Creating Community and Engagement with Video

Much has happened since my last post. I have a year of Graphic Design under my belt, a new show for my school's Live Stream channel, and lots of new tricks up my sleeve. It has been a wild ride and I continue to love teaching online!

Last year, my school introduced EPAC (ECOT Public Access Channel), a place where students can attend field trips live from home as well as view educational content. Color Me Happy was then born, an art show that is accessible for all ages. In our district, we do not have a stand-alone art course that students take in elementary grades so I wanted to give students a place to get some art making instruction. Check out one of my episodes below!



In addition to Color Me Happy, we continue to explore areas of interest involving Art around the state of Ohio. As always I find video to be a great way to engage students and build community.



I have big goals for this 2017-2018 school year including a use of new technology tools like our 3D printers, vinyl cutter, and laser cutter. I can't wait to give my Graphic Design students a taste of professional design equipment later this year. Stay tuned for more updates!

Collaborative Class Project in Art Club Online

For years I have dreamed of creating a mural or other large artwork with my students. Logistically this can be a bit of a challenge with my students being scattered all over Ohio without the ability to converge in one location very often outside of graduation and perhaps prom. So this year I set out to make my dreams come true with a collaborative project for my Art Club students.

First came first, choosing a theme. For this one I was inspired by "The Eye Project" (above, more photos here). I liked this project because it shows the diversity of students but also ties them all together into one composition. Myself and the other Art Club facilitators held a meeting with students to discuss how eyes express ideas and emotions within artwork. We provided tutorials for creating eyes and encouraged students to think beyond a typical realistic eye if they wished.

Second, I had students sign up so I could mail them the materials they needed for the project-in this case that included a letter of directions and a rectangular piece of watercolor paper. The students chose what media to work with for the project, created their compositions, and mailed them back to me. Then, I had a blast putting it all together. See below!

The final product!

Art Day: Intervention and Supplemental Opportunities

Last year, I had a crazy idea to meet one of my failing seniors in the library and work with him to complete the art projects he needed to pass and graduate. It worked! He successfully completed art right in front of my eyes. At that point I thought it would be great to offer this opportunity to more students. Lots of organizing and paperwork later, Art Day was born!

Yesterday, myself and 3 other teachers on my team, met at our school headquarters to facilitate a day of making art with failing students, many of them seniors. We each invited our struggling students and set up a room with 5 different stations for various projects in Art 1. We provided lunch, materials, and instruction. The result was awesome! The students really enjoyed working side by side and creating artwork. They are also now all passing and I am hoping Art Day will give them the confidence to continue working on their own.

On Art Day, we also had the opportunity to invite our advanced students to paint ceiling tiles for our headquarters building. Selected students from all levels of art were invited to paint the tiles and I am so impressed with their work! It was a really great day and fun to get both groups together for a day of artmaking.

Aiming for Higher Achievement

Over the past 5 years, I have written about my passing rate, reluctant learners, and working to increase the number of students successfully passing my Art 1 class to earn their fine art credit. But this year, I have grown tired of pulling teeth for my students to achieve the minimum. I am tired of begging for students to do work when I really want them to learn more than the minimum, try more than the minimum, and achieve more than the minimum. So, I wrote a goal on my whiteboard that hangs in my office this year, "Aim for A's, not just passing."
Until this semester, I believe I have been aiming too low at times for my students. So, this semester I have been working through some new strategies to increased achievement, rather than simply pass rate. And, it is working!
Here is what I have been trying:

Page 1 of the catch-up packet

• Emailing all students who are missing assignments from the previous week every Monday morning with helpful strategies and scaffolding worksheets when applicable
• Increasing my phone calls by an average of 20 more reaching out calls per week, encouraging students to complete their work and addressing any questions
• Freeing myself of the "passing packet" and replacing it with a catch-up packet (click here to download) which includes more weeks of art projects, better directions, and is marketed towards improving a student's grade with no promises of receiving a passing grade.

Surprisingly, students seem to gravitate towards the catch-up packet far more than they ever did the passing packet, and it doubles as an intervention tool for students with an IEP or who simply prefer to work in a worksheet-style method. It works well as a way to help students who were added late to the course get caught up as well. 

We are only halfway through the semester and already I am seeing an overall 10% shift to higher achievement (letter grades) than at this time last semester! 

With 2% more A's and 8% more C's (and 8% less D's) I am over the moon. Go students go!

Process and Progress Checks

I think one of the biggest challenges I have teaching art online is helping students mid-project as I would if I were walking around a brick and mortar classroom. Of my two courses, Art 1 is the most fast-paced, and I am able to see a student's growth and process as they progress from project to project as well as through practice sketches and one-on-one sessions. However, I rarely see an "unfinished" project before I see the final one. This is because students are generally completing one project per week and students often do not choose to show me what they are working on in this condensed time frame. Art 5 is much slower paced with artwork being created over many weeks as they are higher level, more independent, and aimed at portfolio development. Thus, this course became my guinea-pig for developing ways in which to see a student's artistic process.
This year I have instituted progress checks for Art 5 students where they check in several times throughout the process of creating a piece of art. It is important in an online environment when working with students individually, to plan out structured checkpoints and have clear expectations. Each project begins with a brainstorming sheet such as the one below.

