There’s a guide by Pye Jirsa on headshot photography over on SLR Lounge. As someone who doesn’t do a lot of portrait photography, it’s a good read.

What strikes me is how different this is to what we experience with school photos.

School Photo day is a mass disruption to the school schedule. The photographers have a lot of work to do in a short amount of time and teachers just accept that maybe we’re not going to get our lesson done for every class we see.

I’ve got the steps down for school photos. Sit on the stool. Place your feet on the marker (this turns you to the side for a 3/4 view), if you’re wearing glasses, tilt your head down so there isn’t a glare.

You can ask for a retake but it’ll look the same as the first one.

If you’ve read through the SLR Lounge article, you may have noticed a lot of things have been left out. Perhaps the contracted photographers would care about that if they weren’t photographing 500+ students and their teachers, but they just don’t have the time.

The article even includes advice for having an actual conversation with the subject. That’s not happening when photos are being taken on the stage in the cafeteria during one of the lunches, I assure you.

If you have the idea that school photos don’t turn out nearly as well as professional headshots, well, you’re darned right. For all of the expertise of the school photographers, they’re not given the time or environment to output the same quality.

Switch over to what I do in my classroom. Students learn by doing, as any art teacher will tell you. Early on in my digital media arts position, I decided that meant more assignments would equal more learning.

In some ways, it did. Student had a homework assignment video due every week, and every two weeks they had a more intense project video due. It was a lot of work, and the ones who managed it learned to streamline their workflows to get things done on time.

Many corners were cut, but what we didn’t understand was that those corners were load-bearing. An unscripted, unplanned video by an 11 year old is exactly as high-quality as you think it is, because they don’t have the 10,000 hours needed to do that without a script.

I’ve been doing this for a bit longer, now, and I’ve learned to know better. Students still have a project due roughly every two weeks, but it might not be a video. There’s no homework that’s labeled as such, though they may still work outside of class.

The learning is still happening. There’s actually more learning taking place, because those corners that were being cut were load bearing, but they didn’t have the time.

The quality of the work has also predictably improved, and they’re getting more awards for their efforts to prove it.

There’s still the complaint that they have too much work, but these are 10-13 year old kids. If I asked for one video a month I’d get the same complaint. (In fact, this has happened.)

I think about this when I read news stories about companies giving employees more work to improve productivity. I’m not sure it’s understood that if you scrap your quality, what you’re producing isn’t worth selling.

As I said, the corners that get cut are sometimes load-bearing.

Ariel Gilreath wrote a recent article in The Hechinger Report on what Niagra Falls, New York is doing to prepare students for a rapidly changing career ecosystem.

Two main things they’re doing involve not always emphasizing college and starting to think about career paths as early as 9th grade.

I’ve mixed feelings about this.

As the son of an electrician and grandson of a carpenter, neither of whom used college degrees to do those lines of work, I can get behind the idea of the trades as important lifelong career paths. College was the right call for me for a lot of reasons I don’t intend to itemize here, but I’m not everyone.

As for starting looking at careers in 9th grade… Well, I started that in Jr. High. I kid you not, I frequently used a library pass during Study Hall to go and research different careers, including benefits, drawbacks, required education, and expected salaries.

I’ve always been a nerd.

I also did this at a time when the employment landscape wasn’t getting “disrupted” every few years by a techbro with a shiny, environmentally unsafe new toy.

It was over 8 years from when I latched onto art education as a career goal to when I stepped into my first classroom I could call my own. During that time there were two major changes that affected me:

1. Internet use was more prevalent when I graduated, allowing me to apply to more school districts at a faster rate than what I’d have managed otherwise.
2. My college requirements grew slightly more lenient, allowing me to take any elective in the humanities instead of being limited to a foreign language credit. (After taking 4+ years of French and scraping by each time, I was fine with this.)

That’s 8 years.

At the time I’m writing this, 2020 was closer today than my college graduation date was to when I entered 9th grade. Since then we’ve gone to distance everything to get everyone back into buildings. We’ve gone from Bitcoin to NFTs to the AI Bubble.

In 2017-18 Maryland’s Governor Hogan spearheaded adding Computer Science to Maryland public school requirements. I’ve mixed feelings about Hogan (I mostly dislike his constant desire to cut public school funding) but that push is why I teach a coding class.

It was added because there was significant worry that there weren’t going to be enough people entering the workforce with coding skills in the following decade.

You know … the one we’re in now.

The one where coders are getting laid off because “Vibe coding” can do the work for you, so you don’t need a team of coders any more.

I’m still teaching coding this year, but next year I might not. I’ve heard tell that the Computer Science requirement may be broadened to include the other classes I teach, and having me teach 2 different Middle School subjects is easier on the scheduling than having me teach three of them.

Employment Landscapes change, and they’re changing faster now than they used to be. I hope that some of them bounce back after the AI bubble bursts, but someone who picked Computer Science as their major 4 years ago because it was in high demand is graduating into a hellscape today.

But you know what? People still need plumbing. They still need their houses wired, and faulty wires fixed. (My father wired new houses from time to time but spent much more of his time doing the small jobs that big contractors charged too much to touch.)

Going into a career that still needs training but perhaps not a college degree will get most people earning money faster while also not racking up massive debt that, legally, they can’t even clear out with a bankruptcy.

There are still people who are going to want the careers that require a degree. Future doctors, lawyers, scientists, and even, in spite of all warnings, future teachers, are all still going to head off to universities, but it’s going to be a much smaller number.

I’m absolutely thrilled that I’m not the only one tapping the “you don’t need a college degree to be financially independent” sign, but it’s going to cause problems. Not for the trades, we need people there, but for the colleges.

College is already far too expensive. Reduced enrollment is not going to help, and when some degrees see their applicants drop far enough, they’re going to go away.

My own alma mater is known as a great school for future teachers and a great school for artists. You know what you don’t need to be an artist? A 4 year degree. It’s great if you can afford it, but fewer people can and an income has never been guaranteed.

