Students Record and Share their Knowledge

The National Art Standards have made me rethink how I teach.  In a way, it gave me encouragement to teach the way I feel learning should be presented to students.  In this post, allow me to share how Presenting Art has become more than just a display in the hallway.  

Take a look above, our National Standards encourage that we allow students to SHARE!  What better way to do that than through video. I have been sure to record and share with parents this whole year using the app Seesaw.  There is one small word that bothers me about that last statement, the word 'I'.  We as teachers should be encouraging our students to present their work to their audience themselves.  This is one way to do that.

I set up my room to allow the students to work, but also record their voices for video.  I showed the students a tutorial that I had made of how to create a heart.  First drawing, and then cutting. This seems like a nice easy task... but it is a bit challenging for some of the K's and a few 1st graders too.  It's a skill that needs to be taught if you want a student to perform it.  That sounds funny... doesn't it.  You need to teach the simplest of skills... break it down, show them step by step.  Even how to draw and cut a heart.  I show them in video form to demonstrate what I will be asking them to do later in class.

You need a skill that is simple to start with the tutorial.  Students need to be able to create and be self-explorers. So the room ends up looking like this (see below).

And your students leave your classroom looking like this... 

I have one station set up for recording.  So students might have to (more like, 'get-to') work on the floor. The station is set up with two crates with glass across the top.  The glass is from a display case... shhhh, don't tell. There are two iPads on the glass and I had this setup on both sides of the table to allow four students to record at once. 

The students demonstrate under the glass and the iPad stays on the glass. 

Each iPad has a headphone attached to it with a microphone. This allows the little voices of the students to be amplified and heard over the activities of the classroom.  I had these donated from Doners Choose (Thanks again to my sponsors).  

Here is a view to see what the classroom looks like in action. 

Here are a couple tutorials created by my students. 

The above demonstration is from a Kindergarten student. I love this view of what she was doing because I was able to see that she could use some help on her scissor grip.  I didn't know that previously.  This form of recording is a great way to assess skills. 

In the above video, I love that the student is trying so hard to get the action under the camera. I also was impressed that he took the time to show how to make the heart... and how NOT to make the heart.  Consider what his tutorials will look like after practice.  This was a great start to show a baseline for these Kindergarten and 1st-grade students.