The articles that I looked at this week gave me a little more insight on teaching and the arts. My research is based on looking for the importance of the arts in education. As I went through some of the articles I found that after a while of teaching teachers found that they needed to make changes to their lesson plans in order for the students to gain better understanding of the arts. The search strategies particularly helpful in locating the article was that you could refine your search and look up articles that are PDF Full text that you could go back to later rather than trying to remember certain information and forgetting where you found it. I also liked that you are able to go into Academic Search Premier and add Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) search in order to get the most specific information you need for research. I took notes on each step I took and it didn’t always lead me to where I needed to go so it was helpful to play with it for a while until I figured out what I needed to do to get to the site I needed each time. The only difficulty was looking through the article and realizing it didn’t have the right information I needed but I think that’s normal part of research. As I continue to research my topic I hope to find better books and articles that talk more about teacher experiences. I feel like these kind of books speak for themselves by giving the right information on the arts and its importance in education.

I learned more about the importance of creativity in the arts by one of the books I chose to read through. It was also describing the path of various artists who used art in particular to express themselves and the way they developed as adolescents with art as a form of distraction. The new search strategies that were helpful this time where the advanced search in Leatherby and selecting eBooks. I was able to email some of the pages to myself that way I can print them and read through them more carefully. I like to highlight important lines that will be useful in my research topic so this helps me gather my thoughts. As I went the Leatherby Libraries I selected advanced search and underneath that I also highlighted eBooks. I skimmed through a few until I found one that was more relevant to my topic. I’m still trying to find the right question for my research topic and I know I want it to be based on teaching and the importance of creativity but since I don’t have that concrete idea I’m struggling with my research. The search has not been as frustrating as trying to find the right topic and question. I have been doing a lot of reading to see if that will make me find the question but I’m not sure if that’s the best strategy at this point. I hope to find out I’m making this harder than it should be but then again I’m sure they call it research for a reason. I hope that I can find my topic and question soon so I can get better at researching.

I learned a little more about my topic, teaching and the correlation with creativity, throughout the research I conducted so far. It’s very interesting to learn how important creativity can be for us in the long run. I think that the arts are a way to begin to teach children about creativity and I enjoy learning how important that is for education. I was glad to learn that google has more search tools than I knew about. Since we had to complete our assignment with the most current information it was helpful to use the advanced search feature on google. I like to mark pages that are important for me to go back to by adding it to my favorites also. The aspect of my topic that I would like to research further is the benefits of creativity and how teachers can implement ideas that will stay with students in order for them to use these skills later in life.

Hi everyone!

I am currently pursuing my AA to ultimately become a teacher. I have been with Brandman University since last summer. I have been very happy to learn something new each semester and I’m excited to continue my education with online classes. I have been in school for a couple of years now but I needed to take some courses online since I work fulltime.

I would like to further research any courses that are required for teaching. I think children psychology would be an interesting are of topic to work on this term. I think that it is a broad topic but as I took an art class a few semesters I realized that creativity was vital in teaching. That definitely spiked my interest in the way children learn how to be creative. For the last course I took I struggled with using library databases to find scholarly literature. I was researching poetry and I’m not sure if that is a reason why resources felt limited but I would like to learn more on how to evaluate websites to ensure the information is legitimate. I would also like to improve my citation skills. I think that there are so many rules that I don’t quite understand and I would like to learn more on how to present my findings.