You Get What You Incentivize #Blaugust2026

Posted on by Aaron

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

Emanuel Maiberg has an article on 404 Media that tells the tale of Microsoft saying “No, not like that!” after insisting that their employees should all be diving head-first into the slop-fest that is AI.

It turns out that AI use can get expensive, and when you expect those under you to use the expensive things more and more, you start realizing how wasteful that is.

One could draw parallels to school level high-stakes testing. We talk a lot about “teaching to the test” like it’s a bad thing, but very little is done about it because those tests are how we measure student success.

If those in charge (we’re talking politicians and those appointed by them, here) thought teaching to the test was actually bad, they wouldn’t make the test so darned important.

In a recent post on this very site, I mentioned that until recently the big event for digital media arts programs in my district is a district-wide Film Festival. It’s still seen as the biggest thing, with more pomp and circumstance pumped into that than most events.

This, in spite of the push to cover the other aspects of digital media covered in our curriculum. It’s slow going, in part, I think, because the big prize is for video production, not the other things.

We have other awards, now, an I welcome the improvements. Inertia’s a pain sometimes, though.

I think about stuff like this when I’m writing my rubrics. What’s that particular project’s big thing? If that’s not the part getting most of the instructional time, why not?

And if I don’t like the results I’m getting, what do I need to change? How much needs to be changed, and how do I present those changes to my students?

Always Be Branding? #Blaugust2026

Posted on by Aaron

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

Kate Garibaldi has an article over on PetaPixel covering custom lens caps for cameras so any time the camera’s out but not in use you’re carrying around a tiny billboard.

My knee-jerk reaction was of course “Thanks, I hate it” because I don’t like the idea of tying my identity to a brand or product, but the article wasn’t about selling ad space to companies so much as it was promoting self-branding, and now there’s a company that prints custom images on lens caps.

I think this is neat, but not because I intend to use this service. (I’m on a teacher budget, after all, and I’m buying enough things for my classroom.)

Branding is, unfortunately, everywhere. Our lens caps already have manufacturer logos on them, as do the cameras, monitors, computers, keyboards, mice, and I’m going to stop the list here. This was particularly “fun” when our rules for our district level Film Festival forbade any trademarked logos from being shown on-camera.

(Things are a bit more relaxed, now, but a lot of the tech from back then still has tape over the marketing, because it was more efficient to use a bit of tape once than to apply a blur effect to each shot.)

Here’s the thing: Our classes can have their own branding. Most schools have mascots and logos already. My department has a district-wide logo used on all of our press releases and event signage. On the school level, I design a new variation each year and we silkscreen t-shirts for the students.

(I also cut a lot of vinyl stickers with my Cricut, though I won’t recommend that brand due to my experiences.)

Having branding for your classroom can help to promote a group identity, and while practice makes the act of logo creation easier, one doesn’t need a lot of skill to get started.

“But Aaron,” you say, “I’m no good at art, how could I manage to do this?”

I have students making logos as young as 3rd Grade with a simple web-based vector editor. They take an image and add some words to it. Done.

“But Aaron, it’s not going to POP without a cool graphic, and I’ve no skill with making those!”

(H&R Block couldn’t manage it either, you’ll be fine.)

Go to OpenClipArt.org and search for your school mascot or something that relates to your content area. (I’ll often look for a camera or microphone.) Grab one with high contrast that doesn’t look like slop. You lose a lot of respect if your image looks like slop.

“But Aaron, how do I get this to be ON things?”

This one’s trickier. You could go my route and use a vinyl cutter, though your image will have to be monocolor a free of floating objects. (Floating objects are parts of the design that are not physically attached to the rest of it, so they require additional effort to place correctly after you peel off the backing.)

Me, I like that challenge, but not everyone does.

If you have access to a printer, printer-friendly sticker paper has been around for decades. In a pinch you can use address labels. Being pre-cut is a bonus, though you’re stuck with those dimensions. Visit your office supply store of choice and look for “sticker paper.” You’ll find options.

Now if you don’t mind, I have some stickers to cut out.

Why Are We Still Using High Stakes Tests? #Blaugust2026

Posted on by Aaron

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

Ars Technica recently reported on Mexico’s largest university doing a completely remote entrance exam, and the disaster that resulted from it.

I won’t be using this to rant about AI, though the anti-cheat cameras were “AI powered.” I won’t be using this to rant about anti-cheat lockdown procedures either, though I’m also not a fan of those.

