Digital Graphics!

For the past 5 weeks I have been enrolled in a digital graphics course with Lamar University. I was pleasantly surprised to be able to use my creativity with something for a change. It challenged me to try new things out such as animation, logo making and a newsletter. The course broke design into the CRAP, while the abbreviation seems funny the breakdown of CRAP was very helpful in organizing my text and artwork for the assignments. Being an art instructor I have always just relied on my artistic “eye” to figure out why certain designs are superior to others. I enjoyed the simplicity of CRAP in organizing why good art is pleasing to our eyes. This is something I will definitely use in my classroom. I believe the real benefit to this course is that it gave me lessons that I could take straight to my classroom. The logo assignment was brilliant in really breaking down a persons identity into a visual form. While it seems like a basic thought I labored over color, line quality movement etc. in my piece, I believe my students will benefit from that sort of self exploration. Having other peers via the discussion board was very beneficial in knowing how well I achieved my goal on these projects. Just having dialogue in regards to getting technology used in multiple types of classrooms was eye opening as well. I sometimes find that I look at these courses from a unique spot, as an art teacher. Most other students in our program are technology instructors or in core course areas. I like how I get to see everyone's point of view via our discussions and am sometimes surprised at how similar we actually are. After doing these projects such as the animation I am interested at how having students create their own subject matter will help retention. I would like to see if student ownership makes high school age students more receptive to simple technology. I know that my animation wont wow them, but if they had made it- it would. Through the whole course I was most pleased with my newsletter. It was by far the most relevant project to me and really the most useful to my department. We get so bogged down with emails and blogs are only good is your coworkers constantly check them, so a digital newsletter every two weeks could really show off my department and educate our school on our events and accolades. In short this has honestly been my favorite class, it has given me real useful things to stick in my teacher tool belt and I had a great time experimenting with our assignments.