First Meeting of Year Two at the Art Center

Yesterday, we had our first meeting of our small, but mighty group of DreamYard Art Center Teaching Artists. These teaching artists have a lot of experience and all happen to work in the visual arts - so we are hoping for lots of learning in that area this year. Two of them are returning and one of them is new to the project - all have taught at DreamYard for over five years.

Our meeting included a review of our goals for this project. I looked back at some older materials and share them with the TA's. These included some of our original goals from our first proposal:

• Broaden access to the portfolio development process
• Evidence multiple learning pathways 
• Help young people gain agency to tell their own learning story and gain competency with a variety of existing digital tools
•  Help educators better understand the learning history of their students

We also looked at the key ways that Learning Portfolios are different from traditional portfolios: 

 Linear Narrative --> Interactive

Final Work --> In Progress

Solely Visual Art --> Multidisciplinary

Static --> Easily Shareable 

Carla's Bronx Art Collective class blog

Moriah's Fashion program class blog

After revisiting these early, guiding principles we started to brainstorm around criteria for what makes a good digital portfolio and learning blog. Last year, during our pilot, we learned that our young people usually don't have enough content created to start right in on a digital portfolio. So this year we are starting young people off by just blogging in their classrooms in hopes that will generate enough content that by the end of the year they will be able to pull out some of the best work and share it in a digital portfolio. Here is a link to the chart we created as a way to start brainstorming what young people will have to do to develop a quality portfolio as well as learning blog. We kept in mind our core actions of Empower, Create, and Connect as we brainstormed. Next time we will think about criteria on a more granular level by looking at what makes a good blog post.

Draft Portfolio and Blog Criteria - Art Center 

A draft of a chart for assessing what goes into a good digital portfolio and learning blog. 

We also had some time to brainstorm what we want out of these meetings and we came up with a great list of ideas and also possible tools to create: 

Ideas:

• Create an in-class incentive for posting
• Have Hillary and/or an intern there for first couple sessions to help troubleshoot
• Create how-to guides for practices everyone will need
• Maybe bring in pro photographer to teach classes how to take pics of their work
• Use these meetings to brainstorm ways we can work together
• Add in work time to these meetings - either on the blogs or on the lesson plans
• Need help with back up plans and troubleshooting tech problems
• Would love to get under the hood and have the young people learn some HTML and CSS
• Each educator should have a typed up list of all the student emails and URLs

Possible Resources to create: 

• List of good free Tumblr themes
• Guide to getting started: What do they need - email address, password, URL formula, picture of themself
• Images and video: How to use Google Image, save images, upload images, embed video, etc
• Best practices for prepping a post: Writing it up in a journal first, typing it up in Word or Drive first so you don’t lose it, having images picked out, writing a good title, etc
  
  

Speaking of resources, I also created a new chart (it's a work in progress) of possible types of blog posts. It's meant to help educators think of different types of content the young people can create on their blogs that might eventually end up in their portfolio.

Types of Blog Posts

Draft of a worksheet for explaining different types of posts

 

All in all it was a great first meeting and I can't wait to see what the teaching artists and their participants do this year!