The Last Museum: Ominous Name, Great Resource #Blaugust2026

Posted on by Aaron

(This is my third post in a series of entries I’m using to participate in Blaugust for 2026.)

The very first post I ever made on this blog was about the Artchive, a still-running site where you can find countless fine art images by famous artists. When I made that I was halfway through my first year as an elementary art teacher (after 4 years of teaching high school) and in the process of getting my graduate degree.

That post – this whole website, actually – was part of that degree, as we had to make web pages for one of my courses. Most went with static pages but not me, I had to be fancy!

The Artchive is still awesome, but Open Culture has found yet another resource to add to my tool belt: The Last Museum.

You should read the write-up Open Culture has, it’s not long and I don’t want to just rehash what someone else said. Instead, let’s talk about usage.

My students like making digital things, but those interests aren’t distributed evenly. If they have a video that needs some visuals, their first inclination is to head to Google and steal something. My job, in part, is to fix that so they don’t end up on the news for the wrong reasons.

Now I’ve shared a variety of sites with them to help out with that, but more is better, and The Last Museum is effectively a search engine for art.

One of my favorite features about it is that you can select a specific range of years. Because copyright law is a hot mess in most places (it’s great to protect artists’ rights, it’s unfortunate that companies abuse it constantly), I’m more likely to find public domain art I can use if I move the higher end of that slider down to, say, 1930.

(It’s still worth checking each work, of course, as exceptions sometimes exist depending on each country’s laws.)

And the variety! There’s maps, woodcuts, paintings, prints, lots of architecture, and all kinds of cool things in there.

This isn’t going to replace the other sources I use, but it’s certainly going to supplement them.

Put Your Phone Away, Time to Take Photos! #Blaugust2026

Posted on by Aaron

(This is one of a series of entries I’m using to participate in Blaugust for 2026.)

Remember when you would buy a compact camera if you wanted something inexpensive?

Well, technically you still can (Looking at you, Camp Snap!), but the prices for higher quality compact cameras are surpassing the lower end DSLR and mirrorless models, even when you factor in the lenses.

Granted, you’re getting what you pay for. A $1k+ compact is going to outperform my current, aging DSLR (in the best lighting, at least…) while still being small enough to fit in a pocket. Still, I’m the kind of person who won’t pay the going rate for a new desktop computer when I’m replacing my phone, so my knee-jerk reaction is to not like it.

The Bad Times

I remember when it seemed like the small camera market was dying off. Flip video cameras were remarkable even without an optical zoom, but cell phones were on the rise, so they died away. Reporters were being handed iPhones so staff photographers could be laid off. (And that was earlier this year!)

The Better Times

Now we’ve got a resurgence of non-phone cameras and I love it, for so many reasons. Camera companies are loving it as well, as the ones that survived are raking it in. I won’t celebrate the rich getting richer, but without new hardware being made the hobby does get a bit more difficult.

First of all: Your average non-phone camera isn’t going to be packed with AI “features.” Oh, there might be something in there labeled as AI, in the same way that every spellchecker gets that label if someone in marketing thinks it’ll make a shareholder salivate, but cameras aren’t going to have the processors or storage space dedicated to the LLMs I complain about to everyone who will listen.

Second: Phones are constantly online. Cameras aren’t. You can get a camera with Wi-Fi features, but try turning those on and watch your battery drain in real time. The benefit here is that any portal onto the internet is also a doorway to distraction. When I’m taking photos I want to be in that moment, not immediately going through the process of evaluating and uploading content.

My students have always been in that mindset. It’ll take an hour to record 5 minutes because they need to stop and review after every shot, and while that’s happening oops here come the phones. This only got quashed last year because of a school-wide cell phone ban.

A Mild Complaint

The downside of this is that it’s getting harder to get cameras for my classroom. I started regularly trolling shopgoodwill.com back in 2020 looking for computers, and within a few years I had a class set of compact cameras as well. Granted, they were of … varying levels of quality, with some using cards not manufactured in quantity since before some of my students were born, but they worked, and they were cheap, because the demand was low.

Now, I still get cameras from Goodwill, but my eyes are on the bridge models – like the Nikon Coolpix ones that take four AA batteries, because I can get rechargeable lithium AAs for cheap(ish) prices and those things combined will last for years.

But the compact cameras? That’s a non-starter. I might get a DSLR for $50 and be happy even without it being new enough to record video, but the decent compacts are going for way, way, more.

(I’m fully aware that this may be incredibly dated within a year or two. Consider it a snapshot from a bygone era if that’s the case.)