(Heck, with the teacher shortages, in some places the 4 year degree requirement’s on shaky ground.)

There are going to be changes. There’s going to be changes because of those changes.

I just hope that when the dust settles I still recognize the landscape.

There’s an interesting read by Luke Plunkett over at Aftermath about employees pretending to use AI but still doing all of the work themselves.( Note that this is a more informal news site meant for more video game themed content, and profanity exists. Maybe don’t open this link up in front of students.)

I’m fortunate to not be in their shoes. Granted, my employer has opened the door to AI use, but with many limitations, even more so for student use, and at no point have I been told it’s mandatory.

(The people who want me to use it really, really want me to use it, but if I want to be favorable I’ll point out people who really, really like a TV show would like you to watch it, also.)

As I don’t teach higher than 8th grade I’m under even more restrictions. We do have access to Adobe products but the GenAI portions are only enabled for High School staff and students, at least as of last school year. (I did not complain when I found out.)

Not so for employees outside of my small corner of education, it seems, as companies needing to brag to shareholders and other investors that they’re being the most productive ever with the newest of buzzword tools are mandating AI usage and even implying bad things will happen (career-wise) if they don’t ramp up token use.

(I’m going to acknowledge here that some places are learning the financial downside of this and move on, grateful that learning by doing can still exist among adults.)

I marvel at the dichotomy of some trying to hide their AI use in certain situations, like student papers and, very notably, legal cases, while elsewhere people are having to pretend AI had a hand in their work because someone higher up the chain is certain that’s a better outcome.

I can tell you right now: AI does not make a student film better. It makes it look like slop.

AI can’t help me write better. Proofreading is the hardest part of the writing process for me, and because AI shows what an answer looks like (instead of showing an answer) I’d have to check over anything it does more thoroughly. It’s emotionally draining in a way that proofreading my own work or even student work never is.

(Besides, everyone knows the best way to check for errors is to publish the document and read over it after you know someone else has already seen it. You find ALL the errors that way.)

I can’t see a time when supervisors in my content area will put me in the same boat as the anonymous interviewees in the Aftermath article for a few reasons, most notably the emphasis on teacher and student choice that weaves through everything in our digital media arts department. We’re given tool options, not tool mandates.

Beyond that, things cost money. You know what my department does when they’ve paid for a thing and people don’t use it?

They stop paying for it.

It’s a novel concept, I know. You’d think businesses that can afford to lose more than my school system’s entire operating budget and still somehow stay afloat would be able to grasp the concept.

Instead, their employees have to lie about running what they did through an AI to “check” it.

On the whole I like The Hechinger Report. They have a lenient policy in regards to sharing their articles and they tackle some important issues.

On the other hand, they recently published a guest editorial by Alexandra Walsh, “the chief product officer at Amplify, one of the country’s largest K-12 curriculum and assessment companies.”

To its credit, the opinion piece only mentions Amplify once, and even then it’s in the author bio at the bottom. It’s trying very hard not to be an ad for the company while still leaving people feeling more favorable towards companies like it.

Which is to say, it’s an opinion piece, it doesn’t hide that it’s an opinion piece, and one should approach it as such as they look for the things with which they agree and disagree. (You’ll find both in there, because we’re human.)

As is my theme for Blaugust, I’m not going to give a rundown of the article and go over what I like/dislike about it. It’s what made me want to write something, but that something is not a review.

I used to be an early adopter. New things came out, I played with them, enjoyed them (or didn’t), and tried to figure out how to use them in my classroom.

(At the time I was a traveling visual art teacher and only rarely had access to a computer lab so how I got to use edtech was somewhat limited, but we had our moments.)

The problem was that not every tech “innovation” is actually that. Sometimes disruptions don’t lead to better things, they just make the things that worked well work less well.

This was either harder to spot or just less common back then. It seems nowadays a lot of the “cool, new things” are heavily branded, commercialized, and/or meant to funnel students towards siloed ecosystems where they’ll spend their adult lives making those companies more profitable.

That motivation is incompatible with my motivation as a teacher. I’m not teaching the next generation of Adobe users, I’m teaching the next generation of filmmakers. There’s overlap, but I refuse to see that Venn diagram as a single circle.

(My own alma mater didn’t get it. At the time, they taught that if you wanted to make digital art you needed 1. A Mac and 2. Adobe products. Exceptions weren’t discussed, and to this day there are teachers in my field who believe this.)

In a few days I’ll be honored to give a short talk to newly hired digital media arts teachers in my district. I won’t be the only one talking, but a big emphasis of mine will be on choice.

They’ll be shown Adobe products for editing video. I’m going to point out Kdenlive.

They’ll be shown generative AI (again, from within Adobe tools). I’m going to point out free, openly licensed content made by humans, and tools that can be used to make more of it.

They’ll be shown products that require subscriptions (ones that my district pays) to be useful. I’m going to point out tools that will never require that, some of which will work in a web browser with all of the editing done client-side.

I can’t guarantee they’ll all walk away from what I believe are the “right” things. I don’t want to be in a position where I have that much authority over another teacher. But I do want them to know there are options.

With those options, hopefully enough of them will pick the more sustainable routes.

30 years ago, I probably wouldn’t have. But then again, I didn’t have someone explain it to me.

You may have noticed that each of my Blaugust posts is hung on a hook that is another article (sometimes several), sometimes only loosely related to my topic.

I’m liking the idea of using these as jumping off points, and the whole thing feels far less derivative than the “articles” I’ve frequently found in the past that were “Here’s a video with a paragraph about it that hits word count but really just watch the video.”

There’s a purpose for those, but I want to distance myself from them.

The Setup

With that in mind, PetaPixel has a story on The National Gallery of Art announcing an exhibit “that will trace African American photographers and portrait subjects from the earliest days of photography.”

