Support and resources for educators, near and far

Classroom Connections | Teacher Update

Art & Humanities | Resources and Professional Development from the Smithsonian American Art Museum

SAAM Support: Online, Adaptable, Available

April 2020

I’m looking out my bedroom window, grateful for the spring sunshine in the suburbs of DC. My laptop is resting on a converted easel and I’m listening to friends in California read storybooks to children (including mine) over teleconference. What a gift it is to still be able to connect!

For those of you who have students with low connectivity at home, please reach out. I have printable resources that might be included in packets. I’ve also started collecting strategies for keeping up connections—and encouraging student accountability—with low tech.

Below are a handful of standards-aligned online resources that bring new voices and faces into your students’ worlds.

We’re in this together,
Elizabeth
DeinesE@si.edu

Video Library: Meet the Artist

Interviews as Informational Texts

Hear directly from makers and artists as they share their artistic processes, cultural influences, and creative journeys. Videos run from 2 to 5 minutes.

Common Core Alignment: Integration of Knowledge and Ideas

Watch Videos

Resource: Seeing America

Art as Primary Source

Use art to understand American history. Produced by Smarthistory, this site features videos and learning guides that invite students to read and think critically.

Common Core Alignment: Craft and Structure

Explore Content

For Families: Hands-On Activities

Crafting at Home

Caretakers, take heart! Materials gathered from around the home can be transformed into simple craft projects.

Print directions available.

Get Crafty!

Low Tech

Equity in Education

As I mentioned above, I’ve gathered a few tips and tricks for reaching students with low connectivity at home. This article from KQED offers some tips that may be helpful to you. Ideas from this article and your colleagues nationwide include:

Use speech-to-text features on teleconferencing systems to create transcriptions that can be emailed or printed out;
Ask students and parents to stream videos to cell phones rather than laptops or desktops;
Create your own videos that model for students how to transfer online work to paper (for math teachers or others who need to “see the work”, consider having your students take photos of their paper copies and email them to you);
Identify whether your local library is still available as a wi-fi hotspot (even from outside);
Print and distribute materials in two-week chunks.

Please let me know how I may be of help!

-Elizabeth
DeinesE@si.edu

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