Are you using mLearning to present core studies to your Classrooms? If so, you should check out the Born To Draw digital learning resources. Our program includes professional development training and offers a website membership subscription that gives secure access to all the resources on the Born To Draw website. This helps integrate art education into core studies and gives children a chance to learn to draw.

Mobile devices such as the Apple iPad, iPhone, are an investment into the achievement gap by offering digital educational curriculum, presentation and interaction into the learning environment. More digital learning resources are now being offered, such as my products for integrating art education for common core learning or offering art education as required.

The Born To Draw digital learning products are definitely a niche offering. I cannot begins to compete with the likes of Scholastic or other the corporations. I am a retired art instructor who after 20 years of teaching studio art and working as an artist-in-residence in the public schools, decided to evolve my developed classroom tested art curriculum, package it and offer it at time when arts is the first subject to be cut. I have not seen anyone try to incorporate art education into core curriculum studies or afterschool enrichment with a product like mine. My program is worth the $200 cost per school. Whereas, Scholastic offers 24 hour 7 days a week access streaming for $1,500 per student for common core subject related materials. My program gives art education curriculum development tools so teachers can offer drawing even if they do not have the confidence to draw or the time. The Born to Draw Common Core anchors are in reading, language arts, history, natural science and mathematics. All can be purchased online at the Born to Draw website. I do offer a Teacher’s Training and Art Refreshers courses for a nominal fee that helps confidence in offering drawing in the classroom, puts teachers on track and brings a holistic learning environment to students.

Funding is always as issue, especially now with cuts to programs and education still on the chopping block. I have included an article below that demonstrates the impacts to the classroom and studies using digital media. It makes for better teachers by allowing teachers to access and monitor how a student is matriculates what they understand or needs help with, while giving children access to multimedia expanding their visual and reading literacy. It s a new challenge for children and teachers that I think is needed in the classroom, in afterschool enrichment and to homeschool students.

This Article is from eSchool News featured the following:

iPads help charge reading instruction

From wire service reports
Read more by staff and wire services reports

Teachers say iPads make reading assessment easier. (Paul Tople/Akron Beacon Journal/MCT)

East Haven, Conn., reading specialist Gina Tomassi sits with second-grader Isaac Florentino for a quick reading evaluation, listening to him read a short story about a riverside village.

She’s conducted these informal, frequent assessments countless times with other students in her career, having nailed down a stop-watch monitoring, hand-tapping, note-taking routine that certainly seems a challenge for the uncoordinated or inexperienced multitaskers. But on this recent morning at D.C. Moore Elementary School, it’s all done with the touch of an iPad.

School officials see the gadgets as a possible answer to the district’s achievement gap, deciding at the end of last year to spend more than $120,000 on 220 iPads and software and equip every school with a set. The thinking behind the investment is that the technology will help teachers identify struggling readers faster, use time previously spent calculating and reviewing reading assessments to work with students or adjust lesson plans, and offer kids another learning tool to use in the classroom.

Now, halfway through the first school year of the district’s widespread iPad use, educators say the tablets already are having an impact.

“They’re really serving many purposes while transforming the environment of teaching and learning. And we can better communicate with parents about student growth and progress over time,” said Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum and Instruction Erica Forti.

Forti began investigating options last year as administrators considered reallocating technology money that might have gone to purchases such as new desktop computers. There was a need for mobile technology, rather than more computers that remain hooked up in a computer lab, and for software that could better help teachers track student progress, Forti said.

“A teacher can grab one for assessments or grab five or take them all and use them in groups,” Forti explained. “I walked into a kindergarten class other day, and kids were sitting together using iPads, another group of kids was listening to stories with headphones, and another teacher was using one with kids.”

The kids have embraced the technology, according to Forti. During his Friday morning session, 7-year-old Isaac looked like a miniature Apple employee, opening the computer’s programs as if he was an old pro and flicking digital letters back and forth to form basic words on a “Word Wizards” app. “It’s really fun to play with,” he said.

Some teachers initially were hesitant to test out and begin relying on the tablets, but most have grown to be fans, especially because of the iPad’s time-saving capabilities when it comes to the type of oral reading assessment Tomassi was giving Isaac.