Artsonia is definitely where I have been this year. I decided at the beginning of the year that I would publish all student work. However, it is taking up soooo much of my time. We spend more than one class on most lessons, so it could be worse. I thought I would do this as a way to share student work with parents, grandparents, etc. I don't have that many visitors, though. I am wondering if it is worth it. What is your opinion of Artsonia? Do you use the site? If you do, what makes it worth it? How much do you upload? Do you do all of the work yourself?
I put up artwork on artsonia too. I will put the whole classes' artwork up, but only on selected projects. It's too time consuming to do everything. A lot of my parents buy stuff, so I pick out the projects I think the parents would think are cool enough to have on a mug or whatever. It ends up being a lot of the projects. We get about $300 every year from the sales.
ReplyDeleteI put everything on Artsonia. I have a system of grading and listing the artists all at once and then quickly photographing the whole stack. Once it's loaded on Artsonia I pick away at publishing when I have spare time. I also have a few parent volunteers that come in to catch up photographing when I get behind. I get so many compliments and comments from parents about how much they appreciate the site, it makes the work worth it.
ReplyDeleteIt'd advise being proactive about getting families involved. Print out activity reports and send them home. If you haven't put in parent emails, def do that. Then they get emails about activity for their kid(s). Put a blurb about it on your teacher webpages if you have them, and the school newsletter. The nice thing is once it gets rolling, it's like a snowball, it just keeps getting bigger and better. Parents will start volunteering to help, comments and artist statements will appear on your site, and the fundraising will begin. A little advertising will go a long way and start some word-of-mouth help.
I put almost everything on Artsonia. It takes a lot of time but I do as much at school as I can. I have people who have offered to help but I don't know how to utilize that help since the time consuming part is publishing the artwork. I figure it's good advocacy and a service for my students and their families.
ReplyDeleteAlso, when I first started, I photographed every project, edited the photos at home, then uploaded and published. Now, I publish every students' work for the first project (just in case they are bringing back a permission slip) then I start only photographing work for registered students. I used to write names on the front of all the work so I would know who made it and now I print off my roster from Artsonia so I know who is registered and just place the artwork right below the students' name when I take a picture. I have found that if I adjust my white balance and try to get the artwork "square" before I take the picture that the editing tools on the website do a pretty decent job. I still upload the artwork from home so I can use iPhoto but I do all the editing through Artsonia as I publish.
ReplyDeleteI've been thinking about whether I want to start publishing with Artsonia. This is my first year teaching and I have only about 135 students, but I still think it would eat up a lot of time, so I'm not sure I want to start it.
ReplyDeleteRight now I've got a blog and post only a half dozen of selected projects so parents have an idea what their kids are doing. I have a nagging feeling though that it's not fair to the ones who don't get their artwork shown. I'm thinking a compromise is to continue what I'm doing but to pick a few projects a year for which I'll publish everyones... I can't even imagine trying to publish every project done by 400 or 500 students!!