Art. Education. Technology.
One of my favorite podcasts it Tips From the Top Floor, which talks about digital photography, and one of my favorite podcasters is Leo Laporte.
So I was just thrilled to find out that the two of them met at the Podcast Expo. I’d love to see an interview between the two of them with more substance, though.
Today I talk about how I want to do more tech literacy in the Art Club, but in smaller chunks. (The chirping sound was the AC. I couldn’t help it.)
The voice in the intro is courtesy of Chris Craft. I dare you to send me a better one.
After four frenzied days of preparing for students next week, teachers in my county have been given today off so that we might be tan, rested, and ready come Monday morning.
Well, I don’t get much sun so I’m not tan. And I tend to stay up too late so I’m not rested. But I’m ready! No, really!
Much of what I’ll be doing will be the same as last year, with me reinforcing the other curriculums with my lessons. The big changes will be in my Art Club.
The music teacher in my base school will be helping out again this year, but instead of something random every week she suggested that we put on a combination art show and concert. I was simultaneously thrilled with the idea and embarrassed that I hadn’t suggested it myself, but oh well.
So while she’s teaching the drama and chorus portions of the art club to groups of 15 kids, I’ll be teaching the visual arts portions and having the students work towards producing artworks they feel are worthy of showcasing in the spring. With us staying after school two nights a week, we’ll have 60 students to work with. That’ll give us quite a large show, and I look forward to the challenge.
Another added bonus is that we have some money left over from last year. It’s only $300, but that’s enough to buy several half-decent digital cameras if you shop around and don’t need 15 megapixel digital SLR cameras complete with macro, wide angle, and telephoto lenses. If I’m lucky I’ll be able to snag some cameras that can record video in addition to stills, but we’ll cross that bridge when I go shopping.
Today many of the art teachers in my county got together for a beginning of the year inservice. Along with the free art material sample packs and lesson workshops, we also had time to hobnob and network.
While having lunch with a high school photography teacher, I shared with him my desire to expand my lessons that involve digital photography. He let me know that when his students use digital cameras he tries to get them to do as little post editing as possible, so that he doesn’t cross the line from photography teacher to computer graphics teacher. (His school has one of each, and he doesn’t want to step on his coworker’s toes at all.)
This made perfect sense to me, but as I’m less an art specialist than a jack-of-all-trades, I don’t feel that I need to stick to the same limits. To be honest, my requirement of aligning the art curriculum with other subjects means that the more circles I have in the venn diagram, the more likely I’m doing my job.
This also got me thinking about technology. (but then, what doesn’t?)
Sometimes I’m referred to as an art teacher who’s into technology, or a technologist who’s into art. Do they really have to be separate things? It’s my opinion that anything that allows for creative expression is art, and therefore fair game for one of my lesson plans. It’s true that there’s some art that normally falls outside of the realm of the digital, but scanning it or taking a picture can quickly change that issue.
On the other side of the spectrum, I can’t remember the last program or website I’ve seen that didn’t have an artistic touch to it. (The BIOS doesn’t count.)
I’ll wrap this up with a question from one of my colleagues. Today I was asked if I’d ever considered teaching technology all the time.
I answered without hesitation:
“I already do.”
I’ll be in Pennsylvania all next week to visit with friends and family and perhaps spend a day or two at Musikfest in beautiful Bethlehem, PA. This doesn’t mean that I’ll be taking a break from podcasting, although I probably won’t be posting the MP3s in the middle of the day like I normally do.
This will be my last big fling before I head back to school, and I’m really looking forward to this coming year. I may not have a classroom to set up, but after two years in the same buildings (more or less) I’m familiar enough with the curriculum to start planning my lessons.
I’m actually under more restrictions than you might think. As an Interrelated Art Teacher I’m not allowed to just stroll into the classroom and teach whatever I want. 
I have to develop lessons that don’t just match the state standards for art, but also the standards for other subjects.
So my 3rd grade origami lesson must also be a review of fractions and geometry. Or when we use Model Magic to make insects my 6th graders need to identify the body parts by their proper names.
But there’s more to my motives than just teaching cross-curricular lessons to students. You see, with four buildings there’s no way I can see each class as often as I would like.
I need to find someone who spends more time with the kids than me … gee, who could that be? Oh yeah, the classroom teacher!
