Edutopia coins themselves as:
… the leading voice illuminating and showcasing what works in education. We show people how they can adopt best practices and we tell stories of innovation and continuous learning in the real world.
In a blog post from April 2013 (updated in July of 2015), Edutopia has curated a selection of resources related to incorporating arts education into the core curriculum, particularly with technology in mind. SO MANY of these posts were very compelling, and I kept getting lost in the material because each post was so rich with links to further information. A few of the posts I found of particular interest included:
- Use Music to Develop Kids’ Skills and Character (by Maurice Elias)
- Kids Like Blues: Using Music and Video to Rock Your Classroom (by Jon Schwartz)
- Reel Character: Using Film to Enhance Social and Emotional Learning (by Christina Wright)
- We Are All Artists (by Joshua Block)
- Computers and Fabrication: Revolutionizing the Art World (by Mary Beth Hertz)
- ReMaking Education: Designing Classroom Makerspaces for Transformative Learning (by Stephanie West-Puckett)
- PBL and STEAM Education: A Natural Fit (by Andrew Miller)
- The Power of Digital Story (by Bob Dillon)
The “ReMaking Education” post had some great resources at the bottom as well. In particular, it linked to one teacher’s blog post on the interactive book project they did in their classroom and the tools they used. Some of the digital tools included Audacity and Garageband (to create soundscapes), as well as Scratch and Makey Makey. The teacher (Christian McKay) documents the entire process, explains his reasoning for choosing particular tools and how they work, as well as explains how to recreate the activity for other teachers! I’m thinking something like this would be very cool to pursue as a final project, however, am unsure how I would get access to Makey Makey… Perhaps I can simply explore the Scratch aspect for now.
As an aside – I see the integration of STEAM and PBL pedagogical practices being an area on intent exploration in my future in teacher’s college…