Remembering to Make a Difference

I have spent the last two days filling up my brain with new knowledge about teaching. I learned about motivating students, new technology I can use, how to involve parents and guardians, and various other techniques to improve my teaching strategies. I am excited to implement new multimedia into my classroom and to increase attendance of my live lessons. I am excited to try new ways of motivating students to make the right choices in their education despite their many barriers. I am excited to work even more closely with my inclusion teacher in a more effective way that helps us be a team. However, I took home more than just helpful tools this week. I was reminded of a philosophy that sometimes gets pushed to the backs of our minds. As teachers, we are here to change lives, to teach students more than simply our subject matter. Our first keynote speaker, Steve Gilliland told a story about the 5 people in his life who have made the biggest difference, one being his 6^th grade teacher. I remember the teachers who impacted my life and who made me want to do the same. Sometimes as teachers we get sucked in to our daily tasks. For me its grading, making PowerPoints, and trying to reach out to those reluctant students I have in my classroom. And sometimes they get lumped together and its call after call and answering machine after answering machine that I am speaking to. But Steve’s story reminded me that I want to be the teacher that students tell stories about later in life, long after they are no longer students. I want remind students that they CAN do it, and that someone believes in them. Though I have been learning about new tech programs and approaches I can use in my classroom, the fact is that none of this matters without remembering to make a difference. I can craft the most wonderful lessons and creative projects but at the end of the day I must always remember my purpose. I am a teacher and I am here to change lives. Every moment of extra time I take to learn about a student and talk on the phone about things that don’t always have to be about art class, every time I stop to appreciate a student’s work, or commend a student on working through a personal challenge, these are the moments that matter. My goal now as I move into the end of the first quarter of our school year is to marry my new knowledge of practical skills with my enduring passion for teaching to make my students successful not only in my class but in life.

Perks of Live Instruction Time

This year, as with every year there were changes made to the structure of our office hours as high school teachers. While last year I spent about two hours a week in live instruction, this year I spend about five. One day a week I go over the weekly lesson and project and another day a week I offer an informal art critique for students to attend. Last year I did occasional art critiques with my students but not weekly. I have always been able to help foster discussion in these critiques but this year I am noticing students develop into a tight-knit community quickly and they have surpassed the stage of only making positive comments about each other’s work. Now, they also give suggestions to improve a piece of art, something they had previously not done on their own. The big change this year was going from one hour a week for homework help time to three. Three days of the week, I spend an hour each time with my live classroom open for students to “walk in” and get any questions answered. At first, I was skeptical about how many students would attend or how useful it would be and I have been pleasantly surprised. Last year I had one day a week students could attend to get help with their work and rarely had any students attend. With three guaranteed days a week it seems students are able to find time to attend. I am finding that students without working phones or who might be too shy to call me back are not reluctant to come to a live lesson. Today I worked with a student with special needs to get caught up on some missing projects. I reviewed the examples, instructions, and demonstrated some of the techniques we were learning while he drew them on his paper. These opportunities are difficult to have during a lesson day when I have many students attending but they work well in the smaller homework help time. This student was able to correctly complete a drawing using linear perspective and has been using these days to receive one-on-one help from me. I am making a concentrated effort this year to really slow down and get to know each student and I feel I am starting to be successful in this.

Professional Development and Integrating the Arts

Over the last month my colleagues and I have been preparing for our upcoming professional development meeting in October. We are a little bit of a unique school because we have so many teachers that we cannot fit in many venues all together for a PD day. Therefore, our October PD meetings will be taking place in a convention style where teachers sign up for workshops they would like to attend from a large pool of choices. The presentations and workshops come from a variety of categories such as instruction, technology, and engagement. Our art department will be offering a workshop on integrating the arts into different subjects, which is specifically geared to our online curriculum. With teachers being asked to differentiate lessons for different learning needs and styles, and the changes coming in the Common Core standards, it seems that integration is more important than ever. For our presentation we are focusing on providing online resources, specific lesson plans that can be integrated into existing content, and SMART notebook activities that can be used in live instruction to make lessons more visual and interactive. I have focused on Language Arts for my portion of the presentation and I have worked with the Language Arts department to craft several examples of integration specific to their curriculum. I look forward to presenting this information to colleagues at PD and learning from others.