Neither of those would be needed if we didn’t still rely on high-stakes testing as a measure for student aptitude and accomplishment.

Now I’m not opposed to the occasional quiz. More often is better, because one off day can be balanced out by the rest. If done well, quizzes can even be used as tools for reinforcing the information students need to know.

But the big chunks of a student’s assessment should be evaluated by looking at what they can do, and I’m not going to get that by looking at how often they picked the right answer out of four possible options.

Show me a movie they made, an image they painted, a book they wrote, a business they planned, a robot they built, or anything other than a series of A, B, C, and D answers.

There’s a reason why some colleges have stopped caring about SAT scores, and it might be related to the reason why there’s no peer reviewed evidence showing a correlation between high test scores and success after school. (I vaguely remember Pearson publishing a study on their website that showed it, but their bias alone would probably prevent it from getting through peer review.)

If there’s one thing the SAT is known to show, it’s how wealthy the students’ parents are.

But we still use them, because, and say it with me, now: “We’ve always done it this way.“

And of course we have.

Multiple choice questions are easy to grade. Easier, now that we can have computers do it for us, but I’m old enough to remember Scantrons and hand grading.

We picked the easy over the good, because we have so many other things we’re told to get done and, quite frankly, grading tests is tedious.

(I will not segue into complaining about AI here, but I want you to know there was effort involved in that decision.)

There’s so much more value and reward in seeing students make something. It can still be graded objectively, you just need a rubric.

What amazes me is how many teachers don’t even know how easy rubric grading can be. They’re taught the test and then told to teach to it. I don’t have an article to link for that one, but I recall my days as a traveling art teacher where the principal specifically asked me to show sample rubrics to the teachers in her building because the teachers didn’t know how to use them.

The Better Way: Rubrics

When I’m making a rubric, I ask a simple question: “What do I want the student to accomplish with this specific project?”

We’re not talking a course-long activity here, we’re frequently looking at a single day’s worth of work (maximum 2 weeks, for my older students).

This is where my ADHD comes into play. I’m going to have a short list, because if I start getting distracted while writing it there’s no way I should expect a student to focus through the whole list.

The result is going to be 3-5 things I want their work to include. My youngest students might only have 3 “look-fors,” and even the older students are usually going to have 4. Point values may or may not be distributed evenly, depending on what I want valued.

My older students, for example, will usually have a list of 4 requirements, each worth 25% of their grade. In the beginning of the year my youngest students might instead have a ranked list of scenarios, where managing to log into the computer without help gets them most of the way to an A.

“When the ink was still wet on my certification I sometimes made a list of 10 things I needed to see. Granted, I was teaching high school at the time, but that was still a lot to get done. I like my current method much more.

“But Aaron,” you might ask, “How do I make sure they know everything the test checks in Chapter 5 of the math textbook?”

Great question.

How do you know they’ll remember any of that the day after the test?

My students don’t forget how to make movies, because it’s interesting and compelling enough that the knowledge sticks with them. If I have them make a movie covering a math concept they might not memorize a whole chapter, but they’ll be more likely to have that part down.

Now have the rest of the class make videos about the other sections in that chapter.

Have everyone in the class critique each other’s videos. Give them the rubric, and ask for positive and constructive feedback.

I do this in my classroom. The Critique Days count as an assessment score. My classes aren’t small enough for everyone to watch everything in one day, so I limit them to 10 critiques, with any extras as extra credit.

(I sort them alphabetically by student name and have every student start with their own video, so ideally no two students are grading the exact same list of videos.)

If you want to be really daring, you can average the scores the students give together and have that be a portion of the grade. Reserve the right to override the result, though. I’ve found my students collectively tend to be on the mark for a lot of things but every now and then a misunderstanding results in what would result in an unfairly low grade without me correcting things.

(I’m not the only voice in my classroom, but I reserve the right to be the loudest one.)

So, yeah, ditch high stakes tests. They’re bad. The people who make us have to use them should feel bad for doing so. Assign a project. Use a rubric. Everyone’s going to have a lot more fun learning that way.

The Right Camera For The Photo #Blaugust2026

Posted on by Aaron

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

Ewen Bell is an Australian professional photographer who appeared on my radar last year when I started spending more time on PeerTube, though he has a podcast and a YouTube presence as well.

His recent video, A Long Chat About Learning The Art of Photography (Here’s the YT link, if you prefer that.), is true to its name and gives an overview of a lot of the things you may want to consider if you want to get into photography.