I like how this got through the draconian policies of our current administration, as acknowledging that any non-white, cishet male existed and sometimes had problems in the 1800s is grounds for content warning signs placed outside your museum these days. (I’m looking forward to the days when people look at that last sentence with disbelief.)

The Tie-In

So here’s the thing: Most of my students are African American. I’m not looking up the numbers for this, but it’s like 95+% of them. It’s so prevalent that in spite of my own heritage being a mix of Irish/Scottish/German one of my students found out only last year that I’m not black. They just assumed everyone in the building was, because everyone in their class was.

(In their defense, they have a sibling who is very light skinned, so they thought I was like their sibling.)

So yeah, I have a student population where, when they see most pop culture media, people who look like them are regulated to the “token black friend” casting role.

Having a whole exhibit that tells them “No, people who look like you have been using cameras for almost as long as they’ve existed” is a powerful thing.

My Students’ Work

One of the things I love about my content area (by that I mean Digital Media Arts) is that it has a district-wide theme of amplifying student voices. I didn’t come up with that, but I feel like it was pulled subconsciously from my brain and put into the official documentation.

I teach in an arts school, where we have multiple disciplines to showcase: Visual Arts (of course…), Dance, Theater, Chorus, I could go on.

But the one I teach? Media Arts? It’s how the others get shown off outside of a school gym.

There’s a hazard to this, though.

Artists usually want only their best work to be seen by others. Artists are also usually their own worst critics. This does not lead to a healthy combination. I’ve students who will avoid handing work in because late assignments don’t get seen and critiqued by their peers.

(They also really hurt grades to a degree that submitting unfinished work will not, but if logic always overpowered anxiety I wouldn’t still have acrophobia.)

And then there’s the teacher involvement.

I’ve long felt that art teachers could be sorted into two categories: Those who presented student work as accurate representations of what the students were able to do, and those who wanted to showcase the best art possible.

Those aren’t the same thing. Everyone makes mistakes, but students have more to learn and therefore make more of them. I’ve seen vis art teachers gluing collages back together, going over drawings with markers to fix the linework, and other atrocities to make the student work look nicer. In the end they had work they were happy to showcase, but saying it was done by the students was not really honest any more.

The Solution?

I’ve many goals for the upcoming school year, but one of them is to provide a wider audience to my students.

Many things get easier by doing them, and showing your work to others is included in that. There’s still a need for curation (self and by others), but having my department be more visible is likely to lead to more students getting comfortable with the idea that others will see what they do.

It’s a lot of work.

I’m not sure I can manage that with all of my other duties, but I can delegate.

Among other things, I teach presentation. I can have my 8th graders work to curate student projects in ways I can share with a wider audience. As the teacher I’ll have to have the last say in what goes live (not to mention managing publicity release forms, etc.), but that’s a small portion of the effort needed.

Having my students do the initial curating removes me a bit from the process, but this is an ideal result. The goal is for STUDENT voices to be amplified. If I become that teacher with a marker to fix the line work, then I’m inserting my own voice into things.

That ruins the whole point of all of this.

Sure, as the adult in the room I need to be the last say in what goes live, but by the time I’m making that call there should be few, if any, creative decisions left.

The next hurdle is in HOW to present the work. I teach web design, but I don’t have a school-approved web host I can use for that.

Google tools are for the most part approved, but students can’t make anything in Google Sites, Docs, etc. be viewable outside of our district.

I understand and agree with these limitations. I don’t want them reversed, that opens the doors to too many headaches, but it does make things harder.

The simplest solution I see is for the 8th grader making the showcase to put the whole thing into a video and send it over to me to import to my own account and change the permission settings so a wider audience can see it. I need to check the whole video anyway, so that’s fine.

Another option would be for them to make a Google Presentation that I again copy over to my own account. Video and audio embedding can be done this way, and it’s actually how our Vis Art department did their art showcases back during our distance learning years.

The issue that arises is that permissions for the Google Presentation aren’t the same as the embedded media. You can see all the slides but then get an error for a video if the video has more restrictions. This is, in fact, something I learned from the aforementioned Vis Art shows.

So I have a rough semblance of the outline of a plan.

It might get changed a lot as I talk it out with the other teacher in my department as well as our school admin.

We’ll see how this goes.

There’s an interesting read on The Hechinger Report where Jackie Mader has written an article about game sites that avoid school web filters.

(The Hechinger Report, interestingly enough, releases articles under a Creative Commons license. That’s super cool of them, and one of the reasons they’re in my RSS feed reader.)

As is my trend for Blaugust, this isn’t a summary of that article, I’m using it as a jumping off point.

I have a love-hate relationship with games in my classroom.

Also internet filters.

Also, the internet.

Also, computers in general.

All for the same reason, in fact – these things that can be powerful tools for learning are also a student’s go-to for distraction. As someone with unmedicated ADHD, I know the struggle is real.

The difference is in the directions, as with most tools.

I don’t just toss my students at Luanti, I set up a modded server and direct students to complete a task, often one that requires teamwork.

I have students produce game review videos where OF COURSE they have to get some b-roll of them playing the game, but they also have to write up glows and grows (positive and constructive criticism, if we’re being fancy), script things out, record their audio, and overlay everything in post-production.

Many of the reviewed games are hosted on websites that do their best to avoid school filter blocks, which I allow so long as the content is not inappropriate for school. Students will ask what is and isn’t fair game, and I usually say “Imagine I’m showing your review to [Principal], because there’s a good chance I’m going to show it to [Principal] and your parents if you choose poorly.”

That’s usually enough guidance for a 6th grader to make the right call without going over the Student Code of Conduct in detail.

Heck, I’ve had students designing games for close to 20 years. The tools we use have changed, but the core concepts remain.

There’s plenty of reasons to block websites in school, and I’m glad it’s not my job to decide where the line is drawn, but I’ve found in my own little corner of education the easiest path forward is to take the distraction and turn it into a curriculum-based lesson.

I did the same thing with phones, back before my school banned them, but that’s another topic full of mixed feelings for a different post.

