Professional Development: Keeping Track Of It All and NYCATA Art Teacher Art Club

I'm ramping up to go back to school next week (for me--kids show up 8/31) and part of this process is going through all of the paperwork I stuffed in crates and schlogged home with me in June. That means professional development stuff. 

I am not so great about logging pd hours. Our district uses a program called Frontline and I find it sort of challenging to navigate and I get busy and forget where I'm at in the pd process. This means, I end up with a stack of notebooks and materials that need to be entered. So, one day this week, I sat down and wrangled all of the open pd I had outstanding so I could start this school year with a clean slate!

One thing I did was create these stickers to put on my pd stuff (like notes and handouts and articles). This way, I can see where I am in the process. I printed them out on 8 1x2" x 11" Avery sticker paper, cut them apart and put the extras in my pd binder (yeah, I have a binder--I'm old school!!).

Now it's easy for me to see where I am in the process. Did I ever get reimbursed? Do I need to write the reflection? 

Look on the sticker checklist!

One of the professional development resources I found this past year was the New Your City Art Teachers Association (NYCATA) Art Teachers Art Club. I think I saw it on a middle school art teacher Facebook group I belong to. 

A couple of times a month they "meet" via zoom and art lesson ideas are presented and we can art-a-long. I love it. Sometimes I can't make it or I was just too tired from teacherin' all day--and thankfully their videos are on Youtube afterwards. 

Videos I've found helpful:

Foam Monoprinting: I do this with my students but hadn't thought to create a matrix to mount the plate and paper on. I was also intrigued by using opaque watercolors as ink versus the water soluble markers I usually have the students use.

Glue Batik: I've tried this process with glue/flour mixture and it was difficult to use. I was interested to see how this process was. The gel glue was easier to remove and this educator used fabric inks. Very pretty. Maybe art club? Or an 8th grade Choice project?

Google Drawing--Digital Mosaics: This was a surprise to me! I had my students using Google Draw for a couple of projects and hadn't thought of digital mosaics. Once I watched this, my daughter set to work creating all sorts of mosaics for friends and teachers. I was also able to have a couple of students do this remotely with great results.

I also have plans to watch other videos in the series such as: Abstract Data Self Portraits (maybe a good intro project?) and Typographic Portraits (possibly for my Photography courses).

NOTE: All of the digital mosaics in this post were created by my 10-year-old
 on her own using Google Drawing.

I know this might seem a very weird thing to say given the last year an a half, but I'm glad for Zoom--because I was able to attend these workshops by veteran teachers and learn so much. I'm glad our paths have crossed--even if it is digitally!

Enjoy!