Given the same responsibility I wouldn’t stress all the things he does in the same amount, but if photography’s a hobby you’re thinking of diving into, there’s far worse places to start.

Mr. Bell spends a significant amount of time talking about types of gear you can use, and makes a point of bringing up phone cameras.

After all, most of us have them, they’re decent enough these days, and they fit in our pockets! Why not use them for the hobby?

There’s a saying among a lot of photographers: The best camera is the one you have on you. If what you have is a phone, that works. You can lament not having the $30k DSLR with a lens that needs its own insurance policy, or you can take a photo.

My students don’t have phones. Last year we started a school-wide phone ban, and suddenly they had to rely on lab equipment.

We’ve a mix of cameras, with low end but modern DSLRs, ancient but serviceable DSLRs, a handful of compact cameras, and a growing collection of bridge cameras. Because my classroom projects involve a lot of student choice, I have to ask students what they’re working on when they want to borrow a camera.

Someone trying to take photos of silhouettes is more likely to need a DSLR than someone trying to demonstrate an understanding of the Rule of Thirds, for example.

For myself, I’ve barely touched my DSLR since Summer Break started. I love it, and enjoy when there’s a good reason to use it, but it has a lot of settings to manage.

Don’t get me wrong, that’s why I bought it. I WANT it to have those settings. The downside is that when I’m using it, I’m in the mindset that has me thinking about those settings, trying to get the best photo possible.

That’s great for the results, but lousy for being THERE. I’m doing a job with the camera, not soaking in the moment.

This summer, I’ve had a few opportunities to go places and see things. Most of these involved family who live across a state border. I didn’t bring my DSLR, I brought my Camp Snap Pro.

(This isn’t an ad for Camp Snap. There’s other cameras that can fit the niche of being a compact camera built to take photos but not distract you while you use it to take photos. Some of them do a better job, some are worse. It just so happens that Camp Snap is the one I’ve been using.)

My phone will take a better photo. It has a bigger sensor (not by much), better lenses, and a not insignificant amount of software that tries to clean things up before I even see what I took, but I don’t trust it. The more my phone does to make my pictures pretty, the less the photo can be called my own.

The draw for using my phone is convenience – it’s the best camera if I have no other camera at hand.

The draw for the Camp Snap and others like it is it’s simple enough to be cheap and not a distraction from the life experiences you’re documenting.

The draw for a DSLR (or mirrorless) camera is the significant control you get over everything.

Mr. Bell spends most of his time talking about DSLR/mirrorless gear, because that’s seen as the end goal. If you’re a professional or serious hobbyist, that’s where you’re going to go, and for the most part he’s not wrong.

There’s something to be said for other paths, though. I don’t wave a finger at someone using a phone to take a photo.

I might make a face at someone using a DSLR on the Auto setting, but that’s just force of habit.

Content Diversity #Blaugust2026

Posted on by Aaron

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

There’s a guest “Opinion” post by Oz Alon over on PetaPixel that talks about how photographers are doing less specialization in order to make a living as photographers.

Now Oz Alon is a CEO if a business management platform so I’m looking at this article as more of an ad than a photo news story, but the idea that it’s hard to make ends meet by just doing wedding photography is not too much of a stretch for me.

I’ve been teaching at a K-8 arts academy for almost 20 years, now. When I started, I just taught elective classes. There was barely any photography, no videography to speak of (On 32 bit computers? Surely, you jest!), and the initial job description that I was told to go beyond only mentioned Microsoft Office products as my content area.

There were students making videos, but that was the purview of the TV Production teacher.

Move forward a couple years and budget cuts hit hard. I remember furloughs. It wasn’t a good time. In the shake-up, the TV Production department (our art department with the lowest enrollment) was cut and I inherited those students.

I started out trying to copy what they’d been doing. I had some experience with video at that point (I’d been posting videos here for a few years by then) and I’d been teaching storyboards for years in my previous visual art classes.

All videos, all the time. If it wasn’t a video, it was a plan for a video or critiques of student videos.

It was extremely limiting, but it’s what I thought was expected.

Here’s the thing, though: My class was never called “TV Production.” That program was gone. Mine was brand new. I could have done whatever I wanted, provided I found state or national standards that backed me up.

Eventually I branched out in bits and pieces. Students dipped their toes in music production using GarageBand, since we had a MacBook cart we could use.

We started taking more photos.

