In an article from The New York Times published on January 10th, writer Catherine Saint Louis reports on how people are taking advantage of utilizing Skype and other online conferencing tools to take music lessons. For some it is on the to do list to take music lessons and now it can become a reality in a very different way. The article is called “With Enough Bandwidth, Many Join the Band” explains how this idea has taken a stronghold.

The advantages:

• Players of niche instruments now have more access to teachers.
• Parents can simply send their child down the hall for lessons rather than driving them, and
• teachers now have a new way to build their business.

One parents claims: “It’s accessibility with quality,” she said.

The concerns:

• Their chief reservation is that teachers can’t manipulate a student’s fingers to fine-tune the subtleties of playing a string instrument.
• A lot of people don’t trust that the experience is the same.

Imagine you could have students from anywhere in the world.

Please share your thoughts on this idea. If you’d like to read the entire article please click here.

Alvin Aureliano Davis is a music teacher at Miramar High School in Miramar, Florida. Alvin is one of four finalists for the National Teacher of the Year. He has taught a total of 11 years, the last eight at Miramar, a school of 2,760 students. He received a Bachelor of Science from Florida A&M University in 2000 and has been teaching music ever since. I addition to being Florida’s Teacher of the Year, Alvin is the recipient of numerous teaching honors, including the U.S. Congressional Record of Exemplary Service and Dedication. In 2011, the city of Miramar named July 7, 2011 Alvin A. Davis Day. Fascinated by music from a young age, Davis values the multi-faceted work of teaching the subject in an urban environment, and works to instill a sense of curiosity and community engagement in each of his students. Recalling a conversation with his late father, Davis writes about the realization that he was meant to become a teacher. “Whereas I learned as a youth that music was my passion, I now knew that the honor and responsibility of changing lives was my calling.”

A panel of educators, representing 15 national education organizations, chose the finalists from the 2012 state teachers of the year in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, the Department of Defense Education Activity, and four U.S. extra-state jurisdictions.

The organizations represented on the 2012 National Selection Committee are: American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, American Association of School Administrators, American Federation of Teachers, Association for Childhood Education International, ASCD, Association of Teacher Educators, National Association for the Education of Young Children, National Association of Elementary School Principals, National Association of Secondary School Principals, National Association of State Boards of Education, National Congress of Parents and Teachers, National Education Association, National Middle Schools Association, National School Boards Association, and National School Public Relations Association.

The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) is a nonpartisan, nationwide, nonprofit organization of public officials who head departments of elementary and secondary education in the states, the District of Columbia, the Department of Defense Education Activity, and five U.S. extra-state jurisdictions. CCSSO provides leadership, advocacy, and technical assistance on major educational issues. The Council seeks member consensus on major educational issues and expresses their views to civic and professional organizations, federal agencies, Congress, and the public. www.ccsso.org.

AUGUSTA — A team of four students at Troy Howard Middle School in Belfast set out to prove in a three-minute video that the impact of the performing arts stretches well beyond the theater. And a four-student team at Foxcroft Academy in Dover-Foxcroft set out to demonstrate how the arts and a little more color in life can lift a person’s spirit and boost productivity.

The two teams of student videographers succeeded, and are winners of the first WatchMECreate challenge of the 2011-12 school year. Each member of both teams will receive an iPod Nano, and both teams will receive $500 each to use toward promoting the arts in their schools.

The video challenge, called WatchMEUseTheArts, called on entrants to show viewers “how the arts have moved, or could move beyond the music room, beyond the art room, beyond the theater, beyond the darkroom, beyond the expected spaces to help students like you make their school or their community a better place for all.”

It was the fourth challenge in the WatchMECreate series, which is a collaboration among the Maine Department of Education’s Maine Learning Technology Initiative, the Association of Computer Technology Educators of Maine, and the Maine Alliance for Arts Education. Members of those three organizations judged the video entries and determined the winners.

Cameron Pillitteri, Noah Howard, Eilha Charbonnier and Sarah Joy of Troy Howard Middle School show in their video how the skills they’ve picked up through participating in the school’s drama program have helped them build their self-confidence, bring concepts in social studies class to life, and make literature more understandable.

Shinsuke Mikame, Hollyann Leonhardt, Julian Quinn and Robert Trotter of Foxcroft Academy demonstrate how being surrounded by art – by bright colors and public murals – can change someone’s mood, reduce stress, increase school pride, spark brain development and make people more productive.

