Digital Story/Individualized Education Plan

For my Educational Technology class I decided to combine two projects. The first assignment was to create a Digital Story that was 2-4 minutes in length. The second assignment was to investigate some aspect of educational technology that is directly related to my field. Since I am an art educator, I chose to learn more about the program Adobe Photoshop.

I had worked with this program in the past, mostly for adjusting and touching up photos and images. However, for this assignment I chose to learn how to "paint" in Photoshop. I also thought that it would be fun to use the images that I painted in my digital story and so I combined the two projects together. Consequently, I also learned how to use a Wacom drawing tablet and how to use the most recent version of iMovie, all of which are useful programs for art education.

My idea was to create a children's story about a Robot living in the human world. I started by creating a Story Map, which helped me to develop the plot of the story. Next, I made a storyboard which was a useful tool in deciding what images I needed to create and what text I wanted to include with them.

With the story line completed, I began the process of drawing each scene. I sketched out each image in pencil and then scanned them into the computer. The next step was to paint the images in Photoshop. I found that Photoshop has many excellent tutorials that show you how to use the different tools, filters and how to create special effects. I learned to use layers, different paint brushes, erase, use the magic wand, how to adjust image sizes, colors and contrast, as well as apply different filters.

Overall, I think that I learned a lot working with Adobe Photoshop. I believe that this is a program that all artists should know how to use. You can refine or touch up photographic images, explore design possibilities using a variety of tools. You can paint images, warp or stretch graphics, text or image elements to create unique looks.

Photoshop can be incorporated into an art project, or be the focus of an entire class. The tutorials are an excellent way to learn the basics, and I would use some of the tutorial projects to introduce Photoshop to students. They are a simple and straight forward way of learning the program.

I did not have the opportunity to teach Photoshop to my students since there is a digital art and design course taught by a different teacher at JDHS. However, I would like to incorporate the use of Adobe Photoshop into the AP art course to help students put together their portfolios. All AP students turn in a portfolio, part of which is made up of images uploaded to a website. Photoshop would provide AP students with a way to enhance or correct any flaws in their images before uploading them.

Also, we have several students in the drawing classes who are interested in graphic comics, cartooning and anime. These students could benefit from both Photoshop and the use of a drawing tablet. I feel that these tools would supplement what they are currently learning in our classes, and all they would need to learn is just the basic functions.

Click here to watch my Digital Story

Professional Online Community

The Professional online community that I chose to join, was the National Art Education Association (NAEA) for Secondary Teachers, a social network specifically for secondary art teachers. This particular social network is called a "Ning," which is more or less a portal to a variety of mini-social networks. The user, like myself, signs up and creates their own profile and then can choose to join any of the thousands of user-created networks, groups, blogs, and forums.

After signing up to join the NAEA Ning, I created my own blog. My hopes were to get feedback from other art teachers that would be helpful in upcoming lessons. I wanted to find new ideas for assessment, teaching strategies, resources and lesson plans. However, I was disappointed that I did not receive very many responses to my post and some of the posts may have been automated. There were a few comments that were helpful, but were often posted long after I had taught the lesson. Even though some of the comments I received proved to be useful, I quickly lost interest in blogging due to the response time. I think that you would have to patient and not expect to get immediate feedback.

The part of the Ning Network that I liked the most was the online gallery of student work. This photo gallery was a great way to search for project ideas and to see what is happening in art rooms across the nation. I also found some useful posts from other blogs and from different forums that had helpful insight into the world of teaching art. I may continue to use this network in the future due to the online gallery and forums. However, I now realize that I will have to be more patient in order to find or receive useful information.