Over on DIY Photography, Alysa Gavilan as a good introduction to freelance photography as a career. It’s worth a read if that’s something you or someone you know is seriously thinking about that as a choice.

I’m not summarizing articles here, but I’ve known a few freelancers and photography business owners (Are you a freelancer if you have employees?) and because of that I offer some additional advice:

Get a business degree.

No, seriously. Some of the most talented artists I know don’t have formal degrees in their craft, because it’s already their passion. They live and breathe that stuff, and the knowledge follows experience and sharing with others in the communities that form around their chosen media.

A photographer might not start out strong, but they get that way through trial an error.

You know what field is prohibitively expensive if you try to learn through trial and error? Business.

A 2 year business degree from a community college will give you the basics for how to start a company, handle billing, pay employees (you should be an employee of your business, even if it’s just you), get proper permitting and paperwork, and a bunch of stuff I don’t know because I’m not a freelancer.

I’m not saying a photography degree is worthless, far from it. I would love it if every artist had the time and money to get a degree in the media that is their passion, but that’s not the world we live in right now.

If you only have the finances for one degree, get the one that helps you manage those finances.

Then use it to make your love of photography profitable.

I recently read an article with a similar name to this one that I’ll not link here, because it made me angry enough to draft a rebuttal.

This is not that rebuttal. This isn’t even a tribute.

Instead, this is my own list, different from the other one, and limited to five things simply to keep this post shorter than a novel. I could go on. I could nitpick. I would rather not invite that poison into my soul this morning.

(And yes, these are in a numbered order, but what that order should be has changed on a daily, sometimes hourly basis for me. I might adjust it after I’ve written all five. I might not.)

#5 We call it EdTech

TL;DR: I don’t like that it’s shoved over to be a separate thing when technology use should be in everyone’s domain.

There’s plenty of reasons to use labels, but doing so fits things into neat little boxes when the world is not so easy to organize.

I’ve been my school’s “EdTech” teacher for as long as it’s existed, and with that comes a concept held by too many people that I hold a fiefdom over all that has blinking lights and LCD screens.

We’ve moved away from that a bit in the past 6 years (I wonder why…) but the problem persists, with teachers using class Chromebooks for unsupervised “independent study” time because they’re not “techy” enough to do more.

In truth, any technology is a tool that makes life easier for those who are using it. (If it’s making life harder, someone’s doing something wrong.) The first of our ancestors that learned a pointy stick kept their food from running away was using technology. It should not be mystified just because now a lot of it has rocks we tricked into doing math.

There are plenty of people who make loving tech their whole personality and try to build walls up so anyone not on their level doesn’t get to be “in the know” and learn how to use the tools. Those who just want things to work don’t need to help build those walls.

#4 We Let Capitalism Lead It

TL;DR: Nothing in education should be a for-profit enterprise, because that shifts priorities to making money, not supporting students.

Schools, traditionally, are underfunded. Underfunded schools do not traditionally have a lot of money to spend on technology. Therefore, schools will frequently look for the free and/or cheap options.

This means the schools will have tons of open-source software running on refurbished hardware, right? Hahaha, my lab is an outlier and does not get counted.

No, a lot of the tools we use are “freemium” to get us hooked before charging for more features, or ad supported, or have data collection, or are provided at steep discounts so that students (and teachers) get locked into the “but I’ve always used [thing]” mentality.

Look at what Apple did in the 1990s. All of those Mac labs existed for a reason, and it helped keep them afloat for years.

Google’s doing the same thing with Chromebooks, and they don’t even need to deal with hardware or marketing to make it happen.

Sure, to be in my school system they have to promise to not collect any data on our students, but this is Google. If they have someone locked into their ecosystem by 3rd grade then as soon as that kid creates a non-student account the data collection and selling begins.

Adobe makes me the angriest, though, as even my own colleagues in the past have said their students needed Adobe Creative Suite to be successful. Why? It’s the industry standard. Why? Because everyone uses it. Why? Because it’s the industry standard.

There’s no such thing as a free lunch, I know. Using open source software in my lab requires me to do more work installing and maintaining things, but my students will still know WHEN to make the cut from one scene to another.

#3 We Lowered Our Standards

TL;DR: Some tools we use are garbage, but we still use them because they’re “educational.”

A long time ago I was really into a handful of Christian Rock bands. Alas, only a handful, because the rest were … developing their skills. Christian Rock was a small enough niche that a band could get their foot in the door and be on the local Christian Rock radio station with a level of quality one could not find on any pop, country, or oldies station because the bar for those was too high.

Most “educational” programs I’ve played with have either been heavy on the fun with a glaze of flash cards on top or heavy on the flash cards with showing a point total to make it “gamified.”

I’ve had far more success taking tools never meant to be limited to the classroom and having students make things with them. Kdenlive isn’t a video editor for kids, it’s a video editor. The lesson is in learning how to use it, and it doesn’t need a cartoon mascot for that.

(Although Tux Paint has a cartoon mascot and is super fun, so there’s always exceptions.)

#2 We Abandoned Old Successes

TL;DR: Things that work well don’t have to be dumped just because we found a new thing.

Remember when blogging and podcasting were big in education? No, not recently, I mean the first time, back in the ’00s, before some of my coworkers were born.

How about game based learning? Gamification? (You know those aren’t the same thing?)

Each of these was a trend that was popular for good reasons that just faded away to obscurity, not because it got worse but because the next new trend showed up and there was only so much time in a school day.

#1 We Jump on Bandwagons Because They’re Bandwagons

TL;DR: If not adopting AI will have me get left behind, then I will leave you to join the lemmings and be here when the bubble has burst with my cognitive skills intact.

I’ve seen a lot of fads come and go: ’80s hairstyles, Bitcoin, NFTs, and candy colored computers are just some of them. You can still find fragments left behind, but they are all shadows of their former selves.

AI is one of these trends, with companies relabeling rather tame algorithms as “AI” because that’s the buzzword of the day.

