Assessment

I don't know about all of you, but the word assessment makes me cringe. I'm more open to it than I was when I first started teaching, and do find it useful at times but in general miss the time in education when I could just sit and create some fun artwork with my awesome students. However, with the teaching climate the way it is, it is necessary to show that our students are learning-even in art. With 650-700 students depending on enrollment, I had to find a way to easily organize all of these assessments. I used to have half sheets of paper for most projects, but have recently found even easier ways to organize assessment. I went to one of my media specialist and told her I was looking for an app that would allow my students to manipulate images and email the results to me. After looking at a few options, we found the perfect app for this process. PicCollage.

PicCollage allows the user to load as many pictures as desired and layer them as they see fit. I have two assessments currently ready for my students to use. The first one I will use with first graders to show that they learned foreground, middle ground, and background. We are touring Africa this year, and they are working on landscape chalk drawings of the Sahara. They will be putting three items into their landscapes; one in each plane of depth. They can choose from cactus plants, camels, or pyramids. For their PicCollage, I put a picture of sand dunes in first and tapped on "select as background" to lock it into place behind the other images. I then searched for each item, adding "with transparent background" after the name; for example, "camel with transparent background." This allowed me to find images that would fit easily with the picture. Once they were put onto one iPad, they were in the camera roll for all of them and it was just a matter of pre-loading the images I needed. Here's what the image looks like when the kids go into the app: 

They can increase and decrease the image size by pinching and move the items to the foreground, middle ground, and background. We talked about how things in the foreground look larger than things in the background, so they will be able to move them to something like this: 

Here's another one I will be using for third and fourth grade, both of which are learning about radial symmetry of Moroccan mosaics and tiles (more on those later).

Before

After

When complete, students can simply email me their finished image and type their name in the subject line of the email. I can grade them whenever I have time, from any device that has internet!

The other new assessment tool I am using is Google Classroom. I am very new to this, but have been getting my 3rd-5th graders set up on it. I will post on that once we finish our first projects, so I can give some tried and true tips.

Artsonia Classroom

Have you tried Artsonia Classroom yet? I have been using it with my third through fifth graders and I love it!

With the coming implementation of Common Core State Standards, I have been integrating more and more writing into my curriculum. Projects, Pre-project work, and assessment can all include writing in some form. Artsonia Classroom makes it easy to not only add writing into the assessment process, but teach about Artist Statements and assess if the kids actually understood what I was trying to teach them. As an added benefit, students can upload their own artwork AND their artist statement will be published with their artwork for all to see their writing! The process requires a lot of steps, but is very easy to use. My students have had very little questions, after watching me go through it on the SmartBoard. I have created a how-to for both the computer and the iPad and posted them here for all of your classrooms as well. I'll post a few screen shots here, so you can see what it's like. On my actual documents, I added arrows to show the students which buttons I am referring to.

Uploading using an iPad  Please note, I access Artsonia Classroom through the free QR Reader app. 

Uploading using a computer: Please note, if the artwork is not already published, you or the artist will need to take a digital photo of the work and have access to it.

I have three laptops and one computer in my classrooms, which I carry from school to school for this purpose. I also have a class set of iPads at each school and try to borrow 3-5 for my third through fifth grade students when they are available. I also have two binders at each school that have printouts of both of the how-to guides above and all the QR codes, sorted by grade level. I have in/out boxes in my classroom and when a student finishes their artwork they are instructed to put it in their grade level IN box and take a rubric from the OUT box. The rubric asks questions about the project and is designed to help the students form complete sentences to then type in as their Artist Statement. For example, my fifth graders just learned about the Principle of Art, Emphasis by creating Zentangles with emphasis and then using the Color Effects App to show emphasis in a landscape image. Their rubric asked 1. What is Emphasis, 2. How did you used Emphasis in your project? (Here's their gallery) The best part? Their writing gets sent to me to review before being posted. I have to approve their editing of their artwork AND their writing before it is posted. This allows me to read what they wrote, grade it, approve it, and add their grade to my grade book all with a few mouse clicks! Simplicity at it's best-while integrating writing AND technology! This seriously makes me feel like an awesome teacher.