 Welcome to the 2012 K-12 Online Conference. I'm your host, Ian Sands, and this is How Technology Helped Me Paint With Mud. In today's high school art curriculum, there's a separation between your traditional materials and your technology classes. Your traditional art classes are going to use acrylic, temper paint, pencils. While your technology classes are separated, they're not integrated. They focus on classes such as Photoshop or computer art and animation. To create this topic, let's consider an ordinary household object, the telephone. This is an old-fashioned analog telephone. Here's how it worked. It was tethered to a wire to a pole, and it had one purpose. It was to send electronic pulses through the wire, up the pole, and down to another wire someplace else. The bad thing about it is, it wasn't even always connected. Sometimes, if somebody else was on the other line, you'd get a busy signal. Did one thing, tethered to a wall, not always connected. This mobile device is digital. It sends voice by bringing into a series of ones and zeros, called binary code. Binary code can go through the air. This increases the user's mobility to anywhere there's a signal. Do endless things, go anywhere, and are always connected. Traditional teacher, like the analog telephone, one thing at a time, have the kids sit in their seat, wait patiently for her to disconnect and connect from one student to the other. Digital students do multiple things at one time. We'd rather sit on the desk than sit in it and are never disconnected. There are three contributing factors to the issue here. Number one, we teach lessons because that's what we've always taught. Number two, we use materials because that's what we've always used. And number three, we separate technology from the classroom because that's what we've always done. Teaching lessons because that's how we've always done it. When I was at Roosevelt High School, I had an art teacher there give me a lesson on drawing still life bottles using a pencil on paper. When I came to Apex High School, one of the first lessons I did with my students is have them draw still life bottles using a pencil on paper. Now don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with observational drawing. But the question I needed to ask myself after a 20-year span of teaching and learning was was I doing this lesson because it's the best method of teaching or am I doing this lesson because it's what I've always done? When our teachers say perspective, what comes to mind is linear one and two-point perspective like these images here. But perspective is simply the way that someone views something. Forced perspective is created by using a camera to trick the viewer. It can make objects appear larger or smaller or it can simply give a view of a new perspective. Another type of perspective is called localized perspective. This means you can only correctly view the image from one direction. In this example of localized perspective, the students created a juxtaposed image in Photoshop. They then constructed a series of panels, used an LCD to protect your image and when viewed correctly, will hear the results. Using perspective as an example, I've tried to demonstrate that if we teach lessons because that is how we've always done it, our students will miss out on so much more that art has to offer. Using traditional materials because that is what you've always used. I'll let you know longer an analog teacher teaching a lesson simply because that's the way that he's taught. Let's move on to step two, getting away from using traditional materials simply because that's what you've always used. At first glance, you might think this project is a traditional chalk mural. However, the chalk mural isn't the art. The photograph is the art. Each chalk mural was designed to be interactive, allowing any student in our school to take photographs of their friends interacting with the mural. This way, the photographer becomes the artist and the photograph becomes the art. This project was dubbed the Mud-a-Lisa and like the title of this presentation, this is how technology helped me paint with mud. I wanted to teach a lesson on value and was looking for a slightly less than traditional method of teaching it. We started with a cheap bag of fill dirt and added clay to produce the lights and the arcs. Incorporated Photoshop to reduce the Mud-a-Lisa to only four shades, then projected our image onto large paper. Next, we swapped our 21st century technology for the Renaissance idea of producing a cartoon. This transferred the image using chalk dust to the sidewalk. The rest was, well, mud art history. Another project where technology really came in handy was when we created Celebrity Portrait post-it note murals. We used the gradient editor in Photoshop to match the colors of the post-it notes to the celebrity's face, in this case, Johnny Depp. We used Photoshop's mosaic filter to break the image into post-it note-sized squares. This produced a map that we could follow. Then the real work began. We spent a week applying post-it notes to the wall. It was a lot of work, but it was a lot of fun. It took a long time, but it was worth it in the end. We created over 10 different murals throughout the school. Sometimes we had to work outside on large sheets of paper. Other times we worked directly on the wall. One group even filmed themselves as they applied the sticking notes to the wall and created a stop-motion animation of the whole week's progress. This technique of gradient mapping and mosaic filtering can be applied to not only post-it notes, but to skittles and even balloons. For this project, Dub Mona Loon, we used the exact same technology to produce our image map. Here you see Anna, our team coordinator, holding up the image map. Behind her on the board is a list of names that form the teams that would follow her directions. We used power tools to create the grid that we built in the parking lot, where we would tie the 1,840 balloons needed to complete this project. It took 190 art students all day long to complete this pop-able portrait. Meanwhile, Kate used Twitter to send hourly tweets to keep the world updated on the Mona Loon's progress. By reusing and reinventing the way we incorporate technology into our art, we were able to evolve our projects into new ideas. For the spray paint project, we used Photoshop's threshold filter to create the positive and negative space needed for this image. We used the remaining stencils to develop these light graffiti images, created with a long shutter speed and a glow stick. The glow stick idea evolved into this stop-motion animation, while the stencil evolved into grass graffiti using birdseed. I know what you're thinking. I like what you're doing integrating the technology and the new materials, but I'm not quite ready to start making birdseed stencils just yet. Okay, fair enough. Let's move on to step three. How to incorporate technology into every aspect of a traditional project. Let's start with printmaking. The first step to incorporating technology into a printmaking project was to go to the computer lab to gather references. After collecting several references for both subject, background, and foreground, our students produced several pencil drawings. Next, we visited the media center, where each student, using their drawing as a reference, recreated their illustrations using the iPad. Since the final printing would only show positive and negative space, the students explored their option using a threshold filter in Photoshop. The final printmaking was completed back in the art room using the traditional printing method. However, that's not the end of the project. Each student posts images of both their work in progress, as well as their final piece to their blog. These posts are used by the students to reflect on their own work, are critiqued by other students when they post comments on their blog, and are used by me as a teacher to assess their final work. I don't collect any projects. I do all my grading digitally. The final step incorporating technology into our traditional printmaking project is displaying our work on the 42-inch frame display monitor that is mounted on the wall by the main office for everyone to view.