The School's 7th grade Spanish teacher, Erin O'Leary, wanted her students to do a "Mi Casa" project that replicated MTV Cribs. Students were asked to mix together audio, images, and/or video and create a show using either GarageBand or iMovie.

I reinforced that students had to properly locate freely shared images using Google's Advanced Search Feature and cite properly in some sort of image bibliography.

Two examples of final projects are below:

6th graders in Yoshiko Maruiwa's art classes are adding a sub-page to their Digital Art Portfolios on our Elgg social network (we named it The Social Network four years ago). Yoshiko and I want the students to be able to archive their work and maintain their portfolio independently. Hopefully, they will continue to do so for the remainder of the year and into 7th and 8th grades. We also talked about having a physical portfolio of their work and one that exists in the cloud.

I had each class for an hour. These were my instructions:

1. Take a good photo. Without flash if possible. From a straight and center vantage point and not too high/low/left/right.

2. Upload photo to iPhoto and crop/edit/enhance as needed.

3. Add their image to the class album on The Gallery. (The Gallery is our in-house photo server powered by Drupal.)

4. Copy the URL of the full-size image.

5. In a new tab, login to The Social Network. (The Social Network is our in-house social network powered by Elgg.)

6. Create a sub-page in their Digital Art Portfolio.

7. Insert the image by pasting the URL, adjust the dimensions of the image, add border and padding if desired. We talked about how the basic WYSIWYG toolbar is "supposed" to be idiot-proof.

8. Awesome trick by a 6th grader: Remove the last digit of the height and the width to quickly resize the picture.

9. In the body of their page, next to their image, write an Artist Statement about their piece: Discuss what it represents, the colors and design chosen, the process...

10. Add tags as needed : 6th Grade, art, portfolio, painting, self-portrait, mosaic...

11. When finished, comment on their classmates' pieces. We reinforced appropriate commenting:

Not so great - "I like your painting!"
Great - "I like your use of color and symmetry."
Really great - "I like how you painted your guitar. Do you play any other instruments?"

In each session, we had three stations and a pile of cameras available for the kids to take a picture of their art piece. After, a student was at the front of the room demo-ing on the classroom iMac while everone was at their personal MacBooks following along or going at their own pace. Having a gaggle of cameras, enough download wires, and 1:1 laptops was awesome but not necessary.

Today, I'm with 6th grade, co-teaching with the lovely and amazing 6th grade teacher/artist, Yoshiko Maruiwa.

Like the other members of our Art Department, Yoshiko encourages and inspires her students to produce, critique, and reflect upon art. Students bring home many physical artifacts, and today we set up a structure of digital pages to showcase, share, define, appreciate, and network about each other's art on our in-house Social network, powered by Elgg (http://elgg.org). Elgg is open-source and relatively easy to maintain, especially as my server manager, Cristina Martinez, does all the back-end work. (Twitter: @cmfinlay)

Students created an overarching "Digital Art Portfolio" main page and are responsible for adding sub-pages for each assignment that will include an Artist's Statement and a digital photo of each piece.

There is a section to comment on every page, and we talk about appropriate comments being ones that are constructive and inspire conversation:
Not so great - "I like your painting!"
Great - "I like your use of color and symmetry."
Really great - "I like how you painted your guitar. Do you play any other instruments?"

Yoshiko and I took photos of the artworks for this project, but for later assignments, the kids will take their own photos and load these images onto a shared album on our in-house photo server; It is called The Gallery and powered by Drupal (http://drupal.org).

I ask students to point the URL of their images rather than download/upload to reinforce citing and not copying works from the web. We talked about ownership: Who owns the photo of their painting? Me, the school, the student? They painted the picture, I took the photo with a school camera, and I posted the image onto our school server. This spawned a quick and mildly interesting discussion, considering my ignorance and my audience.

As I do every time I'm with a class, I totally repeated my mantra that whatever they post online is Public, Permanent, and Traceable, and they should strive to use our technology Academically, Responsibly, and Respectfully.

Now I'd like to get the 7th and 8th grade art teachers on board. I asked Yoshiko to show a sample digital art portfolio to her colleagues at their next department meeting. Fingers crossed.