“How these students responded to this challenge is a perfect example of what can happen when students have a say in how they learn,” said Education Commissioner Stephen Bowen. “These videos demonstrate what we’re seeing more of in our schools as we move to a system designed around the needs of the student.”

The two videos can be viewed online at http://bit.ly/WatchME.

Another WatchMECreate challenge will be issued in the spring.

All Maine Department of Education news releases can be found online at:
http://mainedoenews.net/category/news-views/press-releases/.

Thanks to the Department of Education for providing this information.

Please join Rob Westerberg and Catherine Ring in their Webinar on Wednesday, February 1st on LEADERSHIP AND THE ARTS: The role of Teachers, Administrators and the Greater Community.

We all know that in a culture that values the arts, that it takes a village to ensure that they are given a central role in the lives of its citizens.  It is not enough to simply have “arts classes” in schools; we need a culture that understands, values and supports a solid, quality arts education for our children.  And that requires leadership — not only from the teacher in the classroom, but from administrators in the school and leaders in the community.

In hard economic times, and particularly in times when perceptions about school achievement result in an almost exclusive focus on standardized math and reading test scores, (sound familiar?), support for the arts can decrease. Using arts assessment in the classroom can help teachers show the skills and knowledge their students have gained in the arts, as well as the 21st century skills, such as creativity, innovation, collaboration and communication.  High quality assessment practices in the arts classroom and supportive leadership can give us the evidence to help ensure that our children will continue to be exposed to and benefit from an excellent arts education.

This webinar will examine the various roles of teachers, administrators and community members in keeping the arts alive and well in our schools and communities. Webinar guests include teacher leaders, Matt Doiron (Music Educator from Sanford High School) and Jen Driscoll (Visual Art Educator from Brunswick High School), Carol Trimble (Executive Director of Maine Alliance for Arts Education), Argy Nestor (Visual & Performing Arts Specialist at Maine Department of Education). Join Rob and Catherine as they facilitate a discussion with leaders in arts education and the community.  Call-in participants take an active role in the discussion too, so this is guaranteed to be a lively and interesting forum.

To join the webinar, To join the meeting, go online to http://stateofmaine.adobeconnect.com/pk201013/ (sign in as “guest”). Conference Number: 1-866-910-4857, Passcode: 140893

I suggest you invite your principals to attend with you after school on February 1st for this informative discussion!

January 26, 2012
3:15pm and 7:15pm

Creating art can be traced back almost to the beginning of human kind. Even those with little background in art history have heard of the Lascaux Caves in France where prehistoric drawings and paintings can be found on the walls and ceilings depicting images of animals and humans.  Aesthetically these drawings and paintings, thousands of years later, still bring us to imagine their meanings.

If we continue to look back in history we also have the development of text. Illuminated Manuscripts brought us the initial. “The earliest surviving substantive illuminated manuscripts are from the period AD 400 to 600, initially produced in Italy and the Eastern Roman Empire.” These text images can be found in a variety of forms throughout history eventually even appearing at the beginning of fairy tales. Today initials are still in use and can be found in various artworks including street art tags often recognized as graffiti.

The MLTI program has many tools that allow for art creation. Over the years artists have used many materials to engage their interests and talents. We now have the ability to create digital pieces of art. Photography, painting, drawing, music, poetry, movies, stories, comics, to name a few…All these and more can be created with the suite of tools on our MLTI devices. Although traditional art will always be an important part of our cultures we now live in a time where digital images flourish. Digital Literacy includes digital images as well as digital text. Our students will need to know how to use digital tools in many different ways to be successful in their future.
Join us Thursday to explore creating digital art with MLTI tools. This is a hands on session so bring your MLTI device and roll up your sleeves. We will work together to create a piece of digital art.

To register: Visit http://maine121.org/webcasts and select the webinar/time you wish to participate in – you will be re-directed to online registration. We have a new registration system, so please ensure you enter your email address correctly!  Once you register you will receive a confirmation email that contains a login link that will be used the day of the webinar.

If you cannot access Maine121.org (due to temporary technical issues with the site), please use the links below.

To register for 3:15pm, please visit https://stateofmaine.adobeconnect.com/_a827390218/mltiwebinar012612a/event/registration.html
To register for 7:15pm, please visit https://stateofmaine.adobeconnect.com/_a827390218/mltiwebinar012612p/event/registration.html

Keep in mind:
- All of MLTI’s webinars are free and contact hours are available.
- Webinars are recorded and made available for viewing on the Maine121 Archives page.
- See our schedule at http://maine121.org/webcasts

The annual Arts Week is happening this week at Tremont Consolidated School. Students working are working with artists to create tissue paper-mache crowns, cartooning, and drumming. You can read the entire article written by By Laurie Schreiber in the January 24th edition of the Bar Harbor Times Soup by clicking here.

