What is Digital Art?

After an exciting first class teaching Digital Design I'm increasingly inspired by the ability for an individual to define digital design in such a variety of ways. I found myself inspired by the variety of work I saw from past IB Visual Arts students and my conversation with my Visual Arts department chair. I'm excited to explore how to use the laser cutter, 3D printers and our new milling machine with both practical as well as creative applications. It's amazing how many digital tools now exist that weren't available when I was in school. I can't help but think how exposure to these tools and proficiency with them will shape our world in the near future.

As part of our first class I used a google form to ask the students which type/s of art interest them and why. I played around creating a word cloud of their responses and found it a fun and meaningful interpretation of where I see them not only on their first day of Digital Design, but as 9th grade students starting their journey through high school. I then cut this wordcloud into wood. Check out the video below!

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Online & Blended Learning for All, Like It Or Not

The time has arrived where there is no argument about the place of technology in education . We need to rely on tech to help everyone with delivering education from a distance as we are sheltering in place and we need to do so in an intelligent and effective manner without just bumbling through a Zoom video conference for an entire class period. Be available for question, but don't expect students to sit there and listen to you lecture for even 20 minutes, much less an entire 70 minute period as is the length at my school. I've pasted the tips here and then again below with examples and additional explanation. Distance Learning Tips for 9-12 Classes Here are some quick tips to help you in designing the online experience for both you and your students. If you find it easier to read I have a google doc here with these tips laid out . Formatting gets weird in Blogger sometimes. Try to keep your online experience as similar to your class experience as possible so that the

🏺Codeblocks Vase!!🏺

I have the great fortune of teaching a Digital Design class at Convent & Stuart Hall in San Francisco. As part of designing the class I've gamified the progression of lessons into levels. Upon completion of each level students earn a badge. Here is the final Level for Team Makerbot, designing a Codeblocks vase using loops they create in Tinkercad's block coding feature, Codeblocks. This app is a great example of the exciting intersection of art, science, math & tech and serves as a great visual to help students visualize what exactly is happening as a computer runs through each line of a loop.

The Pandemic & Education

We can all agree that times are not like they have ever been within any of our life spans (at least for those of us under 100). What has been debated passionately is how we, as educators & school systems, should best work with this ongoing pandemic. Some schools have responded by going online to synchronous classes while others have decided to use asynchronous learning and still others have decided that they don't know enough about access and an expectation for online learning is not equitable so they sadly have their students doing nothing. You can go on any social media and see countless hot takes complaining about what not to do and exaggerating these scenarios. Parents are either dismayed by the huge amount of worksheets sent home and apps to download or saddened by the amount of time their kids now have with nothing to do from school. On the educator side "Students shouldn't be looking at Zoom for 8 hours a day" is one of my favorite disconnected complain

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