Exploring, Moving & Finishing

Creative Commons image courtesy of mutablend: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mutablend/7077017143/

This picture says it all. It feels like I have been on top of a cloud for 5040 hours. That is the exact number of hours since I last wrote a blog post here as I have been exploring, moving in and finishing other adventures.

Exploring

Last fall I started doing some consulting work and blogging at Dempsey & Baxter. The staff is wonderful to work with! We have been collaborating and developing strategies for continuing to develop their online presence through various social media channels. This includes promoting the stories that make the business so special. I think school districts could learn a lot by exploring how small businesses market themselves and how they create consensus, promote creativity and encourage collaboration through social media!

Moving

I do a lot of moving both figuratively and literally. Moving along is also the work I do with the team of talented women in the federal Art in Action Program. I have been working as a specialist there assisting teaching artists, the program team, staff and teachers with issues around educational technology and sharing ideas for effective practices in arts infused instruction.

Finishing

Last year the Art in Action team finished a chapter in a book called, “Using creative teaching to teach creativity” that should be published this year. Last August I was also very happy to finish the TPACK Visual Arts Student Activity Types Taxonomy with Judy Harris and Mark Hofer who are wonderful to collaborate with! Other things I have finished since my last blog post is the consulting work with the WeTeach Project, along with a couple STEAM grant projects south of Pittsburgh. In December I also finished my courses in school leadership studies and took the state exam. This is also the year I will finish my dissertation as all my coursework is now completed. In the meantime, I promise that I will not wait 6 months and 27 days to return to writing blog posts here! : )

The Business of Social Media and Small Business

Doing some social media consulting and blogging for Dempsey & Baxter.  Have a look if interested: http://dempseyandbaxter.wordpress.com/

Mr. Bill Adventures at ISTE 2012 in San Diego

Mr. Bill meets his Second Life avatar at the SIGVE table.

Mr. Bill’s Adventures (and mine) at ISTE 2012: http://bit.ly/MPps0X

Mr. Bill in San Diego for ISTE 2012:

Mr. Bill Goes to 2012 ISTE Pre-Con Events:

Mr. Bill – ISTE 2012 Day 2:

Mr. Bill – Last Day of ISTE 2012:

Meanwhile over at the ArtsEducator2.0 Blog…

Have been blogging around educational technology topics over here for awhile… Will be back here soon…

Home Sweet Home: Reflections on ISTE 2011 and My Experience as a PAFA Art Student

Jordan Mroziak and I doing a poster session on TPACK and Effective Practices in the Arts (TPArtsCK). Click here to visit the wiki site.

Volunteering at the Digital Arts Playground – Participants explore green screen/stop animation with clay characters and iMovie.

About a week and a half ago I returned from the ISTE Conference in Philadelphia. It was great to be back in the “City of Brotherly Love” as it had been my home as a student nineteen years ago. I decided to document my learning and experiences during this conference using Twitter that was filtered into a CoverItLive blog.

I was surprised to see that the Philadelphia Convention Center had been expanded to Broad Street right across from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts School and Museum. Some of the members of SIGAE (Special Interest Group for Arts Educators) members toured the oldest school and museum in the country during the conference which was a great experience.

The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts School

Special thanks to the Stan Greidus, Vice President of Admissions & Financial Aid, who gave us a tour of the school building. Thanks also to the President and CEO, Dr. David Brighham and Melissa A. DeRuiter, Executive Vice President of Development who met our group at the front door sharing information about the school. Thank you also to Melissa’s assistant, who gave our group free museum passes and school literature. I was also pleasantly surprised to see Al Gury, one of my portrait painting instructors who graciously invited our group into his studio. We had a brief conversation about technology and the arts and then we were off to the next stop on the tour – the studios behind the museum.

PAFA Cast Hall – I was pleasantly surprised to see one of my classmates (Roger Chaevez) was here.

Nineteen years I was an art student there by day and a student at the University of Pennsylvania by night. One of my fondest memories of the school was drawing the Clydesdale horse in an animal drawing class in one of the studios at the back of the museum building. I can also remember creating drawings and paintings of models in the studios and doing studies of the Greek and Roman antique sculptures in the cast hall as well as other from works in the museum collection. This time, with my iPad in tow, I used Sketchbook Pro to create a “painting” study in the museum which was a thrill since I had creating drawings in this same spot with charcoal and paper almost twenty years ago. I found myself dreaming about what it would be like to teach children’s classes drawing from observation of the museum collections using iPads. It would also be interesting to conduct an animal drawing class with the iPads on easels. I wonder if anyone at PAFA has considered this before?

After the trip down memory lane, I went back to the conference and was greeted by this young man at a poster session. He and his brother and sister were talking about their “Follow Me Project” that documents stuffed animals that travel the globe to bring people together through the use of Web 2.0 tools. This was the best children’s poster session I had seen because the children weren’t chasing us down with canned stories of what adults were telling them what to say. They spoke about their own experiences very authentically and I was delighted to meet them.

The next adventure in the poster session was when I met Roland, a science teacher from Australia. Within a few minutes we were in the aisle doing the “cloud dance” Roland and his students had created to learn about clouds.

His work with students is one of the best examples of arts integration in science I have ever seen:

Got Web2.0 Tools?

Blogging over at Artandmusictechmaste[RED]… Got Web2.o Tools?

Got Digital Barriers?

Blogging over at Artandmusictechmaste[RED]… Got Digital Barriers?