ISTE Standards for teachers

Standard 1.a. Promote, support, and model creative and innovative thinking and inventiveness

This first standard listed in the ISTE Standards for teachers seems to capture the spirit of why we even need to ensure technology learning in school.  It is part of why I think technology is such an important piece of modern artistic practice, and in arts education. Learning technology is about facilitating a kind of thinking, and even a learning mindset, not about specific tools or media.

In my classroom, I am still striving to support creative and innovative thinking through simple and complex tasks. I want to leave students space to "figure out" new technologies and solutions to the problems we encounter as artists.

OERS, who knew?

I had not heard the term OER, or Open Educational Resources, but realize I've been finding them and  vetting them for my own purposes since beginning as a teacher.

I stand staunchly behind the idea of "open source," where a publishing company is not holding strict rights to educational resources and becoming an even more powerful political force in the educational system.

As an art teacher, our district has no adopted curriculum, and so I have always been on my own to find resources to teach. The upside of this is that I can customize curriculum for my students, connect with curriculum they are exploring in their classrooms, and find precisely the right materials to bring in front of them for the very limited time I see them.

I don't believe that familiarizing oneself with an OER as opposed to an adopted published curriculum takes any more time as a teacher. In our district, they have made technology a priority, so with a relatively small investment (Chromebooks) many teachers are better able to use and learn about OERs. There is simply good momentum at this point.

Prensky Article (from an art educator's point of view)

It seems like Prensky's concerns would be diminishing a bit, as those of us who were still in school at that time were able to catch the wave of technology that happened since then. Digital Natives are now old enough to be in high school. I had just started grad school in 2001.

I may technically be an immigrant, but I feel like I moved to this country while I was still pliant enough to learn the language at a near-native level.  I feel lucky that I can still relate to orderly, slow information (though less an less) and feel my own brain wandering, moving faster, looking for quick asides, or just wanting to "tinker"  as I learn or explore instead of listen to someone else's slide show. I wonder if sometimes I among the last of the "translators" between the DI and the DN by the mere fact that I was in my early 20s when the shift happened.

I feel that visual culture is what I explore with students as part of my subject area, and of course that is now largely digital. I am interested in how they consume media, but also how they perceive it and can respond to it. I think that masterfully produced art media and contemporary art (videos, apps, animations, interactive experiences) are going to be the lifeblood of my work with young artists as time continues. I'll need to stay connected to what is current and not rely on old lessons, old goals, or old approaches.

Advantages, Hangups, and Possibilities

I have started new blogs many times, usually to see if it would work for some administrative need or to have an online portfolio available while applying for new jobs.
I can see myself blogging when I can make it incredibly fast and habitual...as easy as posting an image and a caption to facebook from my phone. I want to use a blog as my own record of what I've taught, resources I've used, and for parents to see what the process was for artistic creation, instead of just seeing the product that makes it home (probably in crumpled form).
I synthesize most of my art teaching ideas from other art teacher's blogs, usually found through Pinterest. I'd like to have a blog that might help other art teachers build their own lessons or solve problems that we encounter in the classroom.
One hangup is that I always put blogging at the very bottom of my to do list. I've (luckily) taken a lot of photos of things I'd like to blog about, and then wait until summer to create posts about the projects we've done. I have trouble deciding what "voice" to use in my blog and need to get better at writing quickly
This blog can be a place where I can store student work examples and the online resources I use, so I can return to it time after time. I would like to have students post their own experience of an art project, if possible.