Baby Steps in Becoming a Global Collaborator



As a member of several art-teacher groups on Facebook and Instagram, I love getting ideas from art teachers in other parts of the US and internationally. The sharing of ideas has greatly impacted my own teaching and continues to do so on a regular basis. When I was able to attend the National Art Educators conference last March it felt like I was seeing old friends, even though I was just meeting people for the first time in real life.

I have loved learning more about global collaboration through this course. I am signed up to receive the Connected Classroom emails and each one is so tempting! If I were a classroom teacher I know I would be so into the Mystery Skype experiences! My main struggle that is keeping me from jumping in with both feet is time. I see so many students, but only once a week. If I were able to schedule a mystery skype, only one of my many classes would get the experience. I had considered video taping it for other groups, but that completely defeats the purpose of making these live connections. I have thought about having an artwork exchange as sort of an artwork-pen pal program. I might start by introducing this idea to my art club to try it out before going full scale with all of my students (that would be a ton of artwork to mail!).

The image below is an example of Artist's Trading Cards. Professional and amateur artists make these small works of art with information on the back such as artists name and the title of the piece. These cards can be collected and traded to create a deck of cards that becomes your own little art gallery. I was considering that these would be fun to make and easy to ship to a partnering school.

Image result for artists trading cards
Photo from Amanda Wright's blog: http://amandawrightart.blogspot.com/2011/03/artist-trading-cards.html

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