This sounds and looks like an interesting NOVA episode that you might want to view. The program description below was taken from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/mystery-masterpiece.html If you go to the link you can watch a preview of the NOVA episode. Your students might be interested in this as well.

In October 2007, a striking portrait of a young woman in Renaissance dress made world news headlines. Originally sold nine years before for around $20,000, the portrait is now thought to be an undiscovered masterwork by Leonardo da Vinci worth more than $100 million. How did cutting-edge imaging analysis help tie the portrait to Leonardo? NOVA meets a new breed of experts who are approaching “cold case” art mysteries as if they were crime scenes, determined to discover “who committed the art.” And it follows art sleuths as they deploy new techniques to combat the multibillion-dollar criminal market in stolen and fraudulent art.

Thank you Wiscasset Middle School Art Teacher, Molly Carlson for sending me this information to share with you.

Last Tuesday my colleague, Joyce Huser, from Kansas presented a webinar to SEADAE (State Education Agency Directors of Arts Education), our professional organization of state arts specialists on the topic of arts standards, ELA Common Core, and the 21st Century Skills Map. The webinar was very helpful and I hope you will have 45 minutes to listen to it. The resources and link to the webinar are on the arts education webpage at the Maine Department of Education at http://www.maine.gov/education/lres/vpa/eor.html#webinars

Joyce was on the team that created the Art Skills Map for the Partnership for 21st Century Skills. The partnership is a national organization that advocates for 21st century skills for every student. The document provides information on how the arts teach 21st century skills and fulfill the needs for today’s learners. The webinar provides the connections (crosswalk) between arts standards, Common Core ELA standards, and the 21st century skills. The power point includes a graph that exhibits the skill demands for arts related careers for 2008 – 2018 which shows the skills taught in arts education classes.

For anyone wishing to listen in on the live video stream of the National Coalition of Core Arts Standards meeting on Tuesday, January 24th in Reston, VA the link is: http://nccas.wikispaces.com/Framing+Meeting+-+Reston%2C+VA+-+Jan+2012

Four State Education Agency Directors of Arts Education (SEADAE) members have been nominated by the National Coalition for Core Arts Standards to serve with the writing teams that will produce the next generation of arts standards. SEADAE member Dale Schmid of the New Jersey Department of Education will serve on the Dance writing team. SEADAE member Dr. Richard Baker of the Louisiana State Department of Education will serve on the Music writing team. SEADAE member Jack Mitchell of the California Department of Education will serve on the Theatre writing team and SEADAE member Joyce Huser of Kansas will serve on the Visual Arts writing team.

The National Coalition of Core Arts Standards (NCCAS) announced the selection of writing teams and chairs for the next generation of arts standards project on Friday December 16^th. NCCAS is a coalition of eight national organizations committed to developing new voluntary arts education standards that will build on the foundations created by the 1994 National Arts Standards and, more recently, the 2005 Standards for Learning and Teaching Dance in the Arts, to help guide curriculum designers, teacher training programs, funders, and federal and state policy makers in their arts education decision-making.

NCCAS announced that they received more than 360 applications from throughout the country to serve on one of the four writing teams of dance, music, theatre and visual arts. The coalition’s professional arts education organizations chose the team writers based on breadth of experience and skills in teaching, standards and curriculum writing, assessment and leadership, and practical knowledge in their area of expertise.

Lynn Tuttle, President of the State Education Agency Directors of Arts Education (SEADAE), called the selection of writers for the project “a major leap forward in our efforts to move ahead and actually begin working in earnest.” Tuttle and other SEADAE colleagues have been a guiding force in the effort to re-envision arts standards that will embrace 21st-century technology to help classroom educators better implement and assess standards-based arts instruction. “We know that this will be a complex and challenging project,” said Tuttle. “But we also know how important it is for arts teachers to articulate the skills and knowledge that ought to be available to every student in this country. If we want students to learn, we need to give our educators a framework that will help them create and teach their curricula. I think we have the team that can get this done.”