A Selfish Complaint, Because It’s My Blog So I’m Allowed

I suppose my biggest complaint about it is entirely selfish. Until last year I had a perfectly serviceable compact that was waterproof, shockproof, had a flip-out screen, and all for @ $400. You can’t get that value for that price any more, and since the screen died it’s next to unusable.

The New Old Compact

My new compact, A Camp Snap Pro, is none of the things the old one was. It’s cheap, by both definitions of the word. There’s no flip-out screen, in fact there’s no screen at all. It doesn’t do video, and while I suspect it would survive a bounce or two thanks to a lack of moving parts, I dare not consider it to be waterproof.

Not everyone’s a fan.

I’d take a class set if I could manage it.

No screen to check your shots? Well it’s more work to do that, so you might as well take all of the ones you need for this assignment before stopping your shoot to do that. You DID plan your whole shot list, right? … right?

No built-in zoom? Use your feet like I told you to.

The photos all look too dark? Time to actually use the studio lights we have instead of relying solely on the fluorescent overheads.

It’s only slightly removed from teaching film photography, but without the chemicals.

I’m totally here for that aesthetic.

The Problem With Talented and Gifted #Blaugust2026

Posted on by Aaron

(This is one of a series of entries I’m using to participate in Blaugust for 2026.)

Russell T. Warne has an article over on Education Next about the Gifted (or as some districts call it, “Talented & Gifted,” or “TAG”) program and some of its flaws. This isn’t a summary of the article, I’m just using that as a jumping off point.

I’d like to think I know a bit about the Gifted program. In 5th grade I was labeled Gifted and later I became both a TAG teacher and coordinator. I’ve had the small desk, big desk, and run-around-the-building positions for TAG, something not everyone gets to say.

The Small Desk

My journey in TAG began after taking an IQ test, a method I consider to be outdated based on both Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences (I was taught Gardner in the ’90s, talking about “Intelligence” like it’s one monolithic thing should be reserved for history books and RPGs) and the more recent concept of Growth Mindset.

Regardless of the inherent inequalities in that system of identification, I benefited from it … mostly.

Some of the things we did stuck with me, even now, decades later. I remember playing a competitive stock market game and my team winning, out of mostly sheer luck. I remember working collectively on a model airplane that we never actually finished. I faked a UFO photo with papier-mâché and a Polaroid camera, fooling a significant percentage of my grade level.

I got “enrichment” experiences that I would not have otherwise had, thanks to a poorly designed test that said I met the minimum requirements. They left me more rounded, with a better understanding of what I would and would not like to try later in life.

The Big Desk

For a time, I was my current school’s TAG teacher for grades 4-5. It was a lot of fun, with the program revolving around students identifying problems and inventing creative solutions. Keep in mind that for 4th graders, sometimes a problem might be “I don’t have a cardboard robot costume.”

I was 100% for this. We were a pull-out program, so students missed instructional time elsewhere to attend my class once a week (where I also missed planning time) but hey, they were “gifted,” they could make that up, right?

Then 2020 happened and a lot of changes took place. There were multiple ways to handle distance learning but I ended up not enjoying the changes that were made. As I was teaching TAG for the fun of it and not for the stipend, I asked to not be the TAG teacher and my principal took no issue with that.

TAG Coordinator

My last few years as a TAG teacher I did double duty as my school’s Coordinator. I won’t lay out all of the duties here but my primary responsibility was to be one of the front-line people identifying who was eligible for TAG based on my school system’s requirements. (Oh, hey, Russell T. Warne talks about that in the article I linked!)

My school system had (and I assume still has, but I’m not a Coordinator now) a much more lenient method of accepting students into TAG. Again, I’m not going over all the bullet points here, but nowhere in the multiple factors we examined did we ever consider IQ. Being Coordinator was a thankless job, but I’m glad I got to learn how things work. I wouldn’t touch it with a 10 foot pole unless I was still teaching TAG, though. Most schools, the TAG Coordinator is office staff or an administrator.

The Problem With TAG

Alright, now that you have my life story, here’s the part I’d be able to fit into a post on Mastodon:

In my experience, the parts of TAG that benefit students in the program could benefit ALL students if we just opened it to everyone. The parts of TAG that make learning more engaging are perhaps needed even more by students who are not achieving enough to qualify.

There’s no magic switch that makes the TAG program better if you have a label, and nothing that makes it cease to be good if you lack it. We could teach the core concepts to everyone, but we don’t.

At least, not officially.

There’s lots of reasons why, and I’m not about to take a position outside the classroom in order to address them, but I suspect it boils down to resource allocation. TAG costs money and time, both of which are in short supply in most schools.