We made animations.

We made podcasts.

Minecraft came along and I started letting students create “adventure maps” so long as they scripted the challenges and recorded themselves completing them. I had them doing game design and it was wonderful.

Eventually the remaining TV Production departments in my district were rolled into a new department, Digital Media Arts, with its own state standards and everything. You know what? Those standards matched what I was doing with my more diverse lessons.

You know what most teachers did?

Video production, and nothing else.

You know why? You may want to make sure you’re sitting for this one:

“We’ve always done it this way.”

Inertia’s a heck of a thing.

There’s efforts to change this. On the district level my department still has its annual film festival, but now we also have a festival for podcasting and photography. We’re encouraged to branch out to those areas as well, and given sample lessons to help us step out of our comfort zones.

(Most of the high school photos come from the vis art students, though, because photography “has always been” visual arts and, again, inertia.)

But as slow as they may seem, changes are happening. Tomorrow, before I give my own song and dance to new teachers about things they can do, another awesome colleague will be talking to them about photography.

We’re not just TV Production any more. Haven’t been, for as long as my students have been breathing.

It’s good to see other people agree.

Load-Bearing Corners #Blaugust2026

Posted on by Aaron

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

There’s a guide by Pye Jirsa on headshot photography over on SLR Lounge. As someone who doesn’t do a lot of portrait photography, it’s a good read.

What strikes me is how different this is to what we experience with school photos.

School Photo day is a mass disruption to the school schedule. The photographers have a lot of work to do in a short amount of time and teachers just accept that maybe we’re not going to get our lesson done for every class we see.

I’ve got the steps down for school photos. Sit on the stool. Place your feet on the marker (this turns you to the side for a 3/4 view), if you’re wearing glasses, tilt your head down so there isn’t a glare.

You can ask for a retake but it’ll look the same as the first one.

If you’ve read through the SLR Lounge article, you may have noticed a lot of things have been left out. Perhaps the contracted photographers would care about that if they weren’t photographing 500+ students and their teachers, but they just don’t have the time.

The article even includes advice for having an actual conversation with the subject. That’s not happening when photos are being taken on the stage in the cafeteria during one of the lunches, I assure you.

If you have the idea that school photos don’t turn out nearly as well as professional headshots, well, you’re darned right. For all of the expertise of the school photographers, they’re not given the time or environment to output the same quality.

Switch over to what I do in my classroom. Students learn by doing, as any art teacher will tell you. Early on in my digital media arts position, I decided that meant more assignments would equal more learning.

In some ways, it did. Student had a homework assignment video due every week, and every two weeks they had a more intense project video due. It was a lot of work, and the ones who managed it learned to streamline their workflows to get things done on time.

Many corners were cut, but what we didn’t understand was that those corners were load-bearing. An unscripted, unplanned video by an 11 year old is exactly as high-quality as you think it is, because they don’t have the 10,000 hours needed to do that without a script.

I’ve been doing this for a bit longer, now, and I’ve learned to know better. Students still have a project due roughly every two weeks, but it might not be a video. There’s no homework that’s labeled as such, though they may still work outside of class.

The learning is still happening. There’s actually more learning taking place, because those corners that were being cut were load bearing, but they didn’t have the time.

The quality of the work has also predictably improved, and they’re getting more awards for their efforts to prove it.

There’s still the complaint that they have too much work, but these are 10-13 year old kids. If I asked for one video a month I’d get the same complaint. (In fact, this has happened.)

I think about this when I read news stories about companies giving employees more work to improve productivity. I’m not sure it’s understood that if you scrap your quality, what you’re producing isn’t worth selling.

As I said, the corners that get cut are sometimes load-bearing.

“College & Career Ready” is a Moving Goalpost #Blaugust2026

Posted on by Aaron

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

Ariel Gilreath wrote a recent article in The Hechinger Report on what Niagra Falls, New York is doing to prepare students for a rapidly changing career ecosystem.

Two main things they’re doing involve not always emphasizing college and starting to think about career paths as early as 9th grade.

I’ve mixed feelings about this.

As the son of an electrician and grandson of a carpenter, neither of whom used college degrees to do those lines of work, I can get behind the idea of the trades as important lifelong career paths. College was the right call for me for a lot of reasons I don’t intend to itemize here, but I’m not everyone.

As for starting looking at careers in 9th grade… Well, I started that in Jr. High. I kid you not, I frequently used a library pass during Study Hall to go and research different careers, including benefits, drawbacks, required education, and expected salaries.

