South West '11-13
2012 SW YAM Documents
| Technology sparks creativity
One of the greatest assets you could use in your arsenal of teaching art is technology. Instantly, technology sparks the interest of most students, especially the students who consider themselves gamers. Gamers are people who are devoted players of video games. These students, among many others, find the tedious hours sitting at a desk listening to lectures boring. Out of school they are stimulated with role-playing video games, iPods, and smart phones. These are all INTERACTIVE, while school remains static… usually. That is where visual art comes in to the picture. Not only can you introduce lessons like digital storytelling, or photo manipulation through Photo Shop, but instantly your students can become artists, even if drawing is not their forte. Creation in the digital world is interactive and students understand how it works. Creativity comes in all shapes and sizes. It is our job as art teachers to motivate the students to want to learn skills and techniques that bring out their creativity. Even if technology is not your medium of choice, ask a technology expert at your school for ideas, and suggestions. You’d be surprised at how excited they might be if you ask them to team teach a lesson with you. If you are afraid the students might know more than you, well, they might. Use that to your advantage. Ask the gamers what they might like to do. I can guarantee that if you involve these students you will get amazing results. One lesson that is a sure-fire success, is abstract portraits using Photo Shop. Take a digital picture of your students infront of a solid color background. This prevents competition between the person and the background. Then simply download all the photos to a main computer file. Teach the students simple skills of Photo Shop like crop and color saturation. Once they have mastered these skills, the fun can begin. Let them experiment under the “filters” tab. They can liquefy their own face, make it chrome, or texturize it. Regardless what they choose, they will be instant interactive artist, and you would have sparked the creativity in your students. | ||||||||||
