The Process

One of the best ways to use technology in the school setting is to use it for researching. It cuts time out of the process, offers the students a world of information, and can even make the process enjoyable. That is what I was thinking about when coming up with the idea for my curriculum project. Because my content area is Art, the research aspect of the unit plan needed to be light and fun; art students generally don’t expect to do a heavy amount of academically centered work. The efficiency of the Internet helps with this. I also wanted to have a unit plan that uses technology in the creation of works of art. I’ve seen many lesson plans where they study an artist’s work or style and the jump off to an assignment that explores the style of the artist in a hands-on way. So I came up with a unit plan that involved both aspects: to learn a bit about an artist from history and then spend time in the creation of art. My thought was that in learning about a great artist from the past, the students would be inspired and more excited about the creation aspect of the unit plan than if I just assigned them the creative part of the plan.

Part of the purpose of the research part of the assignment is to compare the different time periods and resources available to artists. Considering the vast differences (the most modern artist studied was from early 1900’s) I thought this would be easy and fun for the students considering they using technology (Internet) that was unheard of in those times studied. Another benefit in a lesson like this is that the students understand that there was life before this technology and people accomplished plenty in art and other areas without the use of technology. This illustrates to them that the real technology is in our skulls. The creative portion of this assignment is to create an online profile in the form of a webpage as if the artists were around today and created it themselves. This merges the past and the present and forces the students to consider: what if? Which is a very important question to ask during any creative process.

Speaking of the brain—our most important piece of technology—brings us to the next part of the plan: an analysis of the student’s own background and personal tastes. In essence, they are looking into their own “hard drives” to understand themselves more and to reinforce the fact that it benefits them greatly as an artist (and as a person in general) to keep “upgrading” this piece of technology. I created an online survey for them to take that directs their attention to what their preferences are in many areas of life. I’m hoping that this leads them to examining their upbringing and background as well as finding out a little more about themselves. I came up with the questions myself, but many are the kinds of questions you see on profiles where you are letting others know who you are. It’s very difficult to come up with just the right questions and creating this survey consisted of a lot of editing and adding questions as I thought of them. What I intended to create with this survey aside from the self-analysis, is a class discussion where the students talk about the culture they shared (in most cases) It’s always fun to reminisce about what television shows, songs, or other aspects of culture played a part in our lives growing up. Sometimes, over the years, you may forget about a particular song or show that had an impact on you and these discussions usually call up some interesting memories.

The last part of the plan is an assignment where students pick a profile that they didn’t create and create an assignment based on the artist. It’s important that they pick a different artist that they worked on so that they could learn more about a different artist.

This unit plan is still undergoing development. There were some good points brought to my attention during my presentation. One was that I hadn’t considered women artists on the list of artists to choose from in the research portion of the assignment. There are many women artists that made significant contributions to the art world and it’s important for the students—especially the females—to understand this. I also need to spend more time on the design of the webquest, as it is imperative that the research aspect of this is as enjoyable as possible. I’m sure that I will also be amending the survey as I think of better questions. I enjoyed creating this unit plan and look forward to the day when I can implement it in a real classroom setting.