This week, I started teaching in my new school.  For those of you just joining this blog, in May, I accepted a position as Founding Art Teacher at Cindy Avitia High School in San José, California.  It has been an exciting change, but also a nervewracking one, as I move back to teaching High School after four years away, and to a new school that has much different ways of doing things than in any schools I’ve ever taught.

For the last 3 weeks, I’ve been working to build an online course.  It turns out that my new school is going to be using Google Classroom, and some classes have already been working with it.  Great!  I started building my online course in Schoology for my EDLD 5318, but now I will be moving content from Schoology to Google Classroom so my students can access it in a few weeks.

I am excited to use my online course with my students.  It will be a blended learning experience, so my students will be doing both digital and offline work.  The online work is mostly learning about artists, exploring art history, and learning about how to look at art critically.  Students will be working individually and collaboratively, watching videos about artists, having collaborative discussions, creating reflection pieces (art critiques in the form of written work, videos, and podcasts,) and making art.

Students will access resources both in the online course and in the physical classroom.  They may work on any part of each unit at any time during the week.  My school offers a long class period for each class once a week and also for an hour each day at the end of the school day where students can get extra assistance.  I had planned for this time to be used as studio time for students to work on artwork, but I could also allow this time to be used for any student needing extra assistance with the course.

Student work will be uploaded to their digital portfolios at Bulb.  Students and parents can access both their digital portfolios, as well as the course, itself.  I will interact with students through comments on their portfolios, in the course, and in person.  Parents may also comment on their student’s digital portfolio, but will not have access to comment in the online class.  I am not very familiar with Google Classroom, yet, so I do not know if parents will typically log into their children’s courses, but I don’t imagine they will, for the most part.  Online assessments will be done in the course, but I will also be doing assessments of students’ physical work and assisting them in person during class time.

I will update my course as I decide to add more material or see that some components aren’t working as well as I would like them to.  The great thing is that this is as easy as switching out a link or a document.