I’ve always been a nerd.

I also did this at a time when the employment landscape wasn’t getting “disrupted” every few years by a techbro with a shiny, environmentally unsafe new toy.

It was over 8 years from when I latched onto art education as a career goal to when I stepped into my first classroom I could call my own. During that time there were two major changes that affected me:

  1. Internet use was more prevalent when I graduated, allowing me to apply to more school districts at a faster rate than what I’d have managed otherwise.
  2. My college requirements grew slightly more lenient, allowing me to take any elective in the humanities instead of being limited to a foreign language credit. (After taking 4+ years of French and scraping by each time, I was fine with this.)

That’s 8 years.

At the time I’m writing this, 2020 was closer today than my college graduation date was to when I entered 9th grade. Since then we’ve gone to distance everything to get everyone back into buildings. We’ve gone from Bitcoin to NFTs to the AI Bubble.

In 2017-18 Maryland’s Governor Hogan spearheaded adding Computer Science to Maryland public school requirements. I’ve mixed feelings about Hogan (I mostly dislike his constant desire to cut public school funding) but that push is why I teach a coding class.

It was added because there was significant worry that there weren’t going to be enough people entering the workforce with coding skills in the following decade.

You know … the one we’re in now.

The one where coders are getting laid off because “Vibe coding” can do the work for you, so you don’t need a team of coders any more.

I’m still teaching coding this year, but next year I might not. I’ve heard tell that the Computer Science requirement may be broadened to include the other classes I teach, and having me teach 2 different Middle School subjects is easier on the scheduling than having me teach three of them.

Employment Landscapes change, and they’re changing faster now than they used to be. I hope that some of them bounce back after the AI bubble bursts, but someone who picked Computer Science as their major 4 years ago because it was in high demand is graduating into a hellscape today.

But you know what? People still need plumbing. They still need their houses wired, and faulty wires fixed. (My father wired new houses from time to time but spent much more of his time doing the small jobs that big contractors charged too much to touch.)

Going into a career that still needs training but perhaps not a college degree will get most people earning money faster while also not racking up massive debt that, legally, they can’t even clear out with a bankruptcy.

There are still people who are going to want the careers that require a degree. Future doctors, lawyers, scientists, and even, in spite of all warnings, future teachers, are all still going to head off to universities, but it’s going to be a much smaller number.

I’m absolutely thrilled that I’m not the only one tapping the “you don’t need a college degree to be financially independent” sign, but it’s going to cause problems. Not for the trades, we need people there, but for the colleges.

College is already far too expensive. Reduced enrollment is not going to help, and when some degrees see their applicants drop far enough, they’re going to go away.

My own alma mater is known as a great school for future teachers and a great school for artists. You know what you don’t need to be an artist? A 4 year degree. It’s great if you can afford it, but fewer people can and an income has never been guaranteed.

(Heck, with the teacher shortages, in some places the 4 year degree requirement’s on shaky ground.)

There are going to be changes. There’s going to be changes because of those changes.

I just hope that when the dust settles I still recognize the landscape.

Don’t Make Me Get Inside the Mechanical Turk #Blaugust2026

Posted on by Aaron

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

There’s an interesting read by Luke Plunkett over at Aftermath about employees pretending to use AI but still doing all of the work themselves.( Note that this is a more informal news site meant for more video game themed content, and profanity exists. Maybe don’t open this link up in front of students.)

I’m fortunate to not be in their shoes. Granted, my employer has opened the door to AI use, but with many limitations, even more so for student use, and at no point have I been told it’s mandatory.

(The people who want me to use it really, really want me to use it, but if I want to be favorable I’ll point out people who really, really like a TV show would like you to watch it, also.)

As I don’t teach higher than 8th grade I’m under even more restrictions. We do have access to Adobe products but the GenAI portions are only enabled for High School staff and students, at least as of last school year. (I did not complain when I found out.)

Not so for employees outside of my small corner of education, it seems, as companies needing to brag to shareholders and other investors that they’re being the most productive ever with the newest of buzzword tools are mandating AI usage and even implying bad things will happen (career-wise) if they don’t ramp up token use.

(I’m going to acknowledge here that some places are learning the financial downside of this and move on, grateful that learning by doing can still exist among adults.)

