Mystery Artists

I. Briefly review the project proposal form. Discuss the project theme, outline and time line; review the project and curriculum objectives.

The project was designed to incorporate technology with objectives from Art and Language Arts. It was as much a learning process for the teacher as it was the students. While the unit of work took about one month of class time, actually uploading all of the information onto the web page took many, many more hours. It was only later, while learning about the GrassRoots Program, did I realize that this would fit the criteria. An important first lesson for me then was - find what the teachers are already doing with the curriculum and determine how these units or themes can be made even more exciting with the use of technology. This was a first step in hooking both teachers and students. The most efficient way I discovered to investigate the curriculum objectives was to use a small document distributed about 5 years ago from the Department of Education.

II. Show the audience the outcome of the project proposal.

Results and a tour of the project can be seen at: http://www.topsail.k12.nf.ca/friends.htm

III. Briefly comment on any successes or problems that were encountered throughout the life of the project.

Successes :

• We ALL learned so very much about art, objectives, technology and Grassroots
• Learning to design a comprehensive evaluation to blend with new report card
• Learning more about the artistic and technical talents of all the students

Problems :

• Links sometimes disappeared ( lyrics international copyright court case - valuable lesson).
• Unavoidable technical problems e.g.. Broken scanner, cookie file server
• The huge amount of time it takes to design web pages, upload information, complete online Grassroots forms and reports.
• Finding a class / school to actually respond to e-pal requests

IV. Comment on any aspects of the project that you would do differently.

Give months lead time to find partnerships outside the school. Perhaps class partnerships within a school would work much better.

V. Comment on if and how the project can be expanded next year.

Next year, we can possibly have the work distributed over 3 classes so that each class can contribute to one aspect of the web page. More artists could be included. We could begin an Art Gallery for our school. We could do a project just on Newfoundland artists.