Feature Stories
Technology Applications for the Secondary Classroom
By Tiffany Asha, M.A.
Fine Arts Department Chair
Deerpark Middle School
Round Rock Independent School District, Texas
The 21st-century student requires a 21st-century teacher. Ask yourself if you are a teacher who includes technology. Web sites and online services are changing how students in the "online generation" construct and interpret visual information, art-making, and self-expression. Technology has made Visual Culture a complete media experience. Are you using this to your advantage in your classroom? Or are you pulling your hair out trying to make the cell phones stop ringing? Even school policy, for the most part, dictates that students "unplug" once they are in class. How is this best practiced? We as teachers need to incorporate the variety of technological tools our students regularly use in our daily curriculum, such as digital portfolios, document cameras, and blogs.
Digital Portfolios
Digital portfolios are collections of artwork, artist statements, self-reflection, and evaluation created and maintained by electronic media. The most common feature is probably already used by many of your students. Students often take pictures of their own artwork using their camera cell phones or digital cameras and upload them to social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace, or to free image hosting sites like Flickr. Some of the more ambitious art-minded students maintain portfolios on portfolio host sites like DeviantArt.com and Wetcavas.com.
Yes, incorporating technology in the classroom requires hardware and software, but much is already available for free both online and in your community. Consider beginning your school year with a technology survey to find out what your students have access to outside of school—Can they access the Internet? Do they have a digital camera? After surveying my own classes, I found that two-thirds has access to both. This was a revelation to me, as 38% of my students are classified as low SES; so, contrary to what I assumed, there is not necessarily a correlation between socio-economic standing and technology access.
Host a BYOC (Bring Your Own Camera to school) Day. Students can share cameras with each other and have a chance to photograph their artwork. Perhaps your school library has cameras you can check out. Provide backdrops and lights for the images and advice for students on how to best photograph their works. Upload the images to a class portfolio on your school's Web site or, if you have the bandwidth, let each student have their own link. If you don't have a Web site available, use a free image hosting site or burn the images onto a re-recordable CD or flash drive. Assign students a portfolio presentation project in which the images can be made into a Power Point presentation, paced to music using Photo Story, or compiled using iMovie, Window's Movie Maker software, or other free downloadable software.
As a teacher, you can use digital portfolios for remote grading. Imagine not having to stay at school late to grade artwork, or worry about lugging art home with you because a digital file is portable! Creating digital portfolios will also save time for when students create an AP portfolio (which is going digital this school year). Looking at work on a computer monitor allows both you and the students to critically view their work, and aides in the artistic process. Students can even manipulate the digital image in a software program to explore changes to their artwork without committing to them. And we haven't even begun to address the possibilities involved with including digital photography in your curriculum-as a standalone or a method for creating a composition to paint, draw, or sculpt. Newsweek's termed Look at Me Generation is armed with cameras and taking photos on a daily basis.
Document Camera
Using a document camera has revolutionized my middle school art room. During every class period, I turn on the document camera, connected to an LCD projector, and offer my students a movie-screen-size live image of their drawing warm up. Every day class begins by having students draw from direct observation. I don't have to worry if everyone can see me while huddled around a table for a demonstration, because with the camera, everyone can see my hands during a demonstration. I can actually take my eyes off the students and concentrate on what I am drawing during a demo because I know that everyone can see, and everyone is engaged. Students are mesmerized by the large live image. For them it feels like they are watching TV in the classroom.
Blog
The next step in technology integration is using a blog—a contraction of the term "Web log." A Web site usually maintained by an individual, with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. This interactive format also allows readers to comment on the entries. Again, there are many free accessible sites for teachers to use to host a blog for the classroom. This is my latest endeavor to integrate technology into my classroom, and an effort to extend my classroom into the digital realm. I did select one of the hosting sites that charge a small annual fee, thus keeping my blog site free from advertisements. I have been experimenting by uploading and embedding videos with TeacherTube.com into the blog, along with photos, daily assignments, and project logs. The site starts with the splash page I created for my Fine Arts Department (http://deerparkfinearts.typepad.com) and continues to my art blog (http://deerparkfinearts.typepad.com/artasha/).
I hope you will continue to learn and explore how to include multimedia applications such as flip-videos, promethean-boards, document cameras, blogs, podcasts, bulk-texting, and even social-networking sites into your classroom. Embrace these technologies to reach your students and, yes, even remind them to complete their sketchbook homework assignment.
Assessing Learning in Art
By Debra Hannu
Art Educator
Woodland Middle School and Homecroft Elementary School
Art Curriculum Coach
Duluth Public Schools
Duluth, Minnesota
Do you know of the tongue-in-cheek image by Fred Babb? The "Insightful Art Teacher" instructs his class by saying "Be wonderfully creative and authentic. Be me."
Or how about your college art class? "Hmm," said the professor. "Maybe a little more blue over here." Obviously, an aesthetic decision was made-but by whom? Based on what criteria? What exactly were you learning, anyway? Whose artistic solution was it?
Now take the art world. The winners of a juried show generally aren't judged on how well they achieved a specific objective, but rather by the personal aesthetic and opinion of the jurors.
Are these practices wrong? Not necessarily, but perhaps they are not the most effective for teaching art in a K-12 setting. No wonder our students sometimes worry that they "have to be good at art to get a good grade." How can we structure art education to both provide quality content and to fairly assess the work? What is the point of teaching if there is no way to know what students have learned, especially in a time when education is being held to task?
The first step for the art educator is to be clear about what is being taught. ALL activity and involvement in the arts is beneficial, but, thankfully, the days of "Here's the big bucket of crayons. Now go and be creative!" are gone. Specifically, what should students be able to demonstrate and understand AFTER the lesson that they couldn't BEFORE? The key to quality teaching in the arts goes back to the well-designed lesson plan. Ideally, objectives should be clear, measurable, and specific. They are, after all, the criteria on which the lesson will be assessed. "The student will learn about women's contributions to art history." is neither specific, nor measurable. However, an objective that is both specific and measurable might read, "The student will choose from a selection of artworks by Mary Cassatt and Georgia O'Keefe and, in researching and studying these artists and their works, will learn about two female artists' contributions to the history of art."
With a carefully-crafted lesson, a student can be guided through a logical learning process. For example, specifying that a student "bleed off the page on at least three of four sides," "identify and use a specific complement set," "use and identify one theme from Latin American culture," or "use at least three distinct textures" in an art assignment sets the student up to problem-solve within specific parameters. Their personal touches and their creativity is woven into the solving of that art problem. When students have incorporated specific objectives into their works, they have undergone tremendous problem solving, and done so in a way that both students and instructor can objectively assess. Albert Einstein once said, "I am my most creative when I have limitations." Effective assessment should not be seen as restrictive to a students' creative problem-solving, but as a guide or plan that helps direct the solution. Having students assess their own use of the objectives in their work provides a layer of art criticism to every lesson.
Quality teaching and learning in the arts is not so strict as to copy, nor so loose as to be without boundaries. Setting up art problems with clear, measurable objectives allows learning to be meaningful and personal-critical to student interest and success.
Anything worth learning is worth assessing!