There’s tons of stuff that’s easily adapted into options and choice for students, especially in the art room. And then there’s the stuff that just needs to get done, oftentimes that’s the stuff I fight and argue with kids about, the stuff I avoid doing until the last minute, or the stuff I just do instead of having students do. None of this is the right way to do things for students.
The AP Studio Art submission is one of these things. The students have had their options and choices in creation. They are so excited about this part of things. But the submission part, not so much. And it’s gotta get done.
So I’ve tried to be thoughtful in how I plan this, thinking about the UDL Guidelines. We are using Chromebooks, which are new to the school/district and to the students. We are doing multiple steps in terms of saving from Seesaw and then uploading into the College Board Website. Nothing that should be too difficult, except many of my students aren’t technologically literate. We all assume kids are but they just aren’t.
So I made this slideshow and videos for students to use to help them upload. Each step is screenshotted (is that a word?) and then I made a video of each step too.
The options come in the planning and the “how” students will do this work, not in the outcome. The outcome is that each student will upload all 24 of their pieces and have 5 pieces matted or “presentation” ready to submit to College Board.
Students will be presented the initial slideshow together, so I can troubleshoot and provide support with the initial set up. Then students will be able to go through the slideshow and videos on their own. The next day I’ll demo and review how to mat work and get it presentation ready.
Then students will have the remainder of the week to get all the work uploaded, concentration statements uploaded and quality work turned in. We worked on our concentration statements a few weeks ago but they will need to be tweaked and edited, especially once the final order of work is up on the College Board site.
My students have the tendency to get distracted, as teenagers do. So I’m creating a few checklists that will be up in the room so they can keep track of what they have done and what they need to do and I can see who needs what sort of support. This is crunch time, so I can’t let things fall through the cracks.
It may seem like overkill in terms of planning and providing options, but I think that so far it’s already going much smoother than last year!
How do you plan for the “boring stuff”?
lizzie fortin 