Below are a few of the many reasons every Art Educator should develop an online presence.
- Share the high quality Visual Arts Education at your school with the entire world (potentially).
- Easily Communicate with parents, families and community members.
- Most parents are online, and will expect to find information about your classes on the web. This trend will increase each year as the generation raised by the internet has children and sends them to school.
- Make your classroom part of the participatory culture of the internet. Create content!
- Advocacy! e-Portfolios are the next best thing to a classroom observation. Show what is really happening in your classroom.
- Easily link students and parents to enrichment websites for learning opportunities outside the classroom.
I believe that an informative online presence (i.e., a website or e-Portfoilo) is the greatest tool for Art Education Advocacy available today. Providing parents, colleagues and your school community with information about your classes (including standards, content, 21st Century skills, etc) is the best way to develop and nurture an understanding that Visual Arts Education is essential, relevant, and effective. We can not let Advocacy be someone else's responsibility. The tools are available to everyone, and easier to use than ever. Let's work together as a community of Art Educators to advocate for what students truly need, one website or e-Portfolio at a time. I'll end this with a great quote from Ewan McIntosh:
"Sharing, and sharing online specifically, is not in addition to the work of being an educator. It is the work."
Send me links to your sites/portfolios! I'd love to see how you are using the internet to promote Art Education at your school. Then I will share some great examples with everyone here.
