DAY 05: Wednesday, June 30th

Last day thoughts:

I have been pondering why I have come up with realtively few uses for Web 2.0 in my classes, and think I may be getting closer to it (I know, excuses excuses).

Using Tim's class as an example, his goal is to teach students about Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. It's the same thing I studied in 10th grade English way back when, and probably was on the syllabus in my parents' English class. So that is the same.  The difference lies in the almost infinite ways of teaching Julius Caesar-- lecture to them about the play, have them read it and then give them a test, watch a movie version, have them act it out in class, or what Tim did-- a really great idea-- have them create a movie clip with Shakespeare's dialogue, but translated into a different film genre. This project, making a movie scene, became a means to the larger end-- teaching the play.

In other classes, Web 2.0 tools are likewise used as a means to a different end-- teaching human anatomy, geography, biology, etc. And the extensive class time devoted to implement these ideas and use these tools to cover core content becomes the project.

In my class however, creating a physical painting or drawing or sculpture is the project, thereby relegating the Web 2.0 tools to a support role, not the project itself. Having students create a podcast about how to make a drawing, for example, probably wouldn't leave much time to, well, make an actual drawing. I can see assigning those students who take my class for honors credit these types of projects ("Create a video podcast that explains the theory of 3 pt. perspective, to be used as a resource for future students") to be completed outside of the normal class time. But I'm not sure how to fully integrate them as the project itself. Which is why most of my ideas so far involve rethinking how I use lectures and exercises and homework to teach art history and aesthetics and evaluating/discussing a work of art. Stuff that frames and supports the actual studio "making" project-- making stuff is already my core content.

Day 04: June 29th, 2010

Today I thought I'd try blogging throughout the day, as thoughts are zinging around:

The AM presentation on podcasting brought me back to where I left off in my last blog, with the idea of the Curriculum Liaison. One outcome from the most recent Visual Arts SAC was the decision to explore the need and support for a district-wide position that would place an art teacher at the disposal of other academic area teachers, with the mission and role of supporting their effectively bringing differentiated instruction into their classrooms.

Over the last few years, I and my peers have compiled a long list of projects that involve visual arts skills that we have:

• Observed being implemented into non-arts classes
• Been proposed and discussed, but never implemented (usually time to collaborate issues)
• Consulted on, or contributed to in some manner (whether in the form of up front ideas, or back-end, rubric suggestions)
• Been asked by students from other classes to help them with

Specific examples: a social studies teacher had students make propaganda posters, but in the end found he wasn't sure how to grade them, or how to explain to students why some posters seemed better to him than others. A science teacher asked me for help designing a science model to visualize a more abstract concept. Another teacher showed me drawings made by students in his class, students who have been in my art class and who I know could do MUCH better. I watched students make a video for their History class, and found myself biting my lip, as I knew  that if I could have caught them before they shot their footage, I could have helped them communicate their ideas more effectively. So art is happening all around the school, and I love it-- I sincerely believe that some students can more effectively demonstrate understanding through non-traditional assessments. I worry/wonder about a couple of things, however:

1. Making sure that the project represents authentic assessment. A few years ago I was part of an accreditation team visiting a high school in NH, and saw an an English project that was displayed as an example of allowing students to demonstrate their understanding through art. The original goal was for the students to learn the themes, style, and importance of Edgar Allan Poe. The assignment was to create a "movie poster" for a fictional film adaptation of one of his stories. 

The rubric for the project awarded 10 points for including the title of the story on the poster, 10 points for spelling it correctly, 10 points for including Poe's name on the poster, another 10 points for spelling that correctly, 10 points for having their own name on the work (huh?), more points for having an illustration on the poster, and so on. I was appalled that this was considered genuine learning. A student could easily have never cracked open a book and still completed this project, demonstrating only that they knew how to copy text from the cover of a book and apply a marker to a piece of posterboard. 

My point is not to suggest that this is happening here in Ipswich, only that applying the arts as an effective assessment tool in other disciplines requires careful planning and understanding of the medium involved. Assistance from an art teacher trained in the desired medium can help in planning such projects, as well as developing effective rubrics to assess the end products.

