Prompt #4: New Teaching Tools and TPACK

Q: When introducing new tools into the classroom, what questions should you consider before implementation (technical, administrative, pedagogical, etc.)?

Good question. This of course depends on the specifics of the tool/technology, but here are some rapid-fire answers:

• How will I seamlessly incorporate this tool into lessons I’ve already planned?
• Will using this tool help the students better understand the content I’m teaching them? 
• What does using this tool do for the students that my current method of teaching doesn’t do? 
• Is using this tool going to be an efficient way to teach the lesson, or will it eat up class time unnecessarily?
• And if using this tool to teach the lesson will take more time, is it so much better to be worth it? 
• Does my classroom have the required infrastructure to administer said tool?
• Can this tool be applied to only one specific lesson, or is it something I’ll be able to integrate into the entire curriculum? 

The term “tool” can be applied to a wide range of technologies. A tool can be something as simple as a mat cutter, a bone folder, or light table; it could also be a very complicated tool, such as a darkroom, computer lab, or an etching press. It’s also important here to note that new tools may not necessarily be the “latest and greatest,” but simply new in the context of the classroom.

Let’s say, for example, that I’m teaching a Drawing 1 class for a group of twenty-five 9th and 10th graders. There are so many possible ways to teach this kind of class! I would have to answer a thousand questions just planning the curriculum about what tools I should have students use. After I’ve meticulously planned my curriculum, what would I do if a local art studio offers to donate a set of clunky old studio easels to the school (rapid-fire again):

• Are there enough easels for every student?
• What are the quality of the easels? 
• Is there enough room in the classroom to store these easels?
• Until now, my students have been drawing while sitting down at their tables. What will we be able to do now that students will draw standing up? 
• If the students are standing up while they draw, how will this affect their behavior? 
• Will the students take the drawing lessons more seriously if they're given the opportunity to use old but professional-quality easels? 
• What other tools and materials will we have to buy in addition to the easels? (i.e., drawing boards, pads of newsprint)
• How will I need to rearrange my room to use the easels effectively with so many students? Or will it be impossible to do so given the size of my room? 

So, the tools we choose must augment or improve our lesson and teach the content better than our previous methods. To summarize the pros and cons:

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• A new tool may be able to demonstrate a concept better than I could with my previous method. 

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• There may be a learning curve to using the tool which sets the whole class behind.
• The students may become more wrapped up in the tool as a way to entertain themselves rather than the content the use of the tool is conveying. 
• The tool may be unsuccessful. It may break, or it may only confuse the students if we aren’t careful. 

When you’re teaching a fine and delicate artistic skill (right now I’m thinking specifically of drawing), it genuinely helps to strip away unnecessary technologies (right now I’m thinking specifically of electronic technologies). For one, you don’t need them. For two, they stand in the way of students’ direct struggle between their brain, their hands, and the physical world. The basics are perfect, and you don’t need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to teaching drawing--the foundational artistic skill of SEEING the world more accurately. Pencil, paper, charcoal, kneaded eraser, sharpener. Done.

But getting beyond the basics (and as I remember hearing the famed animator Richard Williams say somewhere, “Everything is just a sophisticated use of the basics”)…the Pandora’s box opens. Is there a printmaking technique that would also be perfect for teaching about composition? Is there a color wheel application that animates the color wheel in a way that makes it easier to understand? Would using Photoshop be a good tool for me to demonstrate the idea of collage? The answer is maybe! I would have to consider many factors to determine if the situation calls for an innovative approach. Schools tend to let their art teachers alone to their own devices, so it would probably be my call to incorporate new technologies and tools. I’ll be digging a lot more into “the Pedagogy of Art” in the near future to see what other teachers are doing to build students’ artistic confidence and increase their skills and abilities. My assumption is that new technologies will not be a big factor in teaching the basic, traditional skills.