I marvel at the dichotomy of some trying to hide their AI use in certain situations, like student papers and, very notably, legal cases, while elsewhere people are having to pretend AI had a hand in their work because someone higher up the chain is certain that’s a better outcome.

I can tell you right now: AI does not make a student film better. It makes it look like slop.

AI can’t help me write better. Proofreading is the hardest part of the writing process for me, and because AI shows what an answer looks like (instead of showing an answer) I’d have to check over anything it does more thoroughly. It’s emotionally draining in a way that proofreading my own work or even student work never is.

(Besides, everyone knows the best way to check for errors is to publish the document and read over it after you know someone else has already seen it. You find ALL the errors that way.)

I can’t see a time when supervisors in my content area will put me in the same boat as the anonymous interviewees in the Aftermath article for a few reasons, most notably the emphasis on teacher and student choice that weaves through everything in our digital media arts department. We’re given tool options, not tool mandates.

Beyond that, things cost money. You know what my department does when they’ve paid for a thing and people don’t use it?

They stop paying for it.

It’s a novel concept, I know. You’d think businesses that can afford to lose more than my school system’s entire operating budget and still somehow stay afloat would be able to grasp the concept.

Instead, their employees have to lie about running what they did through an AI to “check” it.

Walking Away From The Right Tech #Blaugust2026

Posted on by Aaron

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

On the whole I like The Hechinger Report. They have a lenient policy in regards to sharing their articles and they tackle some important issues.

On the other hand, they recently published a guest editorial by Alexandra Walsh, “the chief product officer at Amplify, one of the country’s largest K-12 curriculum and assessment companies.”

To its credit, the opinion piece only mentions Amplify once, and even then it’s in the author bio at the bottom. It’s trying very hard not to be an ad for the company while still leaving people feeling more favorable towards companies like it.

Which is to say, it’s an opinion piece, it doesn’t hide that it’s an opinion piece, and one should approach it as such as they look for the things with which they agree and disagree. (You’ll find both in there, because we’re human.)

As is my theme for Blaugust, I’m not going to give a rundown of the article and go over what I like/dislike about it. It’s what made me want to write something, but that something is not a review.

I used to be an early adopter. New things came out, I played with them, enjoyed them (or didn’t), and tried to figure out how to use them in my classroom.

(At the time I was a traveling visual art teacher and only rarely had access to a computer lab so how I got to use edtech was somewhat limited, but we had our moments.)

The problem was that not every tech “innovation” is actually that. Sometimes disruptions don’t lead to better things, they just make the things that worked well work less well.

This was either harder to spot or just less common back then. It seems nowadays a lot of the “cool, new things” are heavily branded, commercialized, and/or meant to funnel students towards siloed ecosystems where they’ll spend their adult lives making those companies more profitable.

That motivation is incompatible with my motivation as a teacher. I’m not teaching the next generation of Adobe users, I’m teaching the next generation of filmmakers. There’s overlap, but I refuse to see that Venn diagram as a single circle.

(My own alma mater didn’t get it. At the time, they taught that if you wanted to make digital art you needed 1. A Mac and 2. Adobe products. Exceptions weren’t discussed, and to this day there are teachers in my field who believe this.)

In a few days I’ll be honored to give a short talk to newly hired digital media arts teachers in my district. I won’t be the only one talking, but a big emphasis of mine will be on choice.

They’ll be shown Adobe products for editing video. I’m going to point out Kdenlive.

They’ll be shown generative AI (again, from within Adobe tools). I’m going to point out free, openly licensed content made by humans, and tools that can be used to make more of it.

They’ll be shown products that require subscriptions (ones that my district pays) to be useful. I’m going to point out tools that will never require that, some of which will work in a web browser with all of the editing done client-side.

I can’t guarantee they’ll all walk away from what I believe are the “right” things. I don’t want to be in a position where I have that much authority over another teacher. But I do want them to know there are options.

With those options, hopefully enough of them will pick the more sustainable routes.

30 years ago, I probably wouldn’t have. But then again, I didn’t have someone explain it to me.

Seeing (Yourself in) Your Art #Blaugust2026

Posted on by Aaron

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

You may have noticed that each of my Blaugust posts is hung on a hook that is another article (sometimes several), sometimes only loosely related to my topic.

I’m liking the idea of using these as jumping off points, and the whole thing feels far less derivative than the “articles” I’ve frequently found in the past that were “Here’s a video with a paragraph about it that hits word count but really just watch the video.”

There’s a purpose for those, but I want to distance myself from them.