It disgusts me that so many EdTech “leaders,” some of whom I respected in the ’00s, have seen this as the next big thing and hitched their wagons to it.

Gotta make a buck somehow, if your income is public speaking and book sales, I guess.

Whenever I converse with an AI advocate, I get the same talking points:

• “You’re not teaching your kids what they need to know.”
  • My students know how to make movies. Yours know how to write a prompt and have a program steal other movies and mash them together to make something that looks the same as every other AI generated piece of slop. Our classes are not the same.
• “It gives you more time for the important work.”
  • Everything AI generates is subject to errors, and people are getting in trouble when those errors slip through. It takes me less time to make a thing than it does to double-check the output from a plagiarism engine.
• “It helps students learn.”
  • Citation needed. (I’m never provided any when I ask.)
  • Any time the work is done for my students, they don’t learn. My kindergarten students don’t learn their passwords in classes where the teacher types it for them, but in my class most of them have it down in two weeks. They learn by doing. If AI does the work from them, what are they learning?
  • I teach HTML coding. AI can write code, but AI written code is very hard to maintain. I can look at my hand-coded websites and edit them. My students can do the same. Yours can, what, ask the AI to do better this time?
• “It’s cheaper than paying an artist.”
  • Theft usually is. Knowing how to steal is not the flex you think it is. Telling an art teacher that kids should know how to steal from artists is certainly a choice.

One last thing about the AI bandwagon that is spreading like a cancer: The people making money in a gold rush are the ones who sell the shovels.

The established shovel makers aren’t building more factories. They see the bubble for what it is, and don’t expect it to last long enough for a new factory to pay for itself before the bubble bursts.

When that happens, I’ll be here – still teaching how to make cool things without typing prompts into a souped up spellchecker, while others have forgotten how to do anything without asking an AI for advice first.

The very first post I ever made on this blog was about the Artchive, a still-running site where you can find countless fine art images by famous artists. When I made that I was halfway through my first year as an elementary art teacher (after 4 years of teaching high school) and in the process of getting my graduate degree.

That post – this whole website, actually – was part of that degree, as we had to make web pages for one of my courses. Most went with static pages but not me, I had to be fancy!

The Artchive is still awesome, but Open Culture has found yet another resource to add to my tool belt: The Last Museum.

You should read the write-up Open Culture has, it’s not long and I don’t want to just rehash what someone else said. Instead, let’s talk about usage.

My students like making digital things, but those interests aren’t distributed evenly. If they have a video that needs some visuals, their first inclination is to head to Google and steal something. My job, in part, is to fix that so they don’t end up on the news for the wrong reasons.

Now I’ve shared a variety of sites with them to help out with that, but more is better, and The Last Museum is effectively a search engine for art.

One of my favorite features about it is that you can select a specific range of years. Because copyright law is a hot mess in most places (it’s great to protect artists’ rights, it’s unfortunate that companies abuse it constantly), I’m more likely to find public domain art I can use if I move the higher end of that slider down to, say, 1930.

(It’s still worth checking each work, of course, as exceptions sometimes exist depending on each country’s laws.)

And the variety! There’s maps, woodcuts, paintings, prints, lots of architecture, and all kinds of cool things in there.

This isn’t going to replace the other sources I use, but it’s certainly going to supplement them.

Remember when you would buy a compact camera if you wanted something inexpensive?

Well, technically you still can (Looking at you, Camp Snap!), but the prices for higher quality compact cameras are surpassing the lower end DSLR and mirrorless models, even when you factor in the lenses.

Granted, you’re getting what you pay for. A $1k+ compact is going to outperform my current, aging DSLR (in the best lighting, at least…) while still being small enough to fit in a pocket. Still, I’m the kind of person who won’t pay the going rate for a new desktop computer when I’m replacing my phone, so my knee-jerk reaction is to not like it.

The Bad Times

I remember when it seemed like the small camera market was dying off. Flip video cameras were remarkable even without an optical zoom, but cell phones were on the rise, so they died away. Reporters were being handed iPhones so staff photographers could be laid off. (And that was earlier this year!)

The Better Times

Now we’ve got a resurgence of non-phone cameras and I love it, for so many reasons. Camera companies are loving it as well, as the ones that survived are raking it in. I won’t celebrate the rich getting richer, but without new hardware being made the hobby does get a bit more difficult.

First of all: Your average non-phone camera isn’t going to be packed with AI “features.” Oh, there might be something in there labeled as AI, in the same way that every spellchecker gets that label if someone in marketing thinks it’ll make a shareholder salivate, but cameras aren’t going to have the processors or storage space dedicated to the LLMs I complain about to everyone who will listen.

Second: Phones are constantly online. Cameras aren’t. You can get a camera with Wi-Fi features, but try turning those on and watch your battery drain in real time. The benefit here is that any portal onto the internet is also a doorway to distraction. When I’m taking photos I want to be in that moment, not immediately going through the process of evaluating and uploading content.

My students have always been in that mindset. It’ll take an hour to record 5 minutes because they need to stop and review after every shot, and while that’s happening oops here come the phones. This only got quashed last year because of a school-wide cell phone ban.

A Mild Complaint

The downside of this is that it’s getting harder to get cameras for my classroom. I started regularly trolling shopgoodwill.com back in 2020 looking for computers, and within a few years I had a class set of compact cameras as well. Granted, they were of … varying levels of quality, with some using cards not manufactured in quantity since before some of my students were born, but they worked, and they were cheap, because the demand was low.

Now, I still get cameras from Goodwill, but my eyes are on the bridge models – like the Nikon Coolpix ones that take four AA batteries, because I can get rechargeable lithium AAs for cheap(ish) prices and those things combined will last for years.

But the compact cameras? That’s a non-starter. I might get a DSLR for $50 and be happy even without it being new enough to record video, but the decent compacts are going for way, way, more.