I think TPACK can be a useful framework for breaking down and analyzing your curriculum. It helps to compartmentalize knowledge, which is something I appreciate as a habitual sort-er and organize-er. I don't really have any questions about TPACK, to be honest. The list of Visual Arts Learning Activities (TPACK applied to Visual Art Instruction) should be useful to jog my brain for ideas when I set down to write my curriculum. If I always keep the TPACK framework in mind, hopefully I should be able to make my curriculum well-rounded and compelling for the students.

Prompt #3: Inspired Curiosity and the Future of Textbooks

I'll be brief about this. There are many ways a teacher can promote networking and community participation in their classrooms. We can get their students to explore different blogs, follow experts and professionals on social media, and maybe have discussions with peers online who are learning similar things. However, we need to think about why it’s important to capture this spirit of connectedness in the first place: We want our students to be inspired, enthusiastic, and independent learners.

Teachers need to command the attention of their students by making the material they’re teaching self-evidently relevant, useful, and interesting. As a teacher, I want to act as a bridge helping my students feel more connected to people who are presently active in our local art community. The bottom line is: If your students don’t feel your passion for your subject matter, and if they don’t feel connected to YOU, then you won’t have much of a chance of creating this feeling of connectedness and inspired curiosity in the classroom.

Having open access in the classroom means that we need to teach students how to navigate the sea of information through the Internet and elsewhere. We should talk with students about how to analyze a source of information; how to discern whether or not the information is verified (or verified by whom) and what the slant of a resource or article might be. Now more than ever it’s important to talk about copyright law, the public domain, and why we should always credit our sources. It would be important to teach students how to communicate their thoughts effectively and how to have a healthy dialogue online (essentially, teaching the art of debate). We should tell students about online courses they can take in addition to our class, and recommend educational YouTube channels and blogs they can follow.

Teachers should also encourage students to use the public libraries. They are FREE and always have been!

Speaking of books. Now that we have access to entire textbooks for free or nearly free online, what does this mean for the future of physical textbooks?

I don’t think physical textbooks will become obsolete anytime soon, the same way I believe that books will not be replaced by e-books. A five-year-old slightly beat-up Spanish textbook contains the same information as an open-access online textbook. I can still see the benefit of using online textbooks if they’re available. One of the main arguments used by people who favor online textbooks over physical textbooks is that the information is exactly the same for both mediums. If you can fit all of your textbooks onto a single device, why bother lugging 50 pounds of out-of-date compressed tree pulp between classes? Save your back muscles and the forests.

Despite the cost of new textbooks and their weight, I still feel the interface of a computer can’t replace the quality of learning experienced with the physical printed page. There’s something about the physicality of a book that forces me to slow down and focus on the information more than if I’m seeing the same information on my iPad. If I knew more about what Marshall McLuhan had to say about media, I would be able to perhaps back up my experience with theory. Staring at the light can be bad for the eyes over time. I also can’t be tempted to check my e-mails when I’m alone with a book. It must be the printmaker in me who loves to smell musty old books, or maybe my nostalgia for when I would receive my well-loved, marked-up textbooks in high school.

I think teachers will have to figure out a balance between the two in their curriculum. Some teachers may choose to rely more heavily on an online textbook--which can be easily updated without having to spend hundreds of dollars on a brand new set of volumes--unlike physical textbooks which can get out-of-date. This may especially be the case for the sciences. But for English classes, history, and mathematics, and foreign languages, how likely is it—really—that the content will be evolving in any drastic way? A teacher should be able to recognize possible shortcomings of a textbook and provide their students with supplemental materials they find online, in printed journals, and elsewhere.

Other benefits of the book:

• You don’t need to worry about its battery dying.
• You can mark notes in the text and dog-ear pages.
• You can flip from one page to another quickly or have two pages open at once.
• You aren’t reliant on students having an electronic device to access the book.

Prompt #2: The How? What? When? Wherefore? Of Sharing

I’m going to get philosophical for a minute. What IS a teacher? What is the PURPOSE, the ROLE of a teacher?

To TEACH! Duh…Obviously I can take a stab at a more precise answer:

“A teacher is a person who shares information with others in such a way that the receptive party assimilates that information.”

