1) My official problem statement is: “How do I create a curriculum for my new Digital Arts program that is based upon national and state standards, and enhances student engagement?” I have been teaching traditional K-12 Visual Art for 23 years, 13 at the elementary school at which I am currently teaching.
Prior to thirteen years ago I knew nothing about the computer. When I went for my undergraduate degree microcomputers were just hitting the consumer market, and they could do practically nothing unless you knew BASIC code, which I did know, by the way.
However, I had seen what computers could do by watching the movies “Tron” and of course “Star Wars: Episode Four (the original)” and the television show NOVA on PBS. I saw what real computers like the Cray Supercomputers could do and that is what I wanted to be able to do with computers. Of course there was no way I was ever going to get near a Cray computer and there was no way for a “Commodore 64” or “Texas Instruments Home Computer” would produce such exquisite graphics. So I mothballed the whole notion of doing computer art for many years.
Until 13 years ago, when I met with the people I’d be working with for the next, well 13 plus years, the Arts Team at Midway Elementary School of the Arts. We were given the task of creating a magnet program in the arts from scratch. I remember how each person sat down at their respective computers and started writing and searching the web. I was lost. Not only did I not know how to use the computer for anything, but also I could not even type! That was 13 years ago and many classes and workshops and tutorials about various hardware and software applications ago!
I now find myself, yet again poised at the computer. This time, however, I have the knowledge of both hardware and software and have at my disposal a 24-iMac-computer lab awaiting the middle of August, when the students come back to school, and I start teaching my district’s first elementary digital arts program; which I must write, of course.
2) How did I end up with: “How do I create a curriculum for my new Digital Arts program that is based upon national and state standards, and enhances student engagement?” as my problem statement? I started, first with the notion that my Title I student body was in fact on the wrong side of the great “digital divide”. I had given my third graders an assignment to word-process a document about a piece of art they made on the computer. They didn’t know how to type or even know the configuration of where things were on the keyboard, or even know how many spaces to put between words (the general consensus before I got there was four to five spaces, more if needed). Here was a bunch of so-called Digital Natives who couldn’t produce digitally!
So my original problem statement was to teach a digital art program that promoted digital literacy. When I started researching the digital divide and digital literacy especially, I found that the definition of digital literacy was just way to big and amorphous to grab a hold of. No one really had a single definition of what is meant by digital literacy. For one thing with the rate that technology is being developed, one cannot truly nail down a definition because it is always rapidly changing.
Then I decided to put aside the whole digital literacy topic and spend time doing research on one of my pieces of software, Bryce 6.1 a 3-D modeling software, and see how learning Bryce might affect math grades. It was an easily quantifiable topic, but something was lacking. I really am not that interested right now in how my curriculum will affect another course of study. I actually had a much larger problem, so large that I was dancing all around it. I, in fact, had no curriculum to test nevertheless do research on. I needed a digital art curriculum!
I found through my research that although there a digital art projects on the Web, there appears to be no digital art curriculum. Therefore, this is what I am going to do, create a digital arts curriculum, based upon my hardware and software,
That will be engaging to the students and founded upon what national and state standards there may be.
3) I don’t know what the outcomes will be! I do know that when I had my classes work on a project in the lab they were very engaged both with the software and the hardware, as well as their own creation of art. I remember one student in second grade saying, “I love digital art”. It wasn’t even an official course then just a project. So, I suspect that student engagement will be fairly high.
I cannot know what my students will ultimately create, nor to what level of expertise and craftsmanship they will achieve. However, I can guess, based upon last year’s student growth in Bryce, that they will astonish me with their abilities! This growth will be charted with a rubric and a survey or pretest/posttest scenario.
4) So far only one of my critical friends has been of any real source of help, bouncing ideas off her mind. I’m contemplating finding new critical friends and am pursuing a contact with a person at a local middle school, which does have a digital media program (joined with Full Sail) and have been in contact with Dr. Ludgate in doing so. I’ve also been picking the mind of Michelle Haynes quite a bit in trying to nail down a topic-she may end up one of my critical friends. I don’t know at this time.
5) This month’s course has tightened up the EMDTMS class of 4/1/11, since we’re all following each other’s blogs and diigo accounts. I feel closer to my fellow students, and I like that we’re sharing ideas. At first I must admit I was quite lost the first week trying to get all the RSS feeds and blogs and things up and running. Now I don’t feel that way. I feel and see the sense of having a true learning community.
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