The Agile Classroom?

One of the many habits I have throughout the school year, is to create a folder of links to articles and what not that I find interesting, but don't have time at that immediate moment to really "get into it".  When summer rolls around and I am watching the Reds, I will start to go through that folder and pick something that jumps out to me at that moment.

Since summer has started, my 5-year old girl has become nice and accustomed to waking up ate, leaving her pajamas on for half the day, and more general laziness than even I can tolerate.  So while the Reds were stomping on the Cubs, and the Spurs were stomping on the Heat, I decided to go through that list of links and came across this Lifehacker post about treating your kids like a team of agile program developers to lower family stress.  Already tired of saying the same things over and over to my daughter I watched the TED presentation by Bruce Feiler about a management method called agile development that has been in Silicon Valley for years, but he and other families have applied it to their daily family routines with some pretty positive results.  I could give you blow-by-blow details, but I think watching the video will give you a better understanding of how it works.

Overall, I think the overall messages from this talk are the most important.  Kids in my classroom are always looking to make a checkmark!  It is amazing the motivation a checkmark can do. Also, giving students input in how the classroom operates on a daily basis can empower the students to create meaningful accomplishments.  Lastly, I cannot stress the importance of "quick wins" in the classroom.  Testing culture has made students scared to do anything wrong in the classroom.  As an Art/Tech teacher, I want my students to embrace the "experimentation" aspect of my classroom and want to continue making students feel like they can push forward to try new things, knowing that wins and losses are fleeting, and that we can quickly move on knowing that we learned something in the process.

Some of the portions of this talk that I would like to put into place in my classroom might be a classroom manifesto, monthly meetings, and possibly checklists for each project that students can use to make sure they are focusing on the important aspects of the projects.  I'll keep you posted as I move forward with some of these ideas.

I will also keep you in the loop as I try this at home with a stubborn, but overall creative, sweet, and opinionated daughter who is always looking to make people happy.

Summa-time!

After what can only be described as the most hectic month in my life, May has ended and with the first of June comes summer break and my list of things I have wanted to work on all year is starting to take shape.

Business first.

Next year, the art department in my district is going to transition to OTES by creating Student Learning Objectives for visual arts.  My colleague and I spent a few PD days working on some ideas.  We are slowly going to transition by creating just one SLO for one class in one grade level.  This may sound simple, and I believe that it will be, but first, we must be able to generate baseline data from that one class to create a successful SLO that will show genuine growth from our students.  I have a lot of ideas which I will continue to share throughout the summer and beyond.

Along with the SLO's in visual arts, It will be my job to help the grade level teachers incorporate some of the common core standards that address technology into their curriculum.  I am blessed with having many tech savvy teachers in my building that are both willing to learn and also like to think outside of the box like myself.  Our first thoughts are to look towards interactive writing portfolios for the 3rd and 4th grades, but we will continue to discuss this over the summer to create some really interesting things for the kids to do during the school year.  More posts about that a certain to follow.

Now, on to my personal goals

My wife and I love to garden.  Our garden is getting bigger each year and now we are thinking about how we can get the most yield out of our small plots.  I am looking into creating an automatic watering system using Arduino micro-controllers and also continuing a woven sapling fence to keep the hordes of rabbits that like to eat our Swiss Chard.  Although, we really only plant the Swiss Chard because it looks pretty and it keeps the rabbits from eating the other stuff in the garden.  We are also looking into ways to arrange the garden to spend more time in it, like adding a seating arrangement or table where we can eat in the garden from time to time.

I started to replace all of the baseboards, trim, and doors in the house over spring break, but our busy spring schedule kept me from some finishing touches.  I hope to get all of that finished up as well.  There are lots of other small home improvement projects on my list that I won't bore you with here, but will share from time to time.

My daughter will be attending Kindergarten in the fall, and has a genuine love of books and wants to learn to read like right now, so some of the teachers in my building put together a little kit for me to start that process with her over the summer.  I want to capitalize on her intrinsic motivation now so that she enjoys reading as much as I do.  I also have several books myself I am hoping to power through this summer.  A healthy mix of education-related reading as well as some fun books that have sat on the shelf over the winter.  Ella and I will be spending the summer together for the first time (we had to keep her in preschool over the summer last year to save her spot for the school year) and we have a lot of just plain fun written out on our list to accomplish before school begins in the summer and I am looking forward to that the most!