(There’s also the non-zero possibility that someone thinks that if all classes are TAG then there’s nothing that makes the TAG classes stand out, but that’s idle speculation based on nothing I’ve seen or heard in regards to my district’s TAG department.)

But here’s the thing: If you’re blessed with a curriculum that allows for flexibility, you can just … have students do TAG lessons anyway. I know not every teacher has that option, some admin expect everyone to be on the same lesson in the curriculum on the same day.

But I do have that freedom, and so do many arts teachers.

So that’s what I do.

Reflectors & Photography

Posted on by Aaron

I love reflectors. A good one is lightweight and compacts down to a size that’s super portable.

Importantly: They’re much cheaper and more convenient than most lights that would serve the same purpose.I don’t even need to buy one, since I’ve made due with a sheet of paper and even a blank wall on occasion.

But there’s still a trick to getting it right, so I’m glad that SLR Lounge has written up a guide to Reflector use.

It’s been a while.

Posted on by Aaron

My last published post on here was written in 2018. (I have a draft that I typed up in 2020 but I’m not going to count that.)

Eight years later and a lot has changed. Yes, all the big things that have already come to your mind, but also, I’m doing a lot of stuff differently.

(Except for standardized testing. Standardized testing never changes.)

The rest of this post’s going to be something of a ramble. I might take parts of what’s in here and turn them into separate posts later, or I might come back years later and share another ramble.

My computer lab is all Linux. Heck, my home computers are all Linux at this point. It’s not that I love it, it’s that every other OS I’ve been fond of in the past 20 years has turned to garbage.

AI is a plague, and many of the great educators I once admired are now touting it as the revolution that will help everyone more easily steal from artists while enabling cognitive decline and hastening the destruction of our environment. None of these things really matter to them, but hey, they got it to make a graphic with too many colors so that lets them hand-wave away all the negatives.

A lot of the sites I’ve convinced others to use have gone the same route as my once respected peers. Code.org rebranded to CodeAI just this year. I’m still expected to use their curriculum for my web design course, but it’s one overhaul away from being useless to my students. (They’re all artists. Am I to tell them the future will be built upon their works, with no credit given? Am I to tell them the future requires them to steal for the corporations so that they may be laid off when they’re no longer needed? What skills will it provide to help them after the AI bubble bursts?)

I’m having a lot of fun playing TTRPGs, though, and most years I sponsor an after school TTRPG club for my students. We’ve abandoned Dungeons & Dragons (another product whose owner has made thoroughly bad choices, but this is the wrong blog for that) in favor of Lasers & Feelings, Cypher System, and Tales of the Valiant.

My social media presence has eroded to near nothing. I deleted my Twitter accounts (I’d stopped using them years earlier), and no longer publish videos to YouTube. I’m on Mastodon and PeerTube, though the former is followers-only by default and the latter focuses on TTRPGs. I might make a PeerTube for my education musings, if I gather enough thoughts to make that worth it. You can find the accounts I use on my other website.

Just last month we passed the 10 year anniversary of my wife’s death. It still hurts. I still miss her every day.

I want to be optimistic about things. There are a lot of reasons out there for me to be pessimistic and call it realism. You have to hunt for the things that make you happy, or make them yourself.

Andrew Roach is doing some amazing things. He’s not a teacher in the traditional sense, but he’s a problem solver. He’s using old tech to make video and fancy tech to make toys. He has a zine that’s half manifesto and half instruction manual on how to make your own TV station.

Russ Sharek went and made a new license for releasing work, that’s similar to CC-BY but with carve-outs preventing AI and corporate use.

Old things are becoming popular again, and I only feel like turning to dust a little bit when I remember them as new things. Primitive digital cameras that don’t connect to the internet or use AI to “fix” things are on the rise, and my students like them a lot. It’s made it harder for me to buy used cameras because of supply and demand, but when I brought my Camp Snap 8 to school, all of my younger students wanted to use it.

There are reasons to be optimistic. Maybe that’s what I’ll post more of here, to make myself feel better about the future.

Or maybe I’ll just yell at cloud computing and AI.

Or both. Both is good.

PUWT18 Presentations

Posted on by Aaron

As is apparently tradition for me, I’m presenting two sessions at this year’s Powering Up With Technology Conference. (My first presentation at PUWT was … 2006? 12 years ago? Wow!)

Rather than give long and difficult to type URLS for my presentations, I thought I’d share them here. (Yes, I am aware that “academicaesthetic” is not universally easy to type, but it’s easier than, say, “o03Eil5s,” and people can get here from AaronBSmith.com … hm, maybe that’s the link I’ll share.)

