Back to the Drawing Board
By Gretchen Reist, MACUL Grant Recipient
When something new and exciting is in the works, it’s human nature to want to jump in and get involved, and so when Cory McElmeel, director of Ypsilanti New Tech @ Ardis, told me that a couple of his teachers had some great ideas and wanted to talk to me about collaborating on a MACUL grant, I told him I’d be happy to put our heads together and see what we could come up with. Everything about New Tech was brand new, radically different than anything done before in Ypsilanti Public Schools, and technology infused. The school, which opened in September 2010, features a project based learning environment, where multi disciplinary courses (such as BioLit and GeoArt) are built around the Michigan state standards. Students complete projects in a collaborative classroom environment, where every student has a laptop that replaces traditional textbooks and worksheets.
New Tech’s opening was still many months off, but geometry teacher Matt Perry and art teacher Katherine Fisk had already put together most of their GeoArt course, and had developed goals, objectives, and most of their projects. The GeoArt class is designed to allow students to investigate and discover concepts in geometry and art, and to use these newly learned concepts in the production of various projects. Geometry and art seem like a natural combination if you study the world around you and the projects they had developed had blended the two in a way that had the potential to grab the students’ attention and sustain their interest as they developed and completed them. The drawback that they were finding to using the MacBook to produce the drawings was that, even though it was possible to use the built in track pad or a mouse, neither was sensitive enough to allow students to produce a very detailed or precise drawing.
The technology tool that Matt and Katherine found to give students more control over their digital drawings was the Wacom
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Bamboo Craft Tablet. The Bamboo Craft is a 9. 8” X 6. 9’ tablet that attaches to the computer via USB. It comes with a pen, which can be used with the tablet to draw or to act as a mouse and control the computer. The table also accepts input from a user’s finger touching the slate. The pen and slate also come with an attractive software package including Adobe Photoshop Elements, Corel Painter, and Nik Color Efex. The MACUL grant provided 12 tablets, and the school was able to find a source for matching funds, so Matt and Katherine ended up with 24 tablets for their classes of 38-42 students.
Before using the tablets in any projects, the teachers did a demonstration for the class, and then allowed the students some time to explore the capabilities of the tablets and pens, and to practice using them. The students were excited to see the product initially, but after trying it, some of them became discouraged. It was not a tool that a person could take out of the box and be
Students use a tablet and pen input tool to
combine the detail and control of hand drawing and the power of digital editing tools.
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