EDTC 300
Confessions of an... Artist6/15/2020 The class is coming to a close and you know what that means. Time to reflect on our learning over the period of the class. During the period of EDTC300, we each had to pick something that we wanted to learn and learn it through online sources. For my learning project I chose to learn how to draw. I have always wanted to learn how to draw, and especially with becoming a elementary teacher it would be a great skill to learn for drawing with the students. Over the course of the class I found my skills really starting to develop, and learned many techniques to help me from pushing the pencil to hard leaving me with many non erasable lines. Using online resources was something I had never thought of and I'm glad I was able to find ones that worked for me! I believe with the growing amount of importance of social media and technology learning a skill online now is a great and easy thing to do. I didn't focus on one thing like drawing faces but I worked on many different types of drawings to learn many different techniques, what I wanted to do over the period of this time was learn enough about different drawing techniques so I could eventually create drawings without using any type of source. Overview of each blog post ~Discovering my drawing journey For this learning project post I talked about where I was at with the skill of drawing so we could watch my progress over the class. In this blog post I talked about one source that I would use which was Youtube. If you have been following along with my journey you may know that didn't work out the best for me. I used Youtube a couple times to learn different skills or objects to draw but they tended to be to fast for me, and I was constantly stopping the video or I would miss a step. I didn't have any skills with drawings, I couldn't draw a person but I could draw a turtle (only because I have a tattoo that I see every day). ~First Steps & Drawing homework These two blog posts go together. In these two I found a online drawing course called How to Draw: Free Beginner's Course. This course was great and definitely something I would have kept using if we were allowed to use the same source. The first lesson taught about just drawing and not caring about how it turned out. The teacher instructed to cover a whole page with sketches. Teaching about not caring is great because drawings are always something people thing should just look perfect. ~Are you ready kids!? For this one I will let you guess what I drew... You were right if you guessed Sponge Bob! For this week I used an application on my phone called DrawEverything, this application had so many different step-by-steps so I highly recommend it for others! The characters turned out way better than I thought even though I had to colour the pictures in and make the lines darker from how much I erased. ~Talking Photo's For this week we had a blog post that covered our learning project and the weekly post. I wasn't quite sure how to accomplish this blog post because tools like screencastify wouldn't be possible for me, or ones where I taped myself drawing because I couldn't draw while taking a video. So I decided on using an application where I could make a slideshow of my photos and then do a voice over. If you clicked on this blog you would know it failed, I tried so many different applications and when I thought I had finally found one that worked for me called "Talking photo", it didn't. The voice over worked but when I went to upload my video to Youtube it seemed my videos never transferred over! The Youtube video attached was a fail with a previous application I tried also called talking photo. Check out this blog post to see all my drawings of the week with using Youtube as my online source! ~Drawing into the week This week my focus was on drawing over the whole page with one theme, so I drew a landscape scene and a house scene. The resources I found by using google, one was on Youtube called "How to draw a house with a pool for kids", but I didn't actually open the video I just used the picture that shows up on google to complete my picture! The landscape was a step-by-step process from a page called "How to Draw a Waterfall". These pictures weren't perfect and I think that pictures like these were still beyond my skill level. ~Brightening a Gloomy week This week I was not having the best week and I was having a even harder time trying to find something to draw. So after probably at least an hour I finally decided on drawing different flowers because what is better to cheer you up than flowers! Flowers have many different curves and each flower looks different so even if I thought I was starting to understand the one drawing that doesn't mean the next flower would be perfect. The best site I found for drawing flowers was "How to Draw Perfect Flowers in 3 simple steps". I drew many different flowers but most of my post is reflected on the drawing of the poppy where I showed my step-by-step process of drawing the poppy. Benefits I found learning a skill online very useful and thought I would share some benefits of learning a skill online! Here are the Top 7 Benefits of Learning a New Skill. 1. Your brain chemistry changes. 2. Your learning speed increases. 3. You make connections between skill areas. 4. You become a more interesting person. 5. It fights boredom. 6. You adapt better to change. 7. You could stave off dementia. Personal benefits for me was entertaining me while being locked in doors for most of the class period because of social distancing and being able to learn a skill at all with everything else besides the internet being closed! Another benefit was it gave me a break from the world, if I was feeling down or upset about something drawing became like an escape for me. Another benefit was I could sit in my pajamas and not worry about how I looked while learning to draw! Learning online made it very easy to practice because there are so many different resources. Overall thoughts This was a great learning opportunity and I would love to be able to attempt to learn another new skill by using online resources. What do you all recommend I learn next? I thought I did pretty well with my drawings for having literally no skill before I started. My biggest challenge and is still definitely a challenge for me is drawing lightly so if I need to erase something it doesn't still show up on the page. One of my biggest learning was about shadows, I never thought to think about how the sun and casting shadows worked with drawings I would just shade random parts. Now I know that it's not properly shaded unless it matches how the cast of a real shadow, and where the sun appears in my picture. I struggle with trying to make sure I am perfect with everything I do, which appears throughout my drawings with all my different eraser marks. I think this is very important to show people learning a new skill or future students I have because no one is perfect, we all make mistakes and that's what allows us to keep learning! Learning a new skill through a class was also a great experience because I received so much kind feedback that it pushed me to keep trying new skills and drawings. Overall this experience was great, and drawing using online sources is something I will definitely use in my future classroom. I will also use the skills I learned to be able to assist my students in their drawings!
2 Comments
6/15/2020 01:57:09 pm
Hi Meagan. I can tell that over the course of this class your drawings have improved considerably. I really like how you shared 7 benefits of learning a new skill. Good to see your opinion of how it improves a person.
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Lydia
6/15/2020 07:37:29 pm
I am really enjoying reading everyone's final reflections and seeing the progress. I too think we have all learned valuable skills, but I believe the best is that we have all gained knowledge of tools and resources that we can pass on to our students. Thanks for sharing.
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