2. Students are capable of some truly amazing work, if given instruction by experts in that subject area. It would be foolish to ask me, an art teacher, to try and lead students through an advanced calculus project, as it's something I haven't thought about for twenty years, and only barely grasped back then. Likewise, having an art teacher assist students in other classrooms as they produce posters, videos, illustrated books, animations, etc. would, I believe, result in stronger end products. The question for me is whether that level of craft is something other teachers would embrace. For example, Tim today explained how the "Godfather" video, to the outsider, looks like kids goofing off-- but as an assessment of their engagement with and understanding of the source material, it was in his eyes successful. As an art teacher who has craft itself as part of the course goals, I could see how with a few pointers and technical upgrades, those students' very creative idea could have been fashioned into a more cohesive end product.

Would having an art teacher in this type of classroom, teaching the craft of film in the English class, add anything beneficial to the project, or just take more time away from the course content as students learned these other skills? Would teachers appreciate and utilize this person if such a position existed? I'd love feedback and thoughts on this. It seems like a great idea to me, but would not want to pursue it more--and we as a SAC would love to pursue it-- unless there was a perceived need on the part of other teachers.

Day 02-03: Monday, June 28th pt.2

With all of the technical snafus today, I feel the need to throw a healthy dose of skepticism in the works:

• I worry about the dependence on technology out of our control. Sometimes I even think that students enjoy getting away from it, secretly enjoy projects and assignments that do not require getting on a computer. I am (pleasantly) surprised by the number of students in the art room who don't want to use computers in their work. That said, there are plenty that do...

• I'm amazed at how gung-ho Tim (Sidmore) is about technology and the digital world. He once told me about how he had converted his music collection over to .mp3 files, but then had a problem (was it a hard drive, or a permissions issue?) and lost ALL of his music. As much as I love my ipod, I make a point of buying all of my music on CD-- a format I own and control. I may lose or break my ipod, or the hard drive where all of my music files are stored may become obsolete (remember zip disks, anyone? That was only a few years ago), but I still have the physical CDs, records, and cassettes, (some I've owned since grade school) and the means to play them. Short of a devastating fire or theft, I should still be able to enjoy them for years to come. The reason the ownership piece is important to me is because of the ephemeral nature of the web. Last year I discovered a website called lala.com, which was a music site that let the user stream an entire album once for free, and then elect to download (for the usual fee) or stream (for a third the download cost) the files. I loved it so much I was tempted to start building a collection of streaming files, as I could log in to any computer anywhere with an internet collection and have access to the songs I paid for through the lala website. Cool, right? Well, just this spring apple bought out lala and shut it down-- which would have left me out of luck. I also remember reading about people who had all kinds of personal information (digital family photos, journal entries, etc.) stored on some aol-spnsored website, who lost everything when aol went under and pulled the content from the web. So as much as I see the benefit of using google this or that, or setting up wikis, if the host site is some entity who has no direct connection or loyalty to the school, or to me, I am leery about entrusting them to store the results of my hard work. For example, I could be typing this to a .doc file stored on my computer, but instead it's on the blog company's server-- who knows what will become of it?

• Until the infrastructure is more reliable, and equipment more accessible, it seems almost an exercise in frustration to encourage so many teachers to build curriculum around computers or other equipment. I began this week thinking I would work on updating the Visual Communications curriculum, using Web 2.0 in a series of in-class projects. Quickly however, I realized that I probably will not have access to the computer lab during that period, and so decided to plan to incorporate Web 2.0 as homework or otherwise outside-of-class assignments. I'm sure I'm not alone there. And Tim himself demonstrated the danger of relying on the school network when his online final exam crashed during the exam period. Great ideas, scary to try and count on in a day-in-day-out fashion?

Next post: Curriculum Liaison?

Day 02-03: Monday, June 28th pt.1

Playing catch up today, as I was at a close friend's wedding for most of the weekend and so haven't thought too much about Web 2.0 until this morning.

DAY 02 POST:

I think the best use of this class for my curriculum is to try and focus on using Web 2.0 tools to better assess certain, more difficult aspects of the Habits of Mind. The main focus for the Visual Arts SAC this past year has been reframing our assessment using the Habits of Mind (HOM) as developed by researchers at Harvard's Project Zero. These researchers have postulated that the studio art process contains a variety of different aspects of learning, and that art teaches students to think, reflect, and problem-solve in a way that is consistent with learning in any other discipline, and that is essential to creating a successful, life-long learner.