NCCAS Leadership and the chairs will meet in Reston, Virginia January 23-24 to finalize work on a learning framework that will guide the writers, and to discuss the project’s timeline and plans to include media arts as a discrete fifth arts discipline in the next generation standards. The meeting will include a streaming public Q&A period on January 24. Links to the interactive blog and available video streams will be posted the day of the event on the NCCAS website at http://nccas.wikispaces.com/Framing+Meeting+-+Reston%2C+VA+-+Jan+2012.

Last week the Maine Cohort for Customized Learning brought together arts teachers from their districts to begin some of the work that will help guide the teaching in arts classrooms in the cohort. At this point the cohort districts are:

• RSU 57: Massebesic
• RSU 15: Gray-New Gloucester
• RSU 18: Messalonskee and China
• RSU 2: Hall-Dale, Monmouth, Richmond, Drescen
• RSU 82: Jackman, Forest Hills
• Milford School Department
• RSU 3: Brooks, Freedom, Jackson, Knox, Libery, Monroe, Montville, Thorndike, Troy, Unity, Waldo
• Sanford Schools
• RSU 25: Bucksport
• RSU 4: Oak Hill

The participants started the work to create Strands, Measurement Topics and Learning Targets. This which will be the basis for the work in determining what students will need to learn to show proficiency before they leave high school. The arts teachers doing this work are:

• Wendy Burton and Leone Donovan, visual arts, Pam Rhein, music, Messalonskee
• Michaela DiGianvittorio and Sarah Gould, visual arts, Gray New Gloucester High School
• Jeff Orth, visual art, Richmond Middle/High School
• Cynthis McGuire, music Hall-Dale Elementary School
• Carrie Abbott, visual art, Jackman/Forest Hills
• Cathy Geren, visual art, Massabesic High School
• Matt Doiron and Carol Baker-Roux, music, Sanford High School
• Theo VanDeventer, music/drama, Mt. View Middle School, Eric Phillips, visual art, Mt. View High School

The work will continue in February and I will keep you posted on its progress.

In the words of music teacher from Sanford High School, Carol Baker Roux:

Sanford is new to the cohort, so this was the first meeting for Matt Doiron and I.  I was glad to see people at this meeting who are also working on the Maine Arts Assessment Initiative, as I am hopeful that the cohort’s work will dovetail with the Initiative’s work, as well as the work being done currently on the national standards.  Some concerns raised at this meeting were, “Is this another passing fad?” and “Are we re-inventing the wheel?”  I think these are valid concerns and am hopeful that these will be addressed as we continue to work on developing shared, consistent strands and measurement topics.  The general sense of the people at this meeting was that the Visual and Performing Arts have good Maine Learning Results and we hope to maintain the integrity of that document going forward.

Every time I get together with arts educators in this state I am completely impressed with their intelligence and commitment to their craft.  As a discipline that has always understood meeting and demonstrating standards at a high level, we are the perfect group to model the cohort’s goals of student-centered, performance based learning.

And in the words of art teacher Leone Donovan from Messalonskee High School:

Various members of the 11 cohort schools gathered in Topsham to begin the shift towards a standards-based learning plan. It was a harder two days then I expected with less accomplished than expected. The representatives from the different schools really are at different levels in the process. Some of us needed to learn the language of this version of standards-based curriculum. Others were already working with a version of those concepts this year.

What I like about the conversations that I’ve been involved in, both in my school and at the cohort meeting, is the concept of the learner at the center of the process. I want to believe that there’s a method to create or encourage students to become active, enthusiastic managers of there own education. As a veteran teacher and a lifelong skeptic, I am still yearning for more evidence that this is truly possible. I want to see a school where it is in process with solid evidence that it is working.

We heard that transparency in the curriculum gives the student clear goals and, thus, a clear path to success or as we say in mass customized learning speak, proficiency. Students will know what we, as teachers, want them to learn. We will act as facilitators pointing out ways to master those concepts or techniques. Students can then seek, plan, and follow their own best path to achieving proficiency.

I love that theoretical view of students and learning. But, again, as the veteran and skeptic, I believe that most, if not all of us, are now very clear about our reasons and goals for the lessons we present. I keep wondering, aloud and to myself, how assessing with a 1-4 scale instead of 0-100 scale, how calling it proficiency instead of whatever our current language is, and by rewording existing curriculum yet again will inspire this change.

I hope that we learn more about places where this is in use and has concrete progress recorded. And, despite my skepticism, I’d be thrilled to see more inspired, successful, and enthusiastic students.