Integrating Technology into the Fine Arts Building

Our Fine Arts Dept. including the Douglass High Theater, Band, Orchestra and Chorus classes have finally received computers after a 4 year fight to include a computer lab for the students. This lack of computer technology has made most teachers reluctant to the use of technology in their lesson plans and unsure of how to use them with the classroom. The only integration that was being used was the use of their laptops to develop lesson plans and email communications! Our department did not even have projectors or screens in most classrooms.

After the initial lab set-up the dept had a meeting about planning and developing an action plan and computer use policy for all students. I was able to share some ideas that I have learned in the past year in my technology courses at West Georgia and developed some ideas for the computer labs.

In our planning, most teachers told me that the wanted to include the use of the lab for research and theory based software for students to increase their class knowledge and supplement learning. This was a good start for a group that has never used computers before but after sharing some other ideas they were shocked and excited about the true capabilities of this new lab.

I was able to show the group a class web site that I created and they were excited about the idea of having the students continue the site and help to develop our first Douglass Fine Arts Web Page that would include some class room instructional ideas and media. This would definitely get the students excited about the learning again in the classroom. I was able to show them some instructional videos that I created with movie/audio producing software and they were now starting to see the true capabilities of a true lab.

As a team, we decided to change some typical, boring general music classes that we all needed to teach for the general school population that needed fine arts credit. The new MUSIC TECHNOLOGY courses will include the use of the lab to develop created music and video segments and web pages for all classes.

This will be a fun project for the students and I am excited about the possibilities of teaching the ideas that I learned from classes to my colleagues. I hope that the lab will become more than just a research based lab and that the students are eager to develop some exciting projects that will become useful to them in the future.

Barry