Robotic, yes. But that doesn’t matter. The key word here is sharing.

Sharing is at the very core of our jobs as teachers. We share experiences, knowledge, stories, and (we would hope) wisdom.The role of a teacher is to share PROFUSELY. We must commit to giving our students the best of our knowledge and highest quality attention in the classroom every single day to help them learn and grow. This is accomplished by giving them our time and physical presence. We are so accustomed to going through the Internet to connect with others, and it’s important to remember that building connections to our students with no screen in between is still incredibly important.

So then if this face-to-face aspect of teaching is so essential, as I believe it is, what role should online sharing play in our lives? And further, how and under what circumstances can sharing on social media be useful to teachers?

This could be considered an extreme example, but one way teachers share online is to upload their content to YouTube. They essentially turn their channel into an online classroom which students can stumble upon and sit in as they please. I always go back to YouTube when I think about the possibilities of teachers using social media, because it’s such a great way to open the walls of your classroom to people all over the world. Channels are created by amateurs, professionals, college professors, and school teachers alike. Anyone can upload videos. A wonderful thing about YouTube is that people who seek out an educational channel are generally forgiving of a video having low production value or fancy editing if the content of the information provided is high quality.

Stan Prokopenko, (Art)
Jordan B. Peterson, (Psychology)
Rick Beato, (Music)
Style Sew Me (Sewing)
Atlanta Habitat for Humanity (Plumbing)
Steven Fink (Human anatomy)

There are also teachers online who don’t necessarily use social media as an alternative classroom, but use it sort of as an alternative teachers’ lounge (minus the coffee machine and photocopier). We as teachers can use sites such as Twitter and Facebook to share articles, lectures, blog posts, etc. with one another to help us expand our practices and keep alert to changes that could be going on in our given field. We can ask our wider PLN for feedback and critique on a project we are thinking about or an approach we are thinking about. As a new teacher, there are veteran teachers right at my fingertips who are not only willing but WANT to share their expertise and experiences.

Speaking of blog posts…creating a classroom blog is a social media application for teachers which I’m very intrigued by. I’ve perused the webs a bit for interesting blogs made by art teachers, and I’m overwhelmed! Teacher blogs are places of reflection, for discussing the learning process, and for documenting students’ best work. Students can share what they learned and explain what they found challenging. I don’t know when I’m going to find the time to explore all the blogs made by individual teachers. I’m awestruck by the golden information new teachers can mine from resources generously handed to the Internet by those who have come before. Blogging is also a wonderful way to be transparent with parents. They can follow your blog and see what goes on in your classroom.

How should teachers share their work on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and blogs? In any and as many ways as they feel comfortable. A savvy teacher could upload short videos to a class YouTube channel to serve as a study guide. Another may instead decide to share weekly updates of her students’ terrarium projects on a blog.

There are some general guidelines to sharing online. When it comes to microblogging platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, timing is very important. It's bad form to upload a million pictures at once. Keep it to two or three posts a day at most (or one or two strings of posts with Twitter). You want your posts to have relevant and interesting content about the goings-on in your classroom without revealing too much. You should also keep the names of your students anonymous unless you are given expressed permission from their parents. Use sound judgement and common sense. Formality shouldn't be our primary concern when we share (this is something I admittedly have a problem with). We should strive to present ourselves authentically as possible and still remain professional. We should be thoughtful, honest, and articulate when conveying our thoughts and ideas online. Most of all though, we should be enthusiastic.

It takes a huge amount of confidence and faith to share “everything.” It takes selflessness, generosity, and vulnerability to put yourself out there completely. Not just in the classroom and not just on social media, but in life. For those like me who for so long would ask "what's the point of sharing?"...

I would tell them to go to 4:33

Prompt #1: Some Initial Thoughts on Social Media

"But who has ever torn himself from the claw that encloses you when you drop a seed in a TV parlour? It grows you any shape it wishes! It is an environment as real as the world. It becomes and is the truth. Books can be beaten down with reason. But with all my knowledge and scepticism, I have never been able to argue with a one-hundred-piece symphony orchestra, full colour, three dimensions, and I being in and part of those incredible parlours."

--Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury

In the past, I've been very guarded about sharing my thoughts and opinions online. Unless you count sharing a song I love or commenting on a funny picture. The idea of sharing my personal opinions with the world, about being vulnerable to judgment by the whole Internet, feels like jumping off a cliff into the dark unknown. It's time that changed. Now is the time to be courageous. Life is too short not to share the whole of who you are with the world.  We live in America, people!

In this blog, I vow to be as open and honest as possible. My thoughts will be disjointed; that will be the nature of the beast. Here I will attempt to articulate my thoughts on technology, on education, on whatever comes up. I will do my best NOT to over-edit my posts, trying my best to write just the way I would talk. Letting my thoughts flow. I welcome your comments and criticism, and hopefully we can help each other formulate more complete perspectives. I hope you will enjoy this journey with me!

To the topic at hand: I'm extremely critical of most social media platforms, but I do recognize their utility within certain contexts. I think when used consciously as a supplementary aid to sharing class materials and Internet resources, social media can be an invaluable tool. I really love Brightspace, for instance. I love having all of the class materials for all of my courses uploaded to one place. I can easily check my schedule to see what's due. The discussion posts are also a wonderful tool. It's nice to feel that we can ask each other questions as they arise rather than only during class time. YouTube is also an invaluable resource for teachers and auto-didacts. As they say, is not just for cute cat videos anymore! And I love the idea of creating class blogs. It makes so much sense, especially for an art class.

I do think, though, that it's misguided to integrate social media (particularly Instagram and Facebook) into the classroom in an attempt to "relate to kids at their level." This is a cliche now to say, but I'm averse to the vanity and shallowness that certain social media networks feed into. I do believe that over-saturation in social media and the Internet can have a detrimental effect on the development of writing skills, verbal skills, and critical thinking. If you are an effective teacher, you don't need Smartboards or technological spectacle to keep your students engaged or entertained.

I can sympathize with the point that Katie Benmar is making in her article My Favorite Teachers Use Social Media: A Student Perspective. Teachers can't be naive about how addicted students are to social media these days. Sometimes infiltrating a popular social media platform (e.g., the teacher who posts assignments to Instagram) may work. For me, though, the method feels sly and underhanded. Students know that you're trying to make them feel guilty for wasting time. Instagram and likewise Facebook don't feel like ideal platforms for communicating your expectations to students. Going to these platforms does not challenge students to actually look at the class's online hub. And regarding Facebook, the young folks aren't using it anyway! My cousin, who is seven years younger than me, hasn't updated her profile picture for several years.

A brief explanation of my social media usage. Facebook was my first social media platform, but I don't use it like I used to. I didn't get an account until I was a sophomore in college and part of our grade came from establishing an online presence. I do consider it an important way of communicating with colleagues and sharing online resources. The same goes for Twitter. I have a LinkedIn account, which I can't say I use much. I do try to keep it current just in case it comes in handy. Within the last month, I gave into the pressure of my friends and got an Instagram. It's shiny and appealing, but man, it scares me how my brain feels after being on it for more than a few minutes. I was very impressed by how nice detail shots of my etchings look on the app. It's also really cool when someone from across the globe follows you or likes your picture. But then, the convenient marketing comes at a price. Anyone could take a screenshot of my work and use it for their own devises. So here I stand in the middle of the see-saw again!

I know I focused a lot on the negative points of social media in this post, but I know it isn't all bad. I hope this course can help me become a little less cynical. Social-media is a double-edged sword. With this blog and this class, I hope to traverse the choppy waters and establish a healthy relationship to sharing online and develop effective ways to incorporate social media in my future classrooms. I plan to post more about these topics to articulate my thoughts as the semester continues. I can get very passionate, and perhaps that is why I need a blog!

--Claire  :)