At least once a week, someone posts the question "Is Artsonia worth my time?" on a teacher facebook group. As I was typing my response for probably the thirtieth or fortieth time, I realized that I have posted about a few things separately, but never really explained how they are connected so I will try.
Each of my classes has an artist of the week (aotw). This student is chosen by me. What it means to be the aotw have an artwork added to our online art gallery hosted by artsonia. What it means to them is that they get to wear a special aotw apron. They receive a "brag tag" that is attached to their wrist like a bracelet. This has the link to the website printed on it for parent reference. It also has my email, in case the parent has not yet given permission to participate and they don't understand how to view the work. This system has been very effective in gaining parent support and participation in the artsonia program. At least once a week, one of the 24 chosen students parents reach out to me with some variation of "So my kid came home with this bracelet, but I can't find their work..." and I love when that happens, because their work is hidden until the parent logs in with their password and makes the work public. And of those 24 kids each week usually one parent buys something, which results in a small donation to our art program for me to buy more supplies for them.
The artsonia program is also part of my student led art gallery. So the students who are called "Web Gallery Managers" are trained to help me photograph and upload the work of younger students to our gallery. All students are trained how by 3rd grade. I have two extra ipads in the room that any 4th or 5th grader can use to photograph their completed projects whenever they have free time (early finisher solution). In fourth grade students begin to add artists statements to their work using the prompts that I can provide directly through the teacher version of the site/app. Last year our district went 1:1 for grades 3-5 so I have sent the QR code to our gallery to homeroom teachers so that students can add work they make during indoor recess or at home to their portfolio.
Our district is a "Leader in Me" school. We were asked to create a "Wildly Important Goal" to model the practice for students. Last year I made the goal to upload one artwork from each student by January and met that goal. So this year, I upped my goal to have 10,000 pieces of art in our school gallery by June 2020 and just met that goal last week.
Some tips for those jumping in to the world of artsonia:
- Get the app. Encourage your district to allow students to load the app on their ipads (if possible).
- Ask for parent volunteers to come in to photograph work or to enter student names into the account. The great thing about Artsonia is they graduate the students up a grade each summer. So you will only need to enter your new kids the second year. You can import class lists directly into the program from an excel spreadsheet.
- Print out permission slips and send them home during an important time, such as parent teacher conferences, or first week of school when parents are in the mode of signing things.
- Use an ipad stand. You can quickly slide work under and reduce upload time. I usually have my gradebook open next to the camera. I slide the work in and if I'm waiting for something to load I enter my grade. It's really streamlined my process to do both things together.
Any Artsonia questions? Go ahead and drop 'em in the comments.