(I’m fully aware that this may be incredibly dated within a year or two. Consider it a snapshot from a bygone era if that’s the case.)

A Selfish Complaint, Because It’s My Blog So I’m Allowed

I suppose my biggest complaint about it is entirely selfish. Until last year I had a perfectly serviceable compact that was waterproof, shockproof, had a flip-out screen, and all for @ $400. You can’t get that value for that price any more, and since the screen died it’s next to unusable.

The New Old Compact

My new compact, A Camp Snap Pro, is none of the things the old one was. It’s cheap, by both definitions of the word. There’s no flip-out screen, in fact there’s no screen at all. It doesn’t do video, and while I suspect it would survive a bounce or two thanks to a lack of moving parts, I dare not consider it to be waterproof.

Not everyone’s a fan.

I’d take a class set if I could manage it.

No screen to check your shots? Well it’s more work to do that, so you might as well take all of the ones you need for this assignment before stopping your shoot to do that. You DID plan your whole shot list, right? … right?

No built-in zoom? Use your feet like I told you to.

The photos all look too dark? Time to actually use the studio lights we have instead of relying solely on the fluorescent overheads.

It’s only slightly removed from teaching film photography, but without the chemicals.

I’m totally here for that aesthetic.

Russell T. Warne has an article over on Education Next about the Gifted (or as some districts call it, “Talented & Gifted,” or “TAG”) program and some of its flaws. This isn’t a summary of the article, I’m just using that as a jumping off point.

I’d like to think I know a bit about the Gifted program. In 5th grade I was labeled Gifted and later I became both a TAG teacher and coordinator. I’ve had the small desk, big desk, and run-around-the-building positions for TAG, something not everyone gets to say.

The Small Desk

My journey in TAG began after taking an IQ test, a method I consider to be outdated based on both Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences (I was taught Gardner in the ’90s, talking about “Intelligence” like it’s one monolithic thing should be reserved for history books and RPGs) and the more recent concept of Growth Mindset.

Regardless of the inherent inequalities in that system of identification, I benefited from it … mostly.

Some of the things we did stuck with me, even now, decades later. I remember playing a competitive stock market game and my team winning, out of mostly sheer luck. I remember working collectively on a model airplane that we never actually finished. I faked a UFO photo with papier-mâché and a Polaroid camera, fooling a significant percentage of my grade level.

I got “enrichment” experiences that I would not have otherwise had, thanks to a poorly designed test that said I met the minimum requirements. They left me more rounded, with a better understanding of what I would and would not like to try later in life.

The Big Desk

For a time, I was my current school’s TAG teacher for grades 4-5. It was a lot of fun, with the program revolving around students identifying problems and inventing creative solutions. Keep in mind that for 4th graders, sometimes a problem might be “I don’t have a cardboard robot costume.”

I was 100% for this. We were a pull-out program, so students missed instructional time elsewhere to attend my class once a week (where I also missed planning time) but hey, they were “gifted,” they could make that up, right?

Then 2020 happened and a lot of changes took place. There were multiple ways to handle distance learning but I ended up not enjoying the changes that were made. As I was teaching TAG for the fun of it and not for the stipend, I asked to not be the TAG teacher and my principal took no issue with that.

TAG Coordinator

My last few years as a TAG teacher I did double duty as my school’s Coordinator. I won’t lay out all of the duties here but my primary responsibility was to be one of the front-line people identifying who was eligible for TAG based on my school system’s requirements. (Oh, hey, Russell T. Warne talks about that in the article I linked!)

My school system had (and I assume still has, but I’m not a Coordinator now) a much more lenient method of accepting students into TAG. Again, I’m not going over all the bullet points here, but nowhere in the multiple factors we examined did we ever consider IQ. Being Coordinator was a thankless job, but I’m glad I got to learn how things work. I wouldn’t touch it with a 10 foot pole unless I was still teaching TAG, though. Most schools, the TAG Coordinator is office staff or an administrator.

The Problem With TAG

Alright, now that you have my life story, here’s the part I’d be able to fit into a post on Mastodon:

In my experience, the parts of TAG that benefit students in the program could benefit ALL students if we just opened it to everyone. The parts of TAG that make learning more engaging are perhaps needed even more by students who are not achieving enough to qualify.

There’s no magic switch that makes the TAG program better if you have a label, and nothing that makes it cease to be good if you lack it. We could teach the core concepts to everyone, but we don’t.

At least, not officially.

There’s lots of reasons why, and I’m not about to take a position outside the classroom in order to address them, but I suspect it boils down to resource allocation. TAG costs money and time, both of which are in short supply in most schools.

(There’s also the non-zero possibility that someone thinks that if all classes are TAG then there’s nothing that makes the TAG classes stand out, but that’s idle speculation based on nothing I’ve seen or heard in regards to my district’s TAG department.)

But here’s the thing: If you’re blessed with a curriculum that allows for flexibility, you can just … have students do TAG lessons anyway. I know not every teacher has that option, some admin expect everyone to be on the same lesson in the curriculum on the same day.

But I do have that freedom, and so do many arts teachers.

So that’s what I do.

Importantly: They’re much cheaper and more convenient than most lights that would serve the same purpose.I don’t even need to buy one, since I’ve made due with a sheet of paper and even a blank wall on occasion.

But there’s still a trick to getting it right, so I’m glad that SLR Lounge has written up a guide to Reflector use.

Eight years later and a lot has changed. Yes, all the big things that have already come to your mind, but also, I’m doing a lot of stuff differently.

(Except for standardized testing. Standardized testing never changes.)

The rest of this post’s going to be something of a ramble. I might take parts of what’s in here and turn them into separate posts later, or I might come back years later and share another ramble.

My computer lab is all Linux. Heck, my home computers are all Linux at this point. It’s not that I love it, it’s that every other OS I’ve been fond of in the past 20 years has turned to garbage.