Keep in mind that these Google Slides are primarily my visual aids, as opposed to the talks themselves, and I’ll probably be changing slides around up to and including 5 minutes before my session starts. If all goes well I’ll have recordings of the actual presentations that I can post on this website as a follow-up.

 

Will This Be Graded?

Posted on by Aaron

This post brought to you by…

Let’s talk about assessment.

…

OK, now that I’ve scared off any random students who’ve managed to find my website, let’s have an honest talk about assessment.

Grades in one form or another have been a staple of education for a very long time indeed. With the push to quantify school quality through standardized testing and the overall inertia that we normally encounter in academia in general, they don’t look like they’ll be going away any time soon.

So naturally, they’re a perfect thing for progressive ed reformers to rally against. Kids hate them (unless they have an A), teachers hate assessing which grades to give (unless it’s self-grading), and parents hate having to come in for parent/teacher conferences to discuss them, so let’s trash them, right?

… and the letter Y.

Not so fast.

Grades, like paper in an art room, still serve more than one essential need in the classroom. Unlike slide rules and filmstrip projectors, we still use grades because we haven’t come up with a better alternative for them. They work.

Let’s start with the point that Mr. Robinson brings up in his initial rebuttal: Feedback.

Grades on individual assignments let students know the skill with which they completed the assigned task. Those grades can (and should be) itemized in such a way that students also know how well they accomplished various subcategories of the skills being assessed. Their cumulative grade (which if done well should be accessible at any time, not just when Progress Reports or Report Cards are sent home) helps students know how well they’re doing in the course overall. Ideally they should have some idea about how much each assignment weighs against the other tasks they are given throughout the course.

Yes, I can give feedback just through constructive and positive criticism, but while those things are crucially important parts of my curriculum, the ability to boil something down to a number or letter can help the student better understand their growth than me just saying “Hey, that was reasonably better than last time!”

That’s NOT a #2 pencil!

Next up: Grades do the same thing for me that they do for the students.

For the past eight years, my grade book has been a Google Sheet with more annotations, comments, and conditional formatting than is healthy for any web-based system. It is packed full of additional information that explains or clarifies various scores and why they are what they are.

This is incredibly useful information that I’ve gone back to on many occasions throughout the year, but it doesn’t beat being able to highlight the row a child’s scores are in and scroll across to see trends in the data. I can do that with numbered (or lettered) grades far faster than I’d ever be able to do that without them.

I’ve often complained that education is a dinosaur that needs to do some serious evolving if it’s to continue to be meaningful and helpful to our students, but when it comes to getting rid of grades? That’s throwing the baby out with the bath water.

There are a few kinds of assessment that I could do without (Die, standardized testing, DIE!), but let’s keep grades around for a while. They haven’t failed us yet.

Pun intended.

Scholar.Social: A Mastodon Network For Teachers

Posted on by Aaron

I wrote a short time ago about how I really liked Mastodon and thought teachers should give it a try. At the time I’d settled on a home server but lamented that there was no instance (each Mastodon server is called an instance) set up specifically for teachers.

Well never fear, because scholar.social has stepped in to fill the void!

As the name implies, scholar.social is not JUST for teachers, but anyone involved in academics. The tag line they use is  “The Mastodon profile that you’re not embarrassed to put on the last slide of a presentation at a conference,” which is a little wordy I’ll admit, but I think it’s  a great ideal to live by.

It’s a small instance at the time I’m writing this, but as someone who has debated making an instance just for myself I don’t see this as a bad thing. Something I enjoy on Mastodon is when I can look at the Local Timeline and not have it scroll past me faster than I can read. I was getting that on mastodon.cloud and mastodon.social, but not on elekk.xyz. I’ll admit, being able to see what others were saying on my instance kind of spoiled me, so I’m glad my new home lets me enjoy that again.

scholar.social logoI’m not going to say this will replace Twitter. Twitter didn’t replace Tumblr for me, and Tumblr didn’t replace this blog. I will say that so far I’m enjoying Mastodon, scholar.social specifically, and think that if you like reading what I put on this site you might enjoy it yourself.

So if you’re a teacher, why not give it a try? When you do, say hello. All the cool kids are doing it.

And so am I.

Adam Savage’s “Sunday Sermon” at Maker Faire 2017

Posted on by Aaron

I’m growing more and more certain that everything Adam Savage touches turns to gold, even the things that fail spectacularly.

For years, now, Mr. Savage has been giving a  short talk at the annual Maker Faire. They are full of inspiration, encouragement, and awesomeness. This year’s talk is no different.

The giant ant he rides in on is a bit of a bonus.

