Japara Visit

Lynne making sure Ros blogs before she leaves the building!

I spent some time with Ros from Japara this morning. I came away feeling very positive and excited about their project and it was great to see how organised and also excited about it Ros appeared as well.
 
The Project:
To build up an online community to link art students with disabilities  and other students and art lovers together to share, collaborate and support each other with folio development. The vehicle proposed is  a blog  - either a Wordpress or Blogger. The art teacher Lyn, teaches at Burrinja in Upwey as well as at Japara and is keen to connect the students from both centres online. She also wants to broaden it and invite other students, artists etc from anywhere to become a part of the community and share their art, experiences and expertise. Ros has already approached a similar art group in Canada to sound them out about the idea. Additionally, Ros would like the families of the students to be able to go online and view their child's work and comment on it. This would be beneficial for both student and family.

According to Ros, the art teacher is quite technology savvy and is keen on the idea. We set out a plan in steps, the first being to decide with Lyn  which blog she wanted to use, train her in its use, and get her to set it up. Ros felt that realistically, this might take until the Christmas holidays but that would mean the goal to start the student blog training and participation would be for the start of 2013 which is well-within the project time frame. I suggested that Lyn include the students in discussions about the blog, their ideas etc to keep them interested and excited and wanting to start in early 2013. It may be that she can start them earlier.

We also discussed ways the students might be able to use multimedia - eg film interviews with each other and post online and also audio interviews for those who feel shy about being filmed. We also addressed the issue of getting written permission from everyone involved  before putting either film or audio online.

I feel pretty satisfied with the session - Ros appears very excited and enthusiatic about the project and together we have set timeframes, dates, review dates etc. While I was there, I encouraged Ros to blog about the session and she had started this when I left. She had also not been able to access the dropbox folder from The elearning Showcase so I helped with this and shared a folder from my  dropbox account. She was really pleased with the result.