Reaching Community
So, I have this really great video on tap, from Ken Robinson’s TED talk about the importance of educating for creativity and valuing the fine arts. Our school is gifted with being able to pursue those things.
I have a desire to share this sort of inspirational video with parents and co-teachers–the same way I’ve shared shorter videos with my intermediate and middle school level students. I wish all school families could enjoy a video and have a conversation to respond to it, much the way book groups form.
BUT, I want more! I want more families and co-teachers to find these video shares than just the few who would come to a book group. Would being on the net increase participation? What would be most engaging?
I’m not sure how to hook others into joining this kind of conversation. I’m going to mull it over and look for a way to open.
Filed under: Cool Stuff I Found To Share, Fine Arts, Neurodiversity, education and
This video has been around on Art Ed 2.0 as well, it is excellent!!! Your comments have inspired me to want to add it to my blog as well.
I am also interested in your title of this post. My goal is to have parents at school use my blog to find out — All the News — about what is new in Art Class. So, the question is how do you REACH COMMUNITY…how do you get people to get to the blog???
Also…love your Post-it Note Blog — Great idea!
Let’s keep this conversation going!!!
~Susan
Susan,
I checked out your blog http://www.art-on-the-move.blogspot.com/ and if I were a parent or student of yours, I would be excited to have it! If you don’t attract parents to your blog, I think it would not be because of anything lacking on your part, but because we have a systemic societal problem to overcome.
I have been wrestling with the question about how to “reach community” a lot, lately. My school is upgrading their web site to include “private discussion boards” and one classroom is using Moodle. I haven’t pushed this blog to my parents, but was considering it…
One idea I might test out is to get students to post their work and others’ work (carefully working around permissions and web security issues) on a kind of student created “refrigerator door” blog. I hope that would attract parents and relatives to look at it and see if something was posted by their student, or a display of their student’s work was posted, etc. We could have a clustr map showing where people were coming from, or a hit counter…podcast students reading out loud in the Primary classes…have students take pictures of hall displays for it…get some excitement going around it.
Since the other web places are being highlighted at the start of the school year, I might wait a few weeks before trying it out. It could be a separate page on a blog with a page for my commentary and video recommendations behind it. Dunno.
On the other hand, a private social NING might attract even more participation and community feeling, but I am not so secure about putting kids on there. Are you on the classroom 20 ning with me? I sort of assumed that’s how you found my blog, but lost track of your profile if so…
http://classroom20.ning.com/profile/Bookwyrmish
There, I’ve been waay too wordy, as usual. It’s been nice to share with you.
~Sue