While I teach the students, it’s also my job to teach their teacher at the same time. Lucky for me, this can be as easy as making sure my student helpers hand paper out to everyone including the teacher. Everyone seems to love art, and in my experience the better teachers are more than happy to join in.
They might not repeat that lesson the same year, but the following year when they’re covering the same part of their curriculum they might just remember how that crayon and watercolor project helped reinforce their lesson on hurricanes.
It means I’ll need to plan something different each year, but that’s OK – I think it’s fun.
Hear yourself on my upcoming 100th podcast spectacular! Just click here and your web browser will use your computer’s microphone to send me an audio comment.
I’ll accept just about anything, including simple greetings or congratulations, shout-outs, reviews of products or services, commentary on recent events, or even plugs for other podcasts.
This is, of course, provided everything is kid-safe.
Think of it as free advertising that will reach an exclusive listener base. And yes, by “exclusive” I mean “small.”
Today I’d like to talk about a little thing the art community calls “Form vs. Function,” and relate it to education in general.
An item’s function, as we all know, is what it does – what it’s purpose is. Form, on the other hand, is what it looks like. Both can be equally important, but not always.
Take the chairs in a classroom, for example. Sure, they were designed by someone, but at the end of the day their main purpose is to lift the students high enough off of the floor so they can use their desks. Their color was most likely determined by whatever was cheapest or easiest.
On the other hand, a painting puts much more weight on it’s form. In fact, it’s form is so important that looking nice is also it’s function. (This is, of course, assuming it’s not there to cover the spaghetti stain your three year old managed to put on the wall.)
Think that since you’re not an artist this doesn’t apply to you? Think again. When’s the last time you sat through a workshop filled with pertinent information, but was still so dry in it’s presentation that you remembered nothing afterwards? Or maybe the PowerPoint slides looked nice but added nothing to what the speaker was saying?
As a traveling art teacher I’ve seen a lot of classrooms, and I’ve seen far too many teachers who put the function of teaching so far ahead of the form of teaching that student retention is almost nil.
I could just tell the students what they need to know, give them a test, and move on, but how many of them would really learn?
No, like a well designed car I need to both get the students there and … well … look good doing it.
As those of you who are teachers get ready for the new school year, I want you to think about how you can balance form and function in your lessons. Will your desks be arranged in the same boring grid, or will you break it up a bit? What posters will you have on your walls? (If you don’t have enough posters, have your students make some that tie in with your curriculum.)
What will your class website look like?
And there’s more to it than just how your room appears. When you’re presenting your lesson, will you be hiding behind a podium or moving about the room as if it was your own personal stage? More activity shows you have more interest in the subject, and while that doesn’t necessarily make sure the students will learn, just try to teach them the same thing if they think that even you aren’t interested in long division.
In other news, I’m thinking about playing some audio clips on my 100th podcast which I should reach sometime in late August, provided I don’t get sidetracked somehow. I’ve decided to accept just about anything, including simple greetings or congratulations, shout-outs, reviews of products or services, commentary on recent events, or even plugs for other podcasts.
This is, of course, provided everything is kid-safe.
Think of it as free advertising that will reach an exclusive listener base. And yes, by “exclusive” I mean “small.”
If you want something played during my 100th podcast, record it and send it to me. I’d prefer it to be in MP3 format, but I’ll accept other file formats if they’re not too large.
I love origami, so whenever I need an idea for one of my mini lesson videos I tend to lean towards that first. Lucky for me I know a lot of designs that are public domain!
I tried something new with this episode. Instead of using iMovie I tried out eyespot.com. It’s not as feature rich as iMovie, but it does a decent job and even allows you to export video for video iPods. Nice.
This is the second of two lessons that I recorded at the DEN North East Regional Institute. It has nothing to do with the DEN other than that.
I’ve had Artist Trading Cards, or ATCs, on the brain for a while now. Is it any wonder that I would do a Mini Lesson on them?
This is one of two lessons that I recorded at the DEN North East Regional Institute. It has nothing to do with the DEN other than that.
In today’s podcast I try out Google SketchUp, a cool program available for Windows and, yes, now for Macs as well.
A while back another DEN member (whose name I forget – sorry!) blogged about Google SketchUp, a free program that makes it very easy to design in 3D and export your creations into different formats including Google Earth. My initial response was that it looked like a cool program, but I was disappointed that they didn’t have a version that would run on a Mac.
(Remember, I’m one of those crazy people who don’t do Windows.)