A Day in the Life

Lately I have been busy, busy, busy! My team and I have been working on a presentation for our upcoming professional development event about integrating the arts into other subjects and I attended a field trip to the Cleveland Museum of Art last week as well. I will be writing more about that soon, but in the mean time I found this interesting video showing what a typical day is like for students at an e-school.

(Re)Learning to Blog

This school year I have joined a community of blogging online educators (http://inacol.wordpress.com/). I am so excited to be a part of a community of teachers who work in an environment similar to my own. This community has provided me with prompts for blog posts to help us learn together. The first prompt is sharing my blog’s purpose. It has been almost a full year since I began blogging here and at the beginning, my purpose was clear. I set out to inform anyone who was interested about what it is like to teach art online. At this point most of my audience was family and friends, many of them teachers, interested in education, or just interested in how on earth I could teach art online. I was writing to start conversations involving the questions people had about online education. I had the traditional educational experience in which I never attended an online school or took an online course and I had plenty of questions about online education before I became an online educator (and of course I still have questions!). Now it is my second year as an online educator and as a blogger and I am re-evaluating the purpose of my blog. I feel I have written about many of the questions people had and as my audience expands my ideas about what to write are changing. I still feel it is valuable to inform readers of the things I am still learning every day and how my online classroom works but I also hope to be a resource to the teachers in the online education community. I hope we can be resources to each other and learn together.

Building Learning

The dust is beginning to settle this week as we recover from some technical difficulties with our LMS (learning management system) last week. I am starting to get back into the groove of the school year contacting and welcoming new students and grading their first assignments. This week, students are working on using proportions to create a sense of space in their drawings. Like many Art 1 classes, mine focuses on foundational skills, at least at the beginning. Later, students will learn about linear perspective, which shows them how the foreground, middle, and background connect with this mathematical concept. An important element of any lesson in my online classroom is that is builds upon student learning and provides a foundation for future learning. When the connections are there, students retain more, and I can really tell when students understand the content. For this week’s lesson, students will complete a drawing of an interior room that uses the foreground, middle, and background to create depth and space. Part of their learning takes place by reading the lesson and looking at examples, but I feel the main part of learning takes place when they are asked to demonstrate it. A student might go through the process, “Now I’ve read about it. I know what it looks like. How can I create it? How can I make it my own?” I think that last question is especially important. I encourage my students to make each assignment personal even when the content is technical. In my online classroom I assess in chunks. Each week has a small project for students to complete which helps me witness students building upon their learning as they go. Assigning one project per week keeps students continuously learning and practicing their new skills. Creating is a way of learning that encourages problem solving and I love to see what my students come up with.

Preparing for the New School Year

At last, a new school year is here! I have been working since last Friday to get prepared to make 2012-2013 another excellent year in my classroom. As with any classroom, preparing the environment for students is crucial for starting the year off right. I spent much of my time in the spring making changes to lessons from the school year that needed improvements and clarification. Those changes went into the “Gold Course”, an index of lesson web pages we can import into our classes for the next year. Having made these changes when they were fresh in my mind made setting up online content go smoothly this week. I have imported all of the lessons into my Art 1 and 5 classrooms to get them ready for students to start next week. In online teaching much of the prep to get the classroom ready can be done in the beginning of a semester, leaving the semester to focus on teaching, grading, and working with students. Over the summer many technological updates were made to the systems we use at my school, including a new grading scale, scheduling of live session changes, and a new homepage template. They also updated many of the databases we use to record data. One of the wonderful things about technology is that it is always making our work online more seamless and therefore it is easier to help our students the best ways we can. It’s a little like getting a present when we come back from summer and find new technological tools we can use. One of the changes I am most excited about is the new grading scale and the matching grade book that comes with it. We have moved to a uniform way of grading on a 4-point scale that allows letter grades to be equally spaced. For example 4=A, 3=B, 2=C and so on. Because of the grading change, we have a new grade book to go with it that automatically implements the new policy. The technological tools and the policies work together to make this change effective and clear for students and teachers. Some of my goals for the year will be creating more video content for Art 1 and making more connections to the common core standards that will be implemented by 2014-2015. I will keep you all posted about my progress with that this year and other exciting information from the online art classroom. As always, thanks for reading!