Art teachers are visual, art students learn visually, and kids love to take pictures! For all of these reasons, digital imaging has a place in today’s art room. Ohler (2009) explains, “it is clear that many of the skills needed to command the new media collage would, by today’s standards, fit best into the art curriculum, where concepts of color, form, and collage are part of the everyday narrative“ (p.11)

So how do we begin? Just as with any art lesson, projects that involve digital images and online sharing should be well prepared, clearly outlined and evaluated.

As I have discussed in previous posts, lessons in digital etiquette are very important to give our students the tools needed to successfully and safely publish images online. Copyright issues can also be covered in lessons about digital etiquette. These types of lessons need not only be the art teacher’s responsibility. Brooks-Young states, “Several states now require that educators teach online safety lessons annually” (p.80, 2010). Classroom teachers, media specialists and school counselors may wish to address these topics in their curriculum. It would be wise to collaborate with teachers about teaching digital etiquette lessons. The lessons could be taught in homerooms or the media center and subsequently reviewed in the art room. This would allow for more hands-on time in the art room.

If projects are to be posted online, they should be teacher-led, structured assignments. The teacher will need to mediate the material and set the privacy goals. It will be important to check the district copyright, posting and viewing policies as they pertain to digital media (Brooks-Young, 2010). Teachers will also need to make sure that they have permission before posting student photos, videos and images. This can be handled through the general permission that parents may sign during registration as well as through individual permission slips and notes containing information about class blogs or websites. It may be important to prepare for lessons by checking with the IT staff to increase teacher storage space, create a temporary class share drive, and unblock any imaging or editing sites that will be needed for the lesson.

Students love to take pictures and video. Photos are a great way to document student’s lives, artwork and school field trips. Digital cameras, cell phone cameras and Flip cameras are all relatively simple tools to use to create a collection of images (Brooks-Young, 2010). Teachers will need to provide direct instruction to students on how to use the tools, how to upload and the specific criteria required for the project. One method to devise digital media lessons is to use the “four D’s”: define, design, do and debrief (Churches, Crockett, & Jukes, 2010).

There are many ways that teachers can use pictures and video in the art room. A few ideas of how to implement digital media in the elementary art room:

· Create a cd cover: The students would create a fictitious band and a cd cover for the band. Photographs or drawings can be use in a digital collage for the cd cover. Possible applications to use are photoshop, a blank powerpoint slide and other free online photo-editing sites.

· Ambitious teachers can lead a student multi-media club. The club could be responsible for creating the school’s morning announcements via video which would be viewed once a week by all classrooms.

· Older students could create alphabet books for younger students- digital collages or voice threads.

· Students can create slideshows to document field trips and other school activities such as the school art show.

· Teachers can create and embed video and picture tutorials in class websites.

I used one of many free online slideshow websites to create this slideshow of my family at Halloween and the CPS Super hero day. I set the privacy to keep it from being published publicly through the site. One drawback of a free site such as this is the advertising that comes with the slideshow.