In terms of my personal artwork, I am hoping to get back into some old school screen printing projects. Before I got my job with my district, I spent some time with several notable concert poster artists and created some of my own posters for bands.  I am thinking about building my own screen printing rig and getting back into the concert poster game because I have always been artistically inspired by music and the friends I made during that time were some of the most creative people I know.  Since moving back into education I have missed many of those creative conversations and look forward to re-igniting my creativity.

I hope everyone has a nice summer and I look forward to recharging the batteries and getting a head start to the next school year. I'll keep in touch all summer with everyone right here!

4th Grade Portraits Inspired by Modigliani

Last year, I ran across a lesson idea from another blog that I just had to try.  We were already doing a chalk pastel portrait using the Italian artist Armedeo Modigliani as inspiration, but I was having trouble trying to convey his style to the students.  By using white glue as a means to keep the chalk from spreading around and losing the form of the artworks, my 4th graders were able to follow the steps to creating their own, elongated forms for the head, neck, and shoulders of their self-portraits.  We discussed Modigliani's use of these elongated forms to create eye movement across the paper.  One of the main goals for an artist is to make a viewers' eyes move across the paper to create visual interest.  

Modigliani was excellent about giving what is usually a very static subject like a portrait more interest through his use of lines and shapes arranged on the paper.  The students began by creating a long, oval shape on their black papers and then started to add the neck and shoulders, trying to create visual interest by stretching the shapes in strange ways.

After tracing our lines with white glue and letting it dry, we were able to make a barrier to contain different chalk blends on the paper, keeping our portrait organized to accentuate our elongated shapes and visual interest points.  Hopefully, this lesson will be an excellent percursor to our future discussions about form and sculpture.

Setting up the iPads for intervention

Building iPad Wallpaper

Last spring, the technology department received 20 iPads from the PTO.  The reasons for purchasing these iPads was to use them in intervention settings throughout the building.

I have had an iPad for years and was on the verge to becoming a convert.  Then I had to manage more than one.  My feelings changed quickly.

I should have known after reading Steve Job's biography.  The term "single-user experience" took on a whole new meaning.  Apple wants everyone to own an iPad, not several people sharing one.  Apple has, however, complied with schools like us and has released enough tools to make it plausible, yet not nearly as easy as it should be, to set up iPads for multiple users to share.

Now my knowledge of all things Apple is limited, but I will share with you here the steps I used to set up different user profiles, added apps, and also planned the management of the iPads.  There may be an easier way, but I have found that this way works the best for our building (note: we work in a building with several technical limitations that I will describe throughout the post).

The iPads arrived in the spring.  Excited, an IT guy (the guy) and myself went to a training session about managing the iPads using the Configurator app.  The app is a tool that I believe Apple made after the fact for the iPads because it is clunky and not nearly as intuitive as most of Apple's offerings.  I am pretty sure that Apple created this app after demand for iPads in public environments became apparent. With that said, it still is not difficult to begin setting up profiles and backing up settings and creating an entire profile that does things like lock in-app purchases, password protections, other things you wouldn't want your child doing on the iPads.

After the workshop, I put together a method for setting up the iPads by taking home one of them, setting it up with the iTunes account, and then created a backup of the device.  Then, I was able to apply the backup to the rest of the devices.

Since then, The teachers using the iPads have found more apps and are beginning to find ways to supplement instruction and increase student achievement.  Now, we are dealing with the second phase of the implementation by creating several profiles for the iPads, making it reasonable to purchase apps in bulk and distribute to the grade levels that need selected apps that may not be appropriate for younger or older students.  This keeps app purchase costs down, but becomes a headache for trying to keep the different iPad profiles updated.

I set up three profiles.  Intervention, Primary, and Secondary.  After marking three iPads as the "master" for their selected profile, I can now copy selected iPads to their preferred profile and pass it on to the teachers for use.  We are still putting the final touches on this phase, mainly because:
1.  We lack a wireless network, so I must take the iPad home and do any updates or uploading there.  This simply just takes up time and adds a step or two to actually setting up the master profiles.
2.  Configuring apps is a pain.  You have to constantly keep checking which apps are checked in the list, or not even added to the configurator yet, adding more steps to an already confusing process.
3.  We have had constant troubles with the district iTunes account, so the account we use is a generic one I set up using my school email address.  Not ideal, but certainly easier to distribute apps.

Overall, using iPads in the classroom for intervention has been successful so far.  As we acquire more usability out of them through the use of wireless networks, I feel the sky is the limit.  Until then, we will continue using the iPads as best we can and I will continue to refine how and when iPads are updated and configured.

