My students need a MacBook Pro to support the 10 iPads that we have in the art room, to maintain digital art portfolios, and learn how to create art through technology.
My classroom is best described as a revolving door of creativity, buzzing with excitement. Less Talk More Art! There are over 550 students that enter and exit my classroom per week. Here they learn how to think like an artist, and use many mediums from watercolor and clay, to printmaking and ink.
Our school is one of the only International Baccalaureate accredited schools in our state.
We are accredited at both the elementary and middle school level. My students are agile learners and love to learn in a hands-on environment which makes art one of the favorite subjects. Each elementary student has art once/week and middle school students have art 2-5 times per week. Each student has a portfolio where they keep their artwork as well as a organizer to store their artist trading cards (ATCs) which they create and trade with each other. My students are really getting excited about artist trading cards and anxious to participate in a multi-school trade in a few weeks with over 150 different schools throughout the nation and the world.
My Project
I am requesting 1 MacBook Pro to support the 10 iPads that we have in the art room, to maintain digital art portfolios, and learn how to create art through technology.
A couple of years ago I was able to secure a technology grant from a generous donor which provided our art room with 10 iPads. We use them every single day! We use them for research on images, we use them for the various art apps that it provides, we use them for video making capabilities and we use them for taking photos of our art. Each middle school student has an online portfolio and they upload photos of their work to their portfolios. I would like our elementary students to have Artsonia or Creatubbles accounts in order to upload photos of their work for parents and loved ones to see and post encouraging comments for them to read. We currently lack the capability to back up and retrieve photos/videos etc. from the iPads with the computers that we have in the art room. Looking towards the future, I am hoping to have 1:1 ratio of iPad to student to be able to create some amazing art through technology but a Mac computer will be necessary to facilitate that goal.
With the addition of an Apple laptop in the art room, I can retrieve photos in large quantities from the iPads and load them in student online portfolios.
It also means that student-created movies and videos can be retrieved and saved for future classes to see as great examples of creativity. It also means that our iPads will be able to be supported and backed up on a regular basis. Students can also take turns using the tremendous design capabilities that Apple computers offer.
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