Sunday, March 13, 2016

It's been a long time...

Well, it's certainly been a long time since I've posted anything on this here blog. And the main reason is because I haven't needed to! My school district uses a Learning Management Software called Canvas, so any time I need to direct students to website, images, links, or files, I simply publish them in Canvas. "Canvas" is an unfortunate LMS name for an Art Teacher, in my opinion, as when I ask students if they want to create a painting "on canvas," I usually get very confused looks until they realize I'm not asking them if they want to work online. Which, by the way, would totally NOT work. I have a gripe with Canvas, because although the software has been in use for a little over 5 years, the available tools within Canvas are not particularly conducive to having students share their own images in discussions. If I create a discussion board, my student can't take a picture of his/her artwork from their phone and embed it into the discussion without first leaving the discussion and going to a completely different set of menus, outside of my course, where they would need to upload their picture to their Files... then they can go back to the discussion and write a post in which they can embed the image. #firstworldproblems? Clearly. But apparently this exact concern has been an open ticket for Instructure since 2011. Rude.

Anyway, since I don't need to use this blog to post info and updates for my students, I am hoping to carve out time to write posts ABOUT my lessons, activities, and the awesome artwork my students have been creating. Today we had a reception at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers in New Brunswick, NJ for an exhibit that featured work by 24 of my students. I'll try to update this post with some pictures later!