The eight HOM as defined in the book Studio Thinking are Engage & Persist, Express, Develop Craft, Observe, Envision, Reflect, Stretch & Explore, and Understand the Art World. For our purposes, these terms were combined to form six categories, each graded separately. In my classes, a typical curriculum unit has a variety of grades, each of which corresponds with one of the HOM categories. For example, in my Digital Photography class, I keep a daily shorthand record of a student's effort and focus, which at the end of the unit becomes the grade for "Engage & Persist". The finished photographic work itself is judged separately on its technical merits ("Develop Craft"), how clearly it communicates the intended idea ("Express"), and the level of creativity, originality, and exploration on display ("Envision, Stretch & Explore"). In this way a student who tries to say "But I'm no good at art!" can be reminded that craft comprises less than half of his or her ultimate grade.

The most difficult category to assess is "Observe & Reflect". It's fairly easy to , um, observe this habit in a student, based on how they work, the kinds of questions they ask, and the manner in which they complete their work. (Do they just bulldoze through a project, trying to "get 'er done", or do they stop and look at their progress, recognize their own strengths and weaknesses, revise their work, and then think through the best next step?) But it often feels too subjective, and ultimately not very helpful to the student, to simply assign a grade for this category and move on to the next unit.

I hope to create spaces online, using moodle, for students to post examples of their work, both finished and in progress. Students will then be assigned to comment on their work and that of their peers, the hope being to create a running dialogue that can be used in class as an entry point for discussion. Getting students to loosen up when discussing their work, and the work of peers, is often very challenging. Jump starting the discussion online hopefully will allow less outspoken students a chance to find their voice and share their insights.

The last category, "Understand the Art World", is typically assessed through written homework assignments or oral class presentations. These occur fairly infrequently, and so here is a place where I can hopefully increase student engagement and deepen understanding of the concepts presented though more frequent online blogging and sharing assignments. I hope to set up a space for posting links to helpful (and academically valid) websites for research-- a list that can grow as students contribute to the list sites they discover. Instead of writing an essay on an assigned topic and then printing out and turning it in to me, students can post their work online, with subsequent assignments involving both peer editing and commenting on the initial piece. I'm very excited about having students read each others' work-- as it is now, there is often no time in class for me to read select essays in class and deepen the discussion.

In short, Web 2.0 may provide an effective way to both encourage students to be more reflective, and assess their ability to observe and articulate what they see and know. I don't expect any "magic bullets" here, just a good start on finding solutions and becoming a better teacher.

DAY 01: Thursday, June 24th

First, scattered, random thoughts:

• When creating work electronically, I worry about the difference for students between finding information and understanding content. I have seen wonderful presentations that, when I ask the student to explain the words they are presenting on the screen ("What do you mean when you stated that 'Edward Weston later repudiated his involvement with Pictorialism?'") they often have no idea-- they simply had done the copy/paste thing.

• It's hard sometimes to both find the time to critique student work and get a good conversation started. I'm intrigued by the possibilities of engaging in critiques online, through blogs or wiki sites. What's easier-- a wiki page, or each student with their own blog? Can a single blog page be set up for the class, each student with their own page within that?

• Space and formatting is an issue with blogs and wikis-- with my digital photo classes, we shoot in large (often 8-10 MP) resolution, for printing purposes. But that results in each student using anywhere from 500 MB to 2-3 GB of storage for their work. Too much to host online using these free resources? Also, at full resolution their images will take forever to upload and will be too large for the display space. This would involve having students go through the extra step of making small-res versions of everything they shoot, resulting in two copies of all their work. I'm not sure if this is better than our current system of showing work in class from USB flash drives or CDs, where a students could, say, show us all 50 pics they shot in glorious full-res.

• In the Visual Arts we are moving towards assessing students less exclusively on the finished work, and more on the "Habits of Mind" displayed during the art-making process: Engage, Envision, Observe, Reflect, etc. Coming up with a way to legitimately measure "Observe" and "Reflect" has been a challenge-- blogs and wikis seem like a great way to measure this. Kind of like Matt Simms' graded round table discussions, only online and outside of class. It would also be a way to have students peer review their own work for proofreading, as well as read each other's thoughts on some of the questions they are asked to consider ("What is the difference between art & entertainment?" "Do we as a society suffer from visual overload?")

• One (hopefully) positive side effect from using blogs is promoting maturity and etiquette when commenting online. I am appalled at how people routinely respond to news articles, etc. in the comment section on various sites.

• Personal pet peeve-- the uniformity of design and lack of control in customizing the look of the blog pages. As a visual artist, I can't stand the idea of using someone else's stock art as the background of my page. Or not be able to upload my own.

• Great way to find and share websites with valid and useful info on research projects...