Apples for Artists: Enhancing Art Class with Technology
Help me give my students iPads so that they can compile their own online portfolios, in addition to exploring media arts and creating digital art projects.
I have the privilege of teaching visual arts to all of the students at McDonald International Elementary. Nearly 500 students, kindergarten through 5th grade, attend art class every week. We have a variety of learners in our school community with diverse interests. Some students are heritage Spanish and Japanese speakers, while others are learning the language for the first time. My students are very energetic, opinionated and busy, always coming to art full of ideas and pointing out connections between their art and language learning.
As an international immersion school, we help our students become global citizens and critical thinkers.
Each student spends half of their school day in an immersive language environment, learning either Japanese, or Spanish. In the art studio, we learn about artists and art movements from around the world, considering different cultural perspectives and contexts. Students also explore different art styles and mediums, in an effort to develop their own, unique artistic identities.
My Project
Our art program uses the Artsonia online portfolio platform. Having a set of iPads will allow students to manage their own portfolios. They will be able to practice photographing and curating their projects, publish their own artist statements and engage in self-assessment. The new Washington State Arts Learning Standards designate Creating, Presenting, Responding and Connecting as key pieces in the artistic process that we should be exploring with students. iPads will help our students more meaningfully engage in Presenting, as they will be able to experience the process of evaluating and selecting art for display, and publish their works publicly in our school's online gallery. They will more fully have ownership over this key piece of the artistic process.
We will also use iPads to create new and exciting, technology-infused art projects.
Students will be able to look up reference images for various projects and sketchbook studies, explore photography and short videos and photograph their work at different stages. These iPads will provide the possibility for small research projects and online scavenger hunts to learn about diverse artists and movements.
Currently, we are doing a unit of study on Art Activism that will require the use of iPads to create stencils and images for a street art project. Students will take photographs and then learn to use apps that convert photos into vector images to create stencils and silhouettes in the style of Banksy and other mentor artist. This is just one example of the innovative art projects that this technology can bring to art class for years to come. A set of iPads for the art studio would help us immensely in producing meaningful, contemporary, collaborative art projects of this caliber on a regular basis.
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