Why This Site Is Self-Hosted

Posted on by Aaron

Sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr (the list goes on…) are (or have been) extremely popular, in part because they’re free, but also because they’ve reached a “critical mass” of users. I know many people who only use Facebook because their friends and family use Facebook, for example.

Separate from this is a trend known as POSSE, or Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.

Like it implies, following a POSSE strategy doesn’t forego having and using the free social media sites that are so hip with the kids these days, particularly the ones who don’t describe neato things with the word “hip” (or “neato,” for that matter…). Instead, you put your meaningful content on a site you host yourself, then link to it on those networks.

I like this plan. Here’s why.

Here today, gone tomorrow.

A sizable portion of the things I have made were uploaded to services that no longer exist. Remember Geocities? Mac.com web hosting? Tumblr is still around, but I apparently went so long without using it that an older account of mine was deactivated and resurrected by someone spamming ads for real estate.

We assume when we create an account on a free service that it will stay online forever, or at least until we’ve lost interest. Those of us with more gray hairs know that this is simply not the case. A lot of people today are mourning the loss of Vine, but it’s far from the first to go and certainly won’t be the last.

(Side note: My wife did all her blogging on a Tumblr account. I’m going to have to find a way to preserve that somehow.)

You’re the product.

I’ve heard “If you’re getting a service for free, you’re not the customer, you’re the product” so often that it almost loses meaning now. Unfortunately, it is frequently true.

Google doesn’t make money hand over fist because they’re selling physical items or search results, they’re making money because so many people see the stuff they do that buying ads from them is cost effective. (I say this knowing full well that some pages on this website include ads  from Google. I didn’t say all advertising is bad.) The same is true for Facebook. Twitter is … working on it, but they have a problem still with bots and harassers so their store of products seems a bit tainted to prospective buyers.

I pay a company for server space. Because that’s their product and keeping me happy is the best way to keep me sending them money, they work hard to do so. On a free service that is mostly depending on ad revenue and/or data collection, the people they want to make happy are the ones sending them money.

This happened recently on YouTube, where advertisers got particularly annoyed when their ads started showing up in front of incredibly offensive content. As a result, YouTube has seriously cut back on which videos can be monetized. So far, so good, right? Yes, except the algorithm isn’t as fine-tuned as it could be, and now non-bigoted people (I’m assuming, but I like to assume the best when possible) who depend on YouTube ad revenue to pay their rent are a bit concerned about their drop in income.

I like YouTube. It’s where I post all of my tutorials as well as my more recent conference presentations and vlogs, but I wouldn’t depend on it for my income even if my channel subscriptions went through the roof because I’d be relying wholly on a company NOT designed or motivated to keep me happy meeting my needs. (I’d also be squeamish about forcing my students to watch tutorials that make me money. The channel I use to host my tutorials is currently not set up for monetization. If you see ads, the revenue isn’t going to me.)

Self-hosted content is (more) mobile.

I said before that I like my web host. I do, but if I somehow change my mind it would take only a little bit of work to back up this entire site with YEARS of content and move it to another host. There are a few other companies that do that, but it isn’t universal and it isn’t always easy.

Google is one of the few, which is part of the reason I was able to move from Blogger to WordPress without copy/pasting blog posts by hand.

Flickr theoretically has an option for downloading all your photos, but the last several times I tried it didn’t work. If I had been uploading all my photos to a self-hosted site instead of Flickr, I wouldn’t be so concerned about this.

Twitter allows you to request an archive of all of your tweets.

I haven’t seen anything on Facebook or their subsidiaries (Instagram, etc.) allowing you to download all of your content from them.

Vine offered this, but they’re gone now.

You don’t need to leave, but a permanent home would be good.

This entire post was inspired by Doug Belshaw’s post about why he’s “leaving” Twitter. I use quotes because he’s not abandoning Twitter like I abandoned my old nameless-to-not-support-a-spammer Tumblr account. Instead, he’s switching strategies.

To Mr. Belshaw, the Twitter of yesteryear was a place where he had conversations. Now, it will be a place where he uses a bullhorn to tell followers about the cool stuff he’s doing elsewhere. It’s a viable use for the medium, and many people use Twitter for mostly that anyway.

“But blogs are for long form content, not rapid-fire ephemeral but public communication,” you might counter. “Surely he’ll continue to use Twitter for that.”

Eh, Twitter’s not the only option for that, either.

(I’m on Mastodon as well, if you want to follow me. UPDATE: I found an academics themed instance and I’m giving that one a try.)

(Also, if you want to try self-hosting and help support this blog at the same time, try Dreamhost. If you don’t like clicking affiliate links, here’s one to Dreamhost that doesn’t support me at all.)