Following the brainstorming sheet, students have a progress check dropbox where they submit their project at least once before the final project. Though I only require them to show me one time, my students have all chosen to show me their work multiple times for each project. These progress checks give me an opportunity to give each student detailed feedback through screencast-o-matic and dialog about their artwork on the phone or via email. Below are a couple examples of progress checks and final work.

The conclusion of this process is reflecting upon the piece and self-assessment. In Art 5, students are encouraged to grade their own work in order to develop their skills of selecting work for a portfolio. They are also asked to answer reflective questions which differ based on the goal of the project. An example of one is below.

Adding progress checks to my Art 5 class has been very successful so far and I am receiving higher quality work from my students and having more conversations about their goals for each piece and how they are effectively communicating their ideas. How do you encourage process-oriented thinking in your classroom?

Dressing Up Engagement Strategies

As I mentioned in my September blog post, I have been working on making tip videos in my classroom which highlight tricky concepts for students and seek to correct misconceptions before they happen. I have been successful with these videos and noticed an increase in the quality of student work that I have been receiving since I made them. However, I noticed that some students were still not watching the videos (Screencast-o-matic lets me check my view count for each video). I did notice that I had a higher view count than any other week during the week that I dressed up for Halloween. This got me thinking, perhaps students would be more likely to watch a video if I dressed in something silly or unusual. Students are able to see a thumbnail of the video when I embed it into my announcements. Cassie Stephens, a fellow Art Ed blogger is the queen of dressing up for the art classroom. I am not quite to the point of making my own outfits, but here are some of my silly video outfits:

This seems to be entertaining students as much as it is entertaining me. My view counts have almost doubled since I switched to costumes!

Tablets as an Option for Art Making

I am getting very excited about next semester starting next week and I am preparing my semester 2 classroom with new technology on my mind! Big surprise right? I have been working with my team this semester to create tablet options for all of my Art 1 projects. Previously, all projects were required to be done on paper through traditional techniques. However, I have found that students really enjoy the option of creating a different way and it also benefits students who do not have art supplies or are having problems with their scanner. Also, having a digital option prepares them for all kinds of careers and it helps meet UDL guidelines. So, I have finally done it!
Each lesson in Art 1 offers two options for the assigned projects: a traditional option and a tablet option. All of my students have Android tablets to work on and all the apps I use in my class are free. Some of my projects offer a similar option for the tablet option as the traditional. For example, students may paint traditionally for their Impressionist Landscape, or they may use a painting app such as Sketch Guru.

Traditional watercolor

Using Sketch Guru

Other assignments have a different way for students to show their understanding of a given concept. For example, for my proportion lesson involving foreground, middle, and background students are able to draw the interior space of a room with pencil, or they can create a digital collage using PicCollage. Both assignments accomplish the creation of a piece that shows depth and understanding of proportions but some students might prefer one over the other. 

Traditional drawing

Using PicCollage to manipulate images

Some of these apps add additional materials for students to use that they would not have access to at home easily such as the texture tablet option. Students are learning about visual and tactile texture and then asked to either create a drawing showing 4 textures or create a sculpture showing 4 textures in TrueSculpt. 

Traditional drawing

Using TrueSculpt

I thoroughly believe in teaching traditional art skills and would never want to move towards 100% digital in my classroom but I think options are important. I am excited for students to have the opportunity to experience more diverse materials in their art making and get a taste of digital art if they choose. Stay tuned! 

Shameless plug: I'll be giving a presentation at NAEA this year on Saturday at 2pm all about using free Android apps in your art classroom!

Addressing Weaknesses and Clarifying Concepts

This school year I am working on addressing common mistakes students have made during previous years at the beginning of a lesson so they can be more successful this year. I am doing this through a short weekly video announcement.

Each video presents 3 tips for the current project. I am getting a good amount of student views on these videos. Aside from increasing the quality of student artwork, these videos also serve as a weekly greeting from me that my students see when they enter the classroom. 

Student Recognition

The new school year is up and rolling! I always enjoy the energy and inspiration that come at the beginning of the school year. I am feeling well rested and ready to conquer the world! One of my many goals this year is to make my students feel special. In the online classroom, the key to student engagement is to make students feel cared for and noticed. One of the ways I seek to accomplish this is by creating a weekly student art gallery. I use Animoto (which offers free educator accounts with pro features!) to create an exciting gallery video each week.

I have always posted this gallery for students to access, but this year I am also emailing students who earn a spot in the gallery video to let them know how proud they should be. I send along a certificate which they can print and hang up if they desire (seen at the top of this post). I am hoping this little bit of extra effort gets my students feeling excited about creating artwork and feeling valued in their classroom community. 

Revitalizing Old Projects

This semester I decided I needed to breathe some new life into one of my projects I have been teaching awhile. The students have always done well on it, but I wanted to see them think more deeply than they had been. The project was focused on mixed media. At this point in the semester, students had learned how to use many different media in their work, and the mixed media project was meant to help them think past one art material at a time and use several including non-traditional materials like found objects to create a unique composition.

I decided to update this project by providing a new focus for the theme of their piece and adding an inspirational artist to the lesson. I chose Romare Bearden as the artist and personal culture as the focus. I included a reflective essay in the project where students explain how they represented their culture and why they chose the media they used for the piece. Below is my student gallery for the week. I really enjoyed this new twist on an old project.