Digitizing the Easel: 'Student Perspectives' on Tutorial Videos in the Art Classroom

In my classroom, a typical live demonstration often resulted in a crowd of fidgety, wiggling, middle school students standing on tiptoes and squeezing between others to see the easel. I struggled with finding ways to keep students engaged and focused when presenting new material. There were always a number of students who could not see the demonstration. The pacing never seemed quite right: too slow for the fast workers, too quick for the detail-oriented. Those who missed class on the day of the demonstration had difficulty catching up. My presentations would vary from class to class, elaborating here, forgetting there. Some students would get lost toward the back of the group, where they would covertly play on their phones or hold whispered conversations. Students would forget the information, and I would end up explaining the same thing multiple times during the course of each unit, losing valuable class time. These problems opened up a unique opportunity for exploring a different avenue of presentation. My solution to the crowded easel was to digitize the demonstration, creating tutorial videos covering skills such as portraiture, perspective drawing, ceramic processes, and papier-mâché and posting them to YouTube.