me arts ed

Connect through video conferencing – first meeting of the school year, Wednesday, November 16

Over the past two years Regional and Statewide Virtual Partners in Maine – R.S.V.P. ME – has connected art teachers all over Maine through video conferencing. R.S.V.P. ME is an initiative sponsored by the Maine Art Education Association, designed to shrink the distance between art teachers around our state using technology. Our goal is to create a space for art teachers to meet regularly, share resources and teaching strategies, and discuss current trends and topics in art education.

Some past topics have included advocacy, proficiency-based education, and creating SLOs for the art classroom. We’ve also been fortunate to have guest speakers share presentations on topics such as Teacher Evaluation and Professional Growth, and National Board Certification. (Thank you Shalimar and Danette!)

“RSVP is a fabulous event organized around the current needs of Art Educators. There so many advantages to this group, in fact, too many to list. Some are: Being connected to art educators in ALL reaches of the state / the group itself stars the topic / the topics are current and always helpful / the participants provide authentic feedback on the topics giving participants real world connections to problems we all face every day / ANYONE is welcome but MAEA members get contact hours.” ~ Debra Bickford, MAEA President

One of the quirks of being an art teacher is that we are often the only teacher of our content area in our school. Sometimes we are the only visual arts educator for our entire school district. This can make it challenging to find and connect with colleagues that understand and support the unique teaching and learning that takes place in visual arts classrooms. R.S.V.P. ME uses Zoom Video Conferencing to meet this challenge. Zoom is completely online. Joining a meeting is as simple as emailing R.S.V.P. ME facilitator, Lisa Ingraham and clicking on the link provided in the invite email you will receive about 10 minutes before the meeting begins.

2016-17 Schedule

• Wednesday, November 16, 2016 – Topic: STEAM and Arts Integration strategies and hear more about these topics and a report out from the recent Maine Educators of the Gifted and Talented conference from 3:30 to 5:00. This virtual meeting will be a roundtable discussion about how we integrate other content areas into our art programming (and vice versa!) I will share a report out from this fall’s MEGaT conference “The Art of Technology” and my notes from the fabulous keynote given by Argy Nestor! Sign up to participate in this Zoom Online Video Conference – and earn 1.5 contact hours as a M.A.E.A. member – by dropping me an email me at lisa.ingraham@msad59.org.
• Thursday, January 19, 2017
• Tuesday, March 14, 2017
• Wednesday, May 17, 2017

The next R.S.V.P. ME topic will be “Arts Integration, STEAM, and a MEGaT Report-Out.” Do you integrate? Does your school run on STEAM? Want to learn more? Join us on November 16^th to share your experiences. If you have a topic you would like us to explore, or a presentation to share during one of our upcoming meetings, please email Lisa Ingraham at lisa.ingraham@msad59.org.

Thank you Lisa Ingraham for taking the lead with R.S.V.P. and for providing this blog post.