Summer School Extra Credit

Extra Credit Assignment for MPHS English III Summer School Students: In a couple of weeks, I'll be attending the Smithsonian Institute at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) in Washington, DC through a Cisco 21s Initiative along with several other Moss Point educators and a number of teachers from other school districts. In order to prepare for the conference, we've had several assignments to complete. I'd like you to take a look at a few of these and complete them as well. Follow the instructions below and let me know if you have any questions.

1.) If you do not already have a personal blog, go to Blogger and create an account. Once created, email your URL address to me so that I can link it from my page. Anyone with a pre-existing blog, I would like you to create a new one specifically for this purpose and email that address to me as well. When you are blogging, I would like you to try to upload at least one picture and create multiple hot links within each post.


2.) Read the following two short essays; How to Read a Painting and How to Appreciate and Interpret Art. Next, read this article written about one high school student involved in a lawsuit with his school over a piece of artwork he drew. On your blog, write a short response to both the essays and the articles (can be separately or compared together).


3.) Select and read at least one posting at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s blog, EyeLevel and respond to it on your blog. You can read my response to this assignment here.


4.) First, read this article written about a group of Maryland high school students and a project they had to do with the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Then, listen to at least one student podcast about a museum object available at the Museum website at SAAM or at EyeLevel. Write a response about the student podcast you listened to and post it to your blog. You can read my response to this assignment here.

5.) Now you are going to create your own podcast, or rather, a Gcast. Created by the same people who run GarageBand, Gcast allows you to use your cell phone to generate voice recordings and provides free hosting for your audio file once you are finished. Go to the GCast site and create an account. Once you've created an account, it's time to record your podcast (see Option 1). Select your best blog post and print it out. Then call the number provided by Gcast and read your blog post into the phone. When you are through, your recording should be posted for you on the Gcast site in your Master Playlist. Click where it says "publish from your playlist to your podcast", fill out the necessary fields, then click "Publish this Post". You've created a podcast, now you need to get the code to copy to your blog. Select where it says "Love this podcast? Add it to your blog or MySpace!" to customize the podcast and retrieve the source code. Last step; copy and paste this code into a new blog post. Viola!