The Art Studio 2.0

In my pre-service teaching experience I quickly discovered a great advantage in using PowerPoint in my daily lessons.  Not only does the program allow every student in the classroom to view the presentation on the big screen, but also I can generate strong visual examples with images, videos, and reference materials.   With class sizes increasing, it can become difficult to facilitate a purely visual learning experience of high quality if resources are limited to books, teacher demonstrations, and drawings on the chalkboard.  

As my teaching experiences progressed, I have also grown accustomed to using materials generators in facilitating any lesson, beginning to end.  Without the resources to purchase an art course book for each student – and let’s be honest, most students take art courses to take a break from the mundane reading and writing of the core curriculum – the Art Department is reliant on desktop publishing software.  In developing any lesson, I always begin with a PowerPoint presentation for introducing the artists, art processes, historical/societal contexts, and professional and student artwork.  Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop are ideal tools in producing student worksheets.  Some projects may take up to a week to complete, so this is a good opportunity to break-up the monotony of just “working” on the art project each day for the whole class period.  At this point I might show a video of a demonstration, or an interesting interview or clip of a particular artist or production concept – this is a great way to keep students focused on their objectives and the actual developing process while they are in the middle stages of the creative process.  

Considering the typical high school art room always involves 9^th-12^th grade learners with very different levels of experience in the art studio (thus many different learning needs and skills in the same class), I also use worksheet and puzzle generators from various online resources to enhance the students’ learning experience.  This is a great way to review and reinforce important concepts.  As a natural part of the lesson closure, I always incorporate a project rubric, a project critique for qualitative assessment, and usually a quiz or test to assess the students’ knowledge in a written format.  Although I have created my own rubric and critique sheets from Adobe Illustrator, it is a district-wide policy to develop our written exams on the test generator, Data Director.   Data Director is a program that allows teachers and administrators to create, share, and revise questions and answers while also collecting quantitative performance data for each individual student in the district.  And, of course let’s not forget STI…where would we be without this pre-historic version of the electronic gradebook?  Throughout each lesson, I am always finding ways to incorporate hypermedia design and development through digital cameras, photographs, scanners, projectors, videos, animations, editing software, desktop publishing software, text, tutorials, reference materials, Glogster… and the list goes on.