Radiating Art Display

A new year has started for the Art Lab, and with that comes new ideas. I have been thinking all last year about what I could do better or different for this school year. If something is working great I say leave it alone, but check in every so often to see if it needs updated.

One of my big plans for this school year is to start a Art Parent Volunteer program. As art teachers we know that there is so much to do, and very little free time in our rooms to get it done. I am hoping to have the Art Parents help hang artwork through out the school, and help keep it rotated on a regular basis. I am also hoping that some will be able to help during the school day on big projects, or assisting with supplies and the student art organization.

To help attract parents to the my room during our Back to School night, I decided to make an eye catching display in the art case by the office. I placed QR codes on the glass, redirecting parents to a Google Form on this blog.

It worked by the way, I had several parents sign up at the Mayo Mingle (meet and greet before school starts), and I hope to have more sign up at our upcoming Back to School night.

Here is the Art Display.

The white rectangles at the bottom are random boxes that I covered with white kraft paper. I use them through out the year as stands in the show case. The letters are wood, and can be found at most craft stores. Lastly all of the cut stripes of paper are from my No Name Bin from last year. I will explain my procedures for no name art later.

The Excitement and Dirty Underside of Website Creation

This is the new website/blog for my art room. I started one at my old school, but the suggested WYSIWYG from my site's webmaster was way to clunky. Not her fault, it was the one that my district had obtained for teachers to create websites. It was somewhat functional as long as you wanted to keep things extremely simple, and not attempt to add any pictures. As you can guess, a website with no images is very boring. Since I use to design and build website in my past career I became very annoyed, and eventually abandon the attempt. While part of me yearns for to have the full design control of my site, I have to be realistic. I am an Art Educator. I know how busy I stay all day long at school, then you have after school meetings, district meetings, and then family time. I really need the best solution for fast updates, and easy management. I use WordPress for my personal art website, but I noticed that many (as in almost 90%) Art Educators are using Blogger. I explored many different options, WordPress, Weebly, Wix, Google Sites, and eventually landed on Blogger. And here is why. WordPress is great, I am extremely familiar with its operation. For my personal art website/portfolio, I own the domain name, pay for hosting and use WordPress for my site management software, layout, and design. It is fantastic, but I am excluded from every single automatic blogroll on other sites. I know because I have tried to get my personal site listed. That is annoying. Although my biggest reason for choosing Blogger is my school district is in the beginning stages of doing a massive switch to Google for Education.