks about how he uses them in his teaching, ranging from videos looking at people and their sketchbook work to people working on their pieces ready to showcase in art exhibitions

This is a video revolving around 20th century typography he has made and it looks at the concept that typography is constantly developing.  I think this will be a good blog to look at and research for my own teaching purposes due to it being well formatted, very informative and professional.

Resources:
http://tonypritchard.wordpress.com

AnyMeeting

Today we attempted to use an online group meeting, using the online software called AnyMeeting, it seemed like it would be a helpful piece of software but sadly we were plagued with problems.

The software enables the tutor to run an online classroom where the students can be present with their microphones enabled as well as their webcams as to be completely interactive. the tutor can then use the software to show presentations (powerpoint etc)

and allow the student to give real time feed back and answer real time questions.

Although i like the concept of this online software and think it would be beneficial for the classroom where a classroom was not available it did not work well for us today, due to the wireless network provided by the college there was sound/camera lag which had heavy implications on the all round use of this software.

Also available through this online software is the ability for the main tutor to share a second screen which for showing a presentation and still being able to see all the students in the session is also a big plus because i noticed when you show a presentation you only see a limited amount of students.

Powerpoint Presentations

Microsoft PowerPoint is somewhat simple to use, and that is one of the reasons it can be so beneficial to teaching, the simplicity of it is one of its biggest selling points, the ability to go from nothing to a presentable piece of work in a short amount of time is definitely one of its best points.

Talking about using PowerPoint in teaching art and design may seem like it is not that much of a helpful teaching tool.  Using PowerPoint to show multiple images, which have been sourced from multiple different sources like online, books, photographs and others, but compared to holding up multiple materials it is one of the most helpful tools available.

Using PowerPoint was a big part of completion of projects in university for me, each time a project was coming to a close we were given the task of presenting our work to the group for peer assessment and to build our skills at talking in front of people.  It was up to you whether you wanted to hold up your books and final pieces of work or make a presentation.  The ease of doing a presentation with a PowerPoint built showcasing your work was not only more professional but it made the whole experience of talking in front of a group a million times less stressful.