Since March 12th or so, when it looked unlikely that school would resume as usual, I started communicating with my Advanced Studio Art students. Tabor had enabled me to participate in a Design for Distance Learning workshop from GOA (Global Online Academy) over the March break and I had learned about some tools and ideas that would be helpful in the coming weeks. I decided to try one of the social tools similar to the Microsoft Teams platform we are using now. Twist (a product from Doist) allowed me to connect with my students and start a conversation about how we would “continue.” The thread I started was called simply “continuing,” and one by one 8 of my 12 students started letting me know if they had their sketchbooks with them, wherever they were. They all expressed how essential to their mood and sanity continuing with their art practice would be, so we started using the Twist platform to share a little before the distance version of Tabor Academy officially began.