AI is a plague, and many of the great educators I once admired are now touting it as the revolution that will help everyone more easily steal from artists while enabling cognitive decline and hastening the destruction of our environment. None of these things really matter to them, but hey, they got it to make a graphic with too many colors so that lets them hand-wave away all the negatives.

A lot of the sites I’ve convinced others to use have gone the same route as my once respected peers. Code.org rebranded to CodeAI just this year. I’m still expected to use their curriculum for my web design course, but it’s one overhaul away from being useless to my students. (They’re all artists. Am I to tell them the future will be built upon their works, with no credit given? Am I to tell them the future requires them to steal for the corporations so that they may be laid off when they’re no longer needed? What skills will it provide to help them after the AI bubble bursts?)

I’m having a lot of fun playing TTRPGs, though, and most years I sponsor an after school TTRPG club for my students. We’ve abandoned Dungeons & Dragons (another product whose owner has made thoroughly bad choices, but this is the wrong blog for that) in favor of Lasers & Feelings, Cypher System, and Tales of the Valiant.

My social media presence has eroded to near nothing. I deleted my Twitter accounts (I’d stopped using them years earlier), and no longer publish videos to YouTube. I’m on Mastodon and PeerTube, though the former is followers-only by default and the latter focuses on TTRPGs. I might make a PeerTube for my education musings, if I gather enough thoughts to make that worth it. You can find the accounts I use on my other website.

Just last month we passed the 10 year anniversary of my wife’s death. It still hurts. I still miss her every day.

I want to be optimistic about things. There are a lot of reasons out there for me to be pessimistic and call it realism. You have to hunt for the things that make you happy, or make them yourself.

Andrew Roach is doing some amazing things. He’s not a teacher in the traditional sense, but he’s a problem solver. He’s using old tech to make video and fancy tech to make toys. He has a zine that’s half manifesto and half instruction manual on how to make your own TV station.

Russ Sharek went and made a new license for releasing work, that’s similar to CC-BY but with carve-outs preventing AI and corporate use.

Old things are becoming popular again, and I only feel like turning to dust a little bit when I remember them as new things. Primitive digital cameras that don’t connect to the internet or use AI to “fix” things are on the rise, and my students like them a lot. It’s made it harder for me to buy used cameras because of supply and demand, but when I brought my Camp Snap 8 to school, all of my younger students wanted to use it.

There are reasons to be optimistic. Maybe that’s what I’ll post more of here, to make myself feel better about the future.

Or maybe I’ll just yell at cloud computing and AI.

Or both. Both is good.

Rather than give long and difficult to type URLS for my presentations, I thought I’d share them here. (Yes, I am aware that “academicaesthetic” is not universally easy to type, but it’s easier than, say, “o03Eil5s,” and people can get here from AaronBSmith.com … hm, maybe that’s the link I’ll share.)

Keep in mind that these Google Slides are primarily my visual aids, as opposed to the talks themselves, and I’ll probably be changing slides around up to and including 5 minutes before my session starts. If all goes well I’ll have recordings of the actual presentations that I can post on this website as a follow-up.

• Student Directed Learning With Google Forms & Classroom
• Dungeons & Dragons: The Original Game Based Learning Tool

Let’s talk about assessment.

…

OK, now that I’ve scared off any random students who’ve managed to find my website, let’s have an honest talk about assessment.

Grades in one form or another have been a staple of education for a very long time indeed. With the push to quantify school quality through standardized testing and the overall inertia that we normally encounter in academia in general, they don’t look like they’ll be going away any time soon.

So naturally, they’re a perfect thing for progressive ed reformers to rally against. Kids hate them (unless they have an A), teachers hate assessing which grades to give (unless it’s self-grading), and parents hate having to come in for parent/teacher conferences to discuss them, so let’s trash them, right?

Not so fast.

Grades, like paper in an art room, still serve more than one essential need in the classroom. Unlike slide rules and filmstrip projectors, we still use grades because we haven’t come up with a better alternative for them. They work.

Let’s start with the point that Mr. Robinson brings up in his initial rebuttal: Feedback.

Grades on individual assignments let students know the skill with which they completed the assigned task. Those grades can (and should be) itemized in such a way that students also know how well they accomplished various subcategories of the skills being assessed. Their cumulative grade (which if done well should be accessible at any time, not just when Progress Reports or Report Cards are sent home) helps students know how well they’re doing in the course overall. Ideally they should have some idea about how much each assignment weighs against the other tasks they are given throughout the course.

Yes, I can give feedback just through constructive and positive criticism, but while those things are crucially important parts of my curriculum, the ability to boil something down to a number or letter can help the student better understand their growth than me just saying “Hey, that was reasonably better than last time!”

Next up: Grades do the same thing for me that they do for the students.

For the past eight years, my grade book has been a Google Sheet with more annotations, comments, and conditional formatting than is healthy for any web-based system. It is packed full of additional information that explains or clarifies various scores and why they are what they are.

This is incredibly useful information that I’ve gone back to on many occasions throughout the year, but it doesn’t beat being able to highlight the row a child’s scores are in and scroll across to see trends in the data. I can do that with numbered (or lettered) grades far faster than I’d ever be able to do that without them.

I’ve often complained that education is a dinosaur that needs to do some serious evolving if it’s to continue to be meaningful and helpful to our students, but when it comes to getting rid of grades? That’s throwing the baby out with the bath water.

There are a few kinds of assessment that I could do without (Die, standardized testing, DIE!), but let’s keep grades around for a while. They haven’t failed us yet.

Pun intended.

Well never fear, because scholar.social has stepped in to fill the void!

As the name implies, scholar.social is not JUST for teachers, but anyone involved in academics. The tag line they use is  “The Mastodon profile that you’re not embarrassed to put on the last slide of a presentation at a conference,” which is a little wordy I’ll admit, but I think it’s  a great ideal to live by.

