Educational blogs, RSS, Feedly, and Adobe Spark

This week I learned about educational blogs, RSS and Feedly.  I already follow several educational blogs.  Two of my favorites blogs are The Art of Education Magazine and Smart Classroom Management.  The Art of Education is my go-to source for ongoing professional articles that are quick, on target, and effective.  They feature teachers from around the country who offer instructional guidance and ideas.  I have frequently used many of their free worksheets, as they are clean and the presentation is quite effective. 

The second blog that I read regularly is Smart Classroom Management. Michael Linsin's articles routinely inspire me to take a look at classroom management in a way that I find keeps me on my toes with managing behaviors.  I discovered author Michael Linsin last year when I read his book Classroom Management for Art, Music, and PE.   This quick read led me to find the blog which has been excellent.  I signed up for their RSS feed and the articles are delivered to my email weekly.  

https://theartofeducation.edu/

https://www.smartclassroommanagement.com/

  Speaking of RSS feeds, dow you know what they do and what their purpose is?  If you look at your favorite blog you will likely see a little icon that looks like this:

if you click that button it prompts you to subscribe to the content of that blog.  RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and by selecting it you allow the blogger to send you a link when new material is posted.  It is basically like "Liking" a page on Facebook or subscribing to a magazine that is then delivered to your mailbox monthly.

The free site Feedly can be conveniently used to organize all the blogs that you subscribe to using the RSS feed option.  By installing a Chrome extension for Feedly found HERE you will have the option to quickly hit the extension button and add a blog to their current feed in your Feedly account.  Your Feedly account will organize all of your liked blogs for easy daily updates to new content.  Feedly, I believe, is like the Pinterest of organizing your favorite blogs. The thing I like best about Feedly is the clean look and ease of use!  

https://feedly.com

The last site I learned about this week was Adobe Spark.  I am a huge fan of Adobe Photoshop so I was excited to learn more about this application as well since it is so visually focused.  There are three feature that Adobe Spark can help with when it comes to web design: a graphic, a webpage, or a video.  I see many applications in my future art classroom for Adobe Spark from a teacher introduction video and creating growth mindset graphics in my daily presentations to having students use the program for educational presentations.  The video below highlights some great suggestions for how Adobe Spark can be used in the classroom to get kids using graphics and presentations in a very user-friendly way...

I will leave you an inspirational quote, one of my favorites, created using Spark's graphics option.

Artfully yours,

Mrs. J