The Setup

With that in mind, PetaPixel has a story on The National Gallery of Art announcing an exhibit “that will trace African American photographers and portrait subjects from the earliest days of photography.”

I like how this got through the draconian policies of our current administration, as acknowledging that any non-white, cishet male existed and sometimes had problems in the 1800s is grounds for content warning signs placed outside your museum these days. (I’m looking forward to the days when people look at that last sentence with disbelief.)

The Tie-In

So here’s the thing: Most of my students are African American. I’m not looking up the numbers for this, but it’s like 95+% of them. It’s so prevalent that in spite of my own heritage being a mix of Irish/Scottish/German one of my students found out only last year that I’m not black. They just assumed everyone in the building was, because everyone in their class was.

(In their defense, they have a sibling who is very light skinned, so they thought I was like their sibling.)

So yeah, I have a student population where, when they see most pop culture media, people who look like them are regulated to the “token black friend” casting role.

Having a whole exhibit that tells them “No, people who look like you have been using cameras for almost as long as they’ve existed” is a powerful thing.

My Students’ Work

One of the things I love about my content area (by that I mean Digital Media Arts) is that it has a district-wide theme of amplifying student voices. I didn’t come up with that, but I feel like it was pulled subconsciously from my brain and put into the official documentation.

I teach in an arts school, where we have multiple disciplines to showcase: Visual Arts (of course…), Dance, Theater, Chorus, I could go on.

But the one I teach? Media Arts? It’s how the others get shown off outside of a school gym.

There’s a hazard to this, though.

Artists usually want only their best work to be seen by others. Artists are also usually their own worst critics. This does not lead to a healthy combination. I’ve students who will avoid handing work in because late assignments don’t get seen and critiqued by their peers.

(They also really hurt grades to a degree that submitting unfinished work will not, but if logic always overpowered anxiety I wouldn’t still have acrophobia.)

And then there’s the teacher involvement.

I’ve long felt that art teachers could be sorted into two categories: Those who presented student work as accurate representations of what the students were able to do, and those who wanted to showcase the best art possible.

Those aren’t the same thing. Everyone makes mistakes, but students have more to learn and therefore make more of them. I’ve seen vis art teachers gluing collages back together, going over drawings with markers to fix the linework, and other atrocities to make the student work look nicer. In the end they had work they were happy to showcase, but saying it was done by the students was not really honest any more.

The Solution?

I’ve many goals for the upcoming school year, but one of them is to provide a wider audience to my students.

Many things get easier by doing them, and showing your work to others is included in that. There’s still a need for curation (self and by others), but having my department be more visible is likely to lead to more students getting comfortable with the idea that others will see what they do.

It’s a lot of work.

I’m not sure I can manage that with all of my other duties, but I can delegate.

Among other things, I teach presentation. I can have my 8th graders work to curate student projects in ways I can share with a wider audience. As the teacher I’ll have to have the last say in what goes live (not to mention managing publicity release forms, etc.), but that’s a small portion of the effort needed.

Having my students do the initial curating removes me a bit from the process, but this is an ideal result. The goal is for STUDENT voices to be amplified. If I become that teacher with a marker to fix the line work, then I’m inserting my own voice into things.

That ruins the whole point of all of this.

Sure, as the adult in the room I need to be the last say in what goes live, but by the time I’m making that call there should be few, if any, creative decisions left.

The next hurdle is in HOW to present the work. I teach web design, but I don’t have a school-approved web host I can use for that.

Google tools are for the most part approved, but students can’t make anything in Google Sites, Docs, etc. be viewable outside of our district.

I understand and agree with these limitations. I don’t want them reversed, that opens the doors to too many headaches, but it does make things harder.

The simplest solution I see is for the 8th grader making the showcase to put the whole thing into a video and send it over to me to import to my own account and change the permission settings so a wider audience can see it. I need to check the whole video anyway, so that’s fine.

Another option would be for them to make a Google Presentation that I again copy over to my own account. Video and audio embedding can be done this way, and it’s actually how our Vis Art department did their art showcases back during our distance learning years.

The issue that arises is that permissions for the Google Presentation aren’t the same as the embedded media. You can see all the slides but then get an error for a video if the video has more restrictions. This is, in fact, something I learned from the aforementioned Vis Art shows.

So I have a rough semblance of the outline of a plan.

It might get changed a lot as I talk it out with the other teacher in my department as well as our school admin.

We’ll see how this goes.