What’s New at North?

I am excited to be getting a student teacher for next year. I will be getting him on board with TAB. I will let Kevin introduce himself, later, but he comes from a number of years of being an artist and has volunteered in classrooms for the past several years. He knows a number of computer programs that I am super excited to learn and build for my program, like Google sketch-up.

He will be with me for the full school year, even starting to collaborate this summer. If all goes well I will have a great spring quarter to myself to travel to other classrooms as well! and work on some articles, demo videos and curriculum.

Also I got it in my silly head just yesterday to offer a free online summer camp to my students. we will use our same online learning platform (Moodle) and have a variety of computer activities, along with student classroom chats and forums. I will be offering a free disk to the first 25 students that sign up that will come loaded with a bunch of free-software (like pivot, scratch and gimp). I am also offering an online drawing camp, where the first 25 that sign up will get a kit of drawing materials. Like I don’t have enough to do this summer? HA!

The principal is going to connect me with the program leaders at our local YMCA, boys and girls club and community center to get them the software disks too, because many of our kids get their only computer access at these locations. looking forward to connecting with my students a bit over the summer to keep them engaged, out of trouble and making art!

The artsonia galleries have been a great success too! Having this platform to share student work and communicate with parents has been great, and we have only been doing it a month. It is awesome to see parents and family commenting on the student artwork, kids uploading their own work from home and the general excitement about having their work online. Check out our gallery! and feel free to COMMENT on student work.  The kids LOVE to see the comments!! http://www.artsonia.com/schools/school.asp?id=70981

I also have uploaded some slide shows of the digital work on school tube (along with our door movies and animations)

Did I mention that I am in charge of the first ever literary arts zine at our school? 50+ pages of poems, stories and photography… still formatting the beast 🙂

BTW: We still have a MONTH of school! So that’s what’s new at North!