Tweeting Art

At the beginning of the school year, one of my goals is to get the students to become more reflective artists and discuss the principles and elements of art to enhance communication skills.  With the amount of time that we don't have available already, I was struggling with a way to get the students to talk more about their art without taking too much class time up.  Being the Art/Technology teacher, I dug deep into my technology tool bag and came up with an idea that will hopefully help me achieve my goal.

My Art Tweet
Twitter is becoming increasingly popular in educational circles.  Teachers are finding ways to incorporate the microblogging platform into their lessons in order to reach and engage students to participate and communicate using 21st century skills that will be beneficial to them in the future.

Twitter gives me just the right amount of characters to have students write about their art.  The 140-character format makes students think carefully about what they would like to tell others about the artwork and the process of creating it.  But, with standard Twitter rules, my elementary students are too young to have their own accounts, so I created one with the handle "MES artbot" and created a "worksheet" that gives students 140 blank spaces to add their art tweet.

After the students are finished with their tweet, I have them paste the half-sheet onto the back of their project.  Once that is done, I go through the projects in the morning and find a project with a great tweet.  Then, I take a pic of the project and post the tweet.  Here is what it looks like:


Tweets by @MESArtbot

Close Encounters of the Google Drive Kind

Our district, like many, has made the transition to using Google Apps for Education.  I could go on all day discussing the benefits and limitations that GA's has for schools, but for this entry, I would like to focus primarily on how this impacts the elementary students in my building and how I decided the appropriate procedures for me to introduce GA's in the technology classroom.

How to teach GA's to an elementary student?  Well, there are many different scenarios that can be used.  Most importantly from a teacher standpoint, is that you are able to have some prior knowledge of what your student's skill levels are.  Not just in terms of technology skills, but especially in reading.  There is certainly a lot of reading that needs to be done in order to communicate the specifics within GAs.  One way that I have tried to eliminate the reading deficiencies, is to share with the students a sort-of textbook GAs presentation.  As we go through the unit on GA's, I can adjust and update the presentation and students can access it within their Drive from home.

The presentation will always be a work in progress as we continue to add new skills for using GA's.  However, this presentation allows students to access skills we have covered in class and gives them the ability to review the presentation from home or during classroom computer time.  The point is, they can review this on their own time and hopefully share this resource with their parents when they are working in GA's.

Why a Google Drive presentation?

I could have just as easily used a site to collect and share this information, but I thought it would be too cumbersome of a project.  Here, I can add a page for each skill easily without having to manage a whole site.  Also, I wanted to be able to put the presentation right in their hands, and not have them look for it.  By sharing the presentation, the students will be able to find it easily and use it while they are signed into their account.  I could have used a document, but Google does not allow videos to be embedded into their documents, only presentations as of now.

You have resources, now what next?

The first step, is to get students to log into their account.  We do have a district login web page, but I have taught the kids that from home the easiest way is to just go to Google.com and click the "sign in" button in the top corner.  Teaching the students this way gives them the knowledge that if they can access Google, then they can access their apps.

Student usernames and passwords were generated by our technology department, and I simply create cards with labels on them that students use in the technology lab.  Also, an extra card is made for the 3rd and 4th grade students that they can take home and share/use with their parents.

Next post:  Our First Google Apps Assignment

Smarthistory: Khan Academy for Art Teachers

Smarthistory, presented by the Khan Academy in collaboration with several museums, is a wonderful resource for art teachers looking to add some technology components into their lessons.  The website explains their purpose as:
Smarthistory.org is a free and open, not-for-profit, art history textbook. Part of the Khan Academy, we use multimedia to deliver unscripted conversations between art historians about the history of art.

My first impressions of this resource after stumbling upon the site while searching for video about Van Gogh's Starry Night are that this could be a great tool for the art teacher, especially at the Middle and High School levels.  Art and Art History are expansive topics, but the site organizes artists and movements through an interactive timeline making it easy to find what you need.

All of the features of the site are well thought out and highly organized.  The conversations, links, videos, and shared Flickr images give the art teacher multiple methods for presenting art pieces and explaining their significance to the art world.  Since I am an elementary art teacher, I would share with you that my students are not going to be browsing this site on their own due to the many nudes that are displayed in several different pieces, but the middle and high school teachers could probably let their students use this site for research as long as there is an understanding between the teacher and his/her students about how to approach such images in art.