It’s a small instance at the time I’m writing this, but as someone who has debated making an instance just for myself I don’t see this as a bad thing. Something I enjoy on Mastodon is when I can look at the Local Timeline and not have it scroll past me faster than I can read. I was getting that on mastodon.cloud and mastodon.social, but not on elekk.xyz. I’ll admit, being able to see what others were saying on my instance kind of spoiled me, so I’m glad my new home lets me enjoy that again.

I’m not going to say this will replace Twitter. Twitter didn’t replace Tumblr for me, and Tumblr didn’t replace this blog. I will say that so far I’m enjoying Mastodon, scholar.social specifically, and think that if you like reading what I put on this site you might enjoy it yourself.

So if you’re a teacher, why not give it a try? When you do, say hello. All the cool kids are doing it.

And so am I.

For years, now, Mr. Savage has been giving a  short talk at the annual Maker Faire. They are full of inspiration, encouragement, and awesomeness. This year’s talk is no different.

The giant ant he rides in on is a bit of a bonus.

Separate from this is a trend known as POSSE, or Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.

Like it implies, following a POSSE strategy doesn’t forego having and using the free social media sites that are so hip with the kids these days, particularly the ones who don’t describe neato things with the word “hip” (or “neato,” for that matter…). Instead, you put your meaningful content on a site you host yourself, then link to it on those networks.

I like this plan. Here’s why.

Here today, gone tomorrow.

A sizable portion of the things I have made were uploaded to services that no longer exist. Remember Geocities? Mac.com web hosting? Tumblr is still around, but I apparently went so long without using it that an older account of mine was deactivated and resurrected by someone spamming ads for real estate.

We assume when we create an account on a free service that it will stay online forever, or at least until we’ve lost interest. Those of us with more gray hairs know that this is simply not the case. A lot of people today are mourning the loss of Vine, but it’s far from the first to go and certainly won’t be the last.

(Side note: My wife did all her blogging on a Tumblr account. I’m going to have to find a way to preserve that somehow.)

You’re the product.

I’ve heard “If you’re getting a service for free, you’re not the customer, you’re the product” so often that it almost loses meaning now. Unfortunately, it is frequently true.

Google doesn’t make money hand over fist because they’re selling physical items or search results, they’re making money because so many people see the stuff they do that buying ads from them is cost effective. (I say this knowing full well that some pages on this website include ads  from Google. I didn’t say all advertising is bad.) The same is true for Facebook. Twitter is … working on it, but they have a problem still with bots and harassers so their store of products seems a bit tainted to prospective buyers.

I pay a company for server space. Because that’s their product and keeping me happy is the best way to keep me sending them money, they work hard to do so. On a free service that is mostly depending on ad revenue and/or data collection, the people they want to make happy are the ones sending them money.

This happened recently on YouTube, where advertisers got particularly annoyed when their ads started showing up in front of incredibly offensive content. As a result, YouTube has seriously cut back on which videos can be monetized. So far, so good, right? Yes, except the algorithm isn’t as fine-tuned as it could be, and now non-bigoted people (I’m assuming, but I like to assume the best when possible) who depend on YouTube ad revenue to pay their rent are a bit concerned about their drop in income.

I like YouTube. It’s where I post all of my tutorials as well as my more recent conference presentations and vlogs, but I wouldn’t depend on it for my income even if my channel subscriptions went through the roof because I’d be relying wholly on a company NOT designed or motivated to keep me happy meeting my needs. (I’d also be squeamish about forcing my students to watch tutorials that make me money. The channel I use to host my tutorials is currently not set up for monetization. If you see ads, the revenue isn’t going to me.)

Self-hosted content is (more) mobile.

I said before that I like my web host. I do, but if I somehow change my mind it would take only a little bit of work to back up this entire site with YEARS of content and move it to another host. There are a few other companies that do that, but it isn’t universal and it isn’t always easy.

Google is one of the few, which is part of the reason I was able to move from Blogger to WordPress without copy/pasting blog posts by hand.

Flickr theoretically has an option for downloading all your photos, but the last several times I tried it didn’t work. If I had been uploading all my photos to a self-hosted site instead of Flickr, I wouldn’t be so concerned about this.

Twitter allows you to request an archive of all of your tweets.

I haven’t seen anything on Facebook or their subsidiaries (Instagram, etc.) allowing you to download all of your content from them.

Vine offered this, but they’re gone now.

You don’t need to leave, but a permanent home would be good.

This entire post was inspired by Doug Belshaw’s post about why he’s “leaving” Twitter. I use quotes because he’s not abandoning Twitter like I abandoned my old nameless-to-not-support-a-spammer Tumblr account. Instead, he’s switching strategies.

To Mr. Belshaw, the Twitter of yesteryear was a place where he had conversations. Now, it will be a place where he uses a bullhorn to tell followers about the cool stuff he’s doing elsewhere. It’s a viable use for the medium, and many people use Twitter for mostly that anyway.

“But blogs are for long form content, not rapid-fire ephemeral but public communication,” you might counter. “Surely he’ll continue to use Twitter for that.”

Eh, Twitter’s not the only option for that, either.

(I’m on Mastodon as well, if you want to follow me. UPDATE: I found an academics themed instance and I’m giving that one a try.)

(Also, if you want to try self-hosting and help support this blog at the same time, try Dreamhost. If you don’t like clicking affiliate links, here’s one to Dreamhost that doesn’t support me at all.)

1. Take 100 unique shots of the same item and/or in the same location. (The first 50 or so will likely not be so good. After that, students will be forced to think.)
2. Photograph something being made (Lego sculpture, a meal, a painting, etc.) with the camera in a different location in regards to the subject in each photo.
3. Document an outside (not in a car) journey from the point of view of your feet. Capture as many landmarks/areas of interest as possible.
4. Create a series of images where the subject is only seen in reflections (mirrors, windows, still water, etc.), bonus points if it is interacting or lining up with the non-reflected parts of the composition.
5. Watch the video below for inspiration.

As I write this, a lot of final exams are being given and/or graded. Mine are actually due today, and internet use isn’t an option, it’s a requirement.