Well, they finally developed their Mac version, so I decided to see what the fuss was about.
Google SketchUp required me to log in as an administrator in order to install it, which was annoying but not too much so. Still, that does mean that if you want to put this on the computers in your classroom you’ll either need administrative privileges or a method of asking your Technology Coordinator nicely.
With that unpleasantness aside, I opened the program and was greeted with a window offering to teach me all the basics using three self-paced tutorials. I won’t go through all the steps here, but let’s just say it was very intuitive and user-friendly.
The only problem I really encountered once I got SketchUp running was the absence of hot keys. Many programs have key combinations that act as shortcuts for certain repetitive steps. The different tools in Photoshop, for example, each have a key assigned to them so that you can switch between, oh, say, the pencil tool and the eraser tool without having to move the mouse around too much.
When you get used to hot keys, you really get used to hot keys. However if you’re the type that always goes to the top of the screen to pull down a menu, you won’t even notice that problem and my whole rant’s been for nothing.
There is something I noticed that I think is infinitely cool, though: SketchUp uses three point perspective. For those of you who haven’t had an art class in a while, artists figured out that if you take parallel lines (like the sides of a road) and stretch them off into the distance they appear to get closer together the further back they went. This illusion, when copied in their paintings, helped create a feeling of depth that hadn’t existed before. Simple examples would have all of their parallel lines meant to move back in space meeting at a single point, or vanishing point. The lines didn’t have to go all the way to those points, mind you – they just needed to be angled so that if they were longer they’d touch the vanishing point.
More complex artworks can include two vanishing points, and the photorealistic ones include three points. Three vanishing points, three dimensions, that’s not a coincidence, by the way.
Now where was I? Oh, yes. SketchUp uses three vanishing points, so if you draw a large box you’ll notice that none of the lines are in fact parallel – but it’ll still look realistic. I think that makes SketchUp a great program for art lessons on perspective. It takes an abstract concept like three dimensions on a two dimensional surface and does the difficult stuff for the student, so they can get a better idea of what drawing with a vanishing point should look like.
I don’t think SketchUp should replace handing the students paper, pencils, and rulers for a perspective unit, but I do think it would be a nice way to warm them up before they start the hard work.
In today’s podcast I show just how easy it is to create a new blog.
Yesterday I decided to make a new website.
Don’t fret, I’m not getting rid of AcademicAesthetic.com any time soon, but I enjoy making Artist Trading Cards so much that I decided to make a site for sharing my favorite ones.
Of course I could just post them on my Flickr account, but their pesky 200 picture limit, along with their “Focus on photos, not anything else!” policy left me thinking I should pick another resource.
So once again I turned to Blogger.com. One of the neat things about Blogger is that you can have more than one blog on the same account, so after I logged in I just clicked on the little button that said “Create A Blog.”
Then came the hardest part – figuring out a name for the new blog. I felt “Artist Trading Cards” was self explanatory enough, but wouldn’t you know it, someone had already registered a blogger blog as artisttradingcards.blogspot.com. After playing around with a few other names I registered artistcards.blogspot.com and I was ready to go!
Sorta.
You see, there’s nothing wrong with the default templates for Blogger – I recommend them, in fact, but I wanted something a little different. I also didn’t want to spend as much time customizing this new blog as I did my Academic Aesthetic one. For the solution, I turned to Google.
A quick search using the words “Blogger templates” found a site conveniently titled Blogger templates. They didn’t have millions of looks to choose from, but they had one I liked and that was enough. I copied the code and went to my new blog’s settings page. A quick click on the “Template” tab later I was pasting the new code in, and after clicking on the big button that said “Republish,” my blog had a brand new look.
Now granted, I did a little more after that: I tweaked the RSS feed using Feedburner, added a web counter to see how many visitors I get, and slapped a Creative Commons license on the whole thing. I also changed the default links listed in the sidebar to ones in which I was more interested, but that’s content for another podcast.
The moral of this story is that if you’re holding back on blogging because you think it’s too hard, don’t. I may do a little more modifications to my site than the average person, but the majority of my work yesterday was nothing more than copying and pasting. If you can use Microsoft Word, you have more than enough skill to fool around with Blogger.
Oh, and if you’re interested in that new blog I made, I intend to post a new Artist Trading Card every weekday. I’ve already got a month’s worth ready for posting, so I don’